Transcript Concepts and meanings of community in the social sciences

Concepts and meanings of
community in the social sciences
Valerie Walkerdine and David
Studdert
AHRC Connected Communities
Programme
• Attempts to develop new ways of thinking and
about and engaging research with changing
forms of community
Our project
• Review of concepts and meanings of
community in 9 social science disciplines and
fields:
Anthropology
• Cultural studies
• Sociology
• Geography
• Social psychology
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Community studies
Education
Health
Policing
Online communities
Policy
• In addition, we looked at meanings and
concepts used by 20 government, NGO and
voluntary organisations, across the UK, using
their websites and ran a workshop for policy
makers and community activists and
practitioners.
Conclusions
• Our research concluded that while there were
differences between social science disciplines
in terms of approach to community, there
were a set of fundamental problems standing
in the way.
An alternative to broken communities?
Concepts and meanings from policy
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Community development
Active participation
Empowerment
Involvement
Engagement
What we learnt from the workshop
• 1. A strong distinction needs to be made
between policy which relates to the
implementation of a political agenda and
community activism undertaken by voluntary
groups, which tends to operate on an assetbased approach, which uses a framework of
listening what a locality wants.
2. There is a real problem for academic research in
relation to partnerships with policy and grass roots
organizations, in terms of timescale. Academic
research takes a long time to get funded and to be
undertaken. This does not fit well with an agenda
which demands rapid response and change. It is
therefore a challenge to think about how researchers
and policy makers and practitioners can fruitfully
work together for mutual gain.
• 3. While there may be implicit references to
key theories such as social capital and
communitarianism within policy and practice
literature, the constraints are twofold: having
to operate to a political agenda, fixed in
manifesto commitments and having to
respond on the ground to that agenda as the
starting point for thinking about what is being
demanded by the community concerned.
Is there another way?