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The rise of Far Right populism poses major challenges for communities, exacerbating divisions, hate speech and hate crime. This book shows how communities and social justice movements can effectively tackle these issues, working together to mitigate their underlying causes and more immediate manifestations. Showing that community-based learning is integral to the development of strategies to promote more hopeful rather than more hateful futures, Mayo demonstrates how, through popular education and participatory action research, communities can develop their own understandings of their problems. Using case studies that illustrate education approaches in practice, she shows how communities can engineer democratic forms of social change.

Issues of displacement and dispossession have become defining characteristics of a globalised 21st century. People are moving within and across national borders, whether displaced, relocated or moving in search of better livelihoods. This book brings theoretical understandings of migration and displacement together with empirical illustrations of the creative, cultural ways in which communities reflect upon their experiences of change, and how they respond, including through poetry and story-telling, photography and other art forms, exploring the scope for building communities of solidarity and social justice. The concluding chapters identify potential implications for policy and professional practice to promote communities of solidarity, addressing the structural causes of widening inequalities, taking account of different interests, including those related to social class, gender, ethnicity, age, ability and faith. Issues of displacement and dispossession have become defining characteristics of a globalised 21st century. People are moving within and across national borders, whether displaced, relocated or moving in search of better livelihoods. This book brings theoretical understandings of migration and displacement together with empirical illustrations of the creative, cultural ways in which communities reflect upon their experiences of change, and how they respond, including through poetry and story-telling, photography and other art forms, exploring the scope for building communities of solidarity and social justice. The concluding chapters identify potential implications for policy and professional practice to promote communities of solidarity, addressing the structural causes of widening inequalities, taking account of different interests, including those related to social class, gender, ethnicity, age, ability and faith.

This unique study explores how strategies to safeguard the provision of legal advice and access to welfare rights to disadvantaged communities might be developed in ways that strengthen rather than undermine the basic ethics and principles of public service provision

EPUB and EPDF available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. Access to justice for all, regardless of the ability to pay, has been a core democratic value. But this basic human right has come under threat through wider processes of restructuring, with an increasingly market-led approach to the provision of welfare. Professionals and volunteers in Law Centres in Britain are struggling to provide legal advice and access to welfare rights to disadvantaged communities. Drawing upon original research, this unique study explores how strategies to safeguard these vital services might be developed in ways that strengthen rather than undermine the basic ethics and principles of public service provision. The book explores how such strategies might strengthen the position of those who provide, as well as those who need, public services, and ways to empower communities to work more effectively with professionals and progressive organisations in the pursuit of rights and social justice agendas more widely

This book explores the contributions that research, with refugees and with faith-based organizations for example, makes to strengthen community development and consequently promote active citizenship and social justice, This book focuses upon the contributions that research can make towards strengthening community development and working for social justice agendas in Britain. Drawing upon original research, as part of the Third Sector Research Capacity Building Cluster, the volume explores different ways in which research can contribute to capacity building and 'research mindedness' in the Third Sector. This includes the contributions that community-university research partnerships can make, enabling organisations and social movements to undertake research for themselves. Examples include research with refugee and asylum seeker organisations and groups, research with faith-based organisations and research exploring the relevance of community arts, media and sports. Whilst the book covers a number of related themes, they share an overall focus upon community development to promote active citizenship and social justice

With over 2,000 support groups listed in Britain at the time of writing at the beginning of 2021, the growth of mutual aid has been among the more positive outcomes of the Covid-19 pandemic. So much for the neoliberal view of humans as rational individuals focused on the pursuit of their own self-interests, whatever the needs of others. For Marxists, though, the recent growth of mutual aid groups needs to be set within the framework of critical understandings about civil society, the respective roles of civil society, the market and the state, and the potential for building alternatives within capitalist societies. The Covid-19 pandemic has been highlighting the failures of market-led approaches to meeting people's needs, demonstrating the need for more rather than less public provision, including the need for a national care service. Meanwhile, the voluntary and community sectors have been struggling to fill the gaps between shrinking public services on the one hand and growing social needs on the other. This has been the context for the emergence of the mutual aid groups that are the focus of the final section of this article, exploring their potential contributions, promoting values of mutuality, cooperation and care within these contemporary constraints. The article concludes by reflecting on the implications of such prefigurative community-based initiatives more generally, their contributions as well as their inherent limitations as component parts of social justice movements.