Journal article
Activating community workers in governing conduct: tensions in the practices to empower others
Community Development Journal, Vol.55(4), pp.570-587
30/03/2019
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Abstract
This paper presents findings from a historical study of community renewal, as it was articulated and operationalized in NSW, Australia in the period 1999–2006 to improve conditions on public housing estates. The key argument is that community practitioners need to pay closer attention to the power relations involved in actual interventions that claim to empower others. Further, it is argued that such an analysis is a crucial aspect of developing critical, reflexive and innovative forms of practice which have the potential to reconfigure power relations and open possibilities for new understandings of community. Case examples of the implementation of community renewal are included to show the tensions involved when practitioners engage in empowerment practices that are coercive in that they include the exercise of regulatory and disciplinary power. It is incumbent upon community work practitioners and those who educate aspiring practitioners to understand that policies and programmes utilizing community as a solution to social problems are not benign, nor are they necessarily solely politically expedient, although the dangers lay in conceiving and enacting them as such.
Details
- Title
- Activating community workers in governing conduct: tensions in the practices to empower others
- Creators
- Angela Nunn - Southern Cross University
- Publication Details
- Community Development Journal, Vol.55(4), pp.570-587
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press
- Identifiers
- 991012926990502368
- Copyright
- © Oxford University Press and Community Development Journal. 2019 All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com
- Academic Unit
- Faculty of Business, Law and Arts; School of Arts and Social Sciences
- Language
- English
- Resource Type
- Journal article