Thesis
Doing it and troubling it: community development, advanced liberalism and poststructuralism
Southern Cross University, School of Social and Workplace Development
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Southern Cross University
2002
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Abstract
Community is being reinvented within current economic liberal regimes in ways which locate more responsibility at the local level for dealing with the fall out of global capitalism and for addressing the increasingly tense relations and uncertain moralities between diverse groups. This brings new opportunities for community development, yet the study asks whether the modernist template through which community development is enacted contributes to those very forms of governance which community development opposes.
Drawing on Foucault, I ask how power operates in sites of community development practice. Through four case studies of my own and colleagues' work, I trace the rationalities which we draw on to inform practice, the strategies we use to influence others, and the disciplines through which we limit who we can be. These, I argue, are a better indicator of how power operates in specific sites than actor intentions or posited outcomes.
An analysis which begins by seeing power as the total field within which all thought, action and subjecthood occurs, exposes the most potent expressions of power to lie in the normalised day to day responses to life. One's orientation to having some control in a situation, influencing the actions and beliefs of others, maintaining a certain sense of self, securing resources and status, become the events which then link up into broader systems to reproduce aspects of the status quo. They are part of the trajectory through which certain kinds of order, civility, rationality, privilege and ways of being are normalised or outlawed. This is governance from below.
Reading against the grain of the community development stories, exposes that as we constitute ourselves within familiar fields of power in order to resolve momentary difficulties and procure momentary gains, we reinforce those very fields of power. These fields of power are constituted as much by discourses of humanism, liberalism, order, civility, justice and rights, as they are by economic liberalism, reductive rationalities and the exploitation of people and environment. They are all interlinked parts of the same contested discursive territory.
Such analysis produces, not overwhelming relativity, but useful microanalyses of how the local is traversed by complex forces. As the site where all forces intersect to impact on our immediate lives, the local is the site where we can interrupt who we have become and change, if ever so slightly, the patterns of what we are open and closed to.
Details
- Title
- Doing it and troubling it: community development, advanced liberalism and poststructuralism
- Creators
- Ann Ingamells
- Contributors
- Stewart Hase (Supervisor) - Southern Cross UniversityBob Dick (Supervisor) - Southern Cross University
- Awarding Institution
- Southern Cross University; Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
- Theses
- Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Southern Cross University
- Publisher
- Southern Cross University, School of Social and Workplace Development
- Number of pages
- 308
- Identifiers
- 991012957299302368
- Copyright
- © A Ingamells 2002
- Academic Unit
- School of Arts and Social Sciences
- Resource Type
- Thesis