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This chapter reports on the purpose, methods, and findings of a CDC-funded project in Hartford, Connecticut, entitled the Community Responses to Risks of Emergent Drug Use Project. This project was designed to (1) use ethnographic and epidemiological data collection to identify and track emergent drug use trends; (2) analyze these patterns in terms of the sociodemographic traits of participants; (3) assess the potential impact of identified changes on local public health; and (4) use a Participatory Action Research (PAR) model to implement community-based public health responses to research findings in collaboration with a community advisory group. Three illicit drug use trends examined in the project—the spread of methamphetamine among hard-core drug users, the adoption of PCP among emergent adult users, and the use of sweetened cigars among youth—are assessed while describing applied initiatives designed to address the public health implications of identified drug use trends.

Good teachers are reflective practitioners: they are aware of and reflect on what is happening in the classroom. This chapter introduces the idea of an "inquiring classroom" in which teachers are critical of what they do and observe in class. Three kinds of reflection - technical, practical and critical reflection - are discussed, and a related concept called action research is introduced. Action research is a tool which helps teachers to reflect upon their own experience and construct action plans with a view to tackling any problems or improving situations which they may find difficult. It is also a good means for professional development. Other alternatives for dealing with classroom management issues are introduced, namely school action plans and personal management plans. These plans are effective for dealing with students' difficult behaviour at both the school and personal levels. Throughout the chapter, the use of systematic investigation and reflection upon teachers' experience in solving classroom management problems is emphasized.

This chapter shows how weekly Participatory Action Research Team for Youth (PARTY) meetings facilitated the deepening of critical consciousness and the formation of a collective, oppositional political identity among the youth participants. This, in turn, enabled the exercise of political agency. This deepening of critical consciousness was not primarily a result of the formal “research” conducted in the group, but rather of the dialogic process of open-ended critical reflection that occurred in weekly meetings.

The chapter contributes to discourses of youth participation with respect to understanding what forms of participation might make a difference for marginalised young people living in the context of structural inequality. Drawing on Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) and Critical Utopian Action Research (CUAR), the chapter makes a case for a transformational learning approach to participation that involves learning and change at both an individual level and in professional interventions with marginalised young people. The chapter presents a case study with young people engaged in criminal and violent activities. This case study provides an opportunity to reflect on the challenges and possibilities of using ‘alternative’, transformative, action-based interpretations of youth participation and empowerment involving social learning rooted in professional encounters with young people’s lifeworlds.

This chapter examines how youth Participatory Action Research Team for Youth (PARTY) members and prospective PARTY members from Jackson High School interacted with the “discourse of these kids.” It shows how youth participants mobilized, reproduced, and contested the discourse of these kids by alternately positioning themselves in opposition to it, in accordance with it, or by contesting certain aspects of it.

This chapter examines the results of the shift of Participatory Action Research Team for Youth (PARTY) from theory to practice—from envisioning and planning a social justice class to actually teaching one at Jackson High School. It demonstrates that, despite attempts to implement an alternative and liberatory model of education for social change, the practices and discourses of traditional classroom teaching were largely reproduced. It examines how the social context of Jackson High, and the more generalized figured world of schooling, shaped the emerging teacher identities of PARTY members and their ability to exercise agency as individuals and as a collective.

This chapter examines the problem of hunger and malnutrition in socially excluded communities, and considers how it can be tackled when public funding and charitable donations are not sufficient by themselves to attain fair and sustainable outcomes. It draws attention to issues of difference and diversity in relation to poverty and wider social injustice; and make use of research on a range of community food initiatives to explore how they can generate more ecologically and socially just food-provisioning practices. Lessons from participatory action research carried out with the Warburton Breakfast Minyma (a collective of Aboriginal women) in Australia, and the Gloucestershire Gateway Trust in England, point to how communities can work together with shared resources; supplement with their own food growing; and promote healthy eating, environmental responsibility and cultural diversity.

This chapter examines internal debates within Participatory Action Research Team for Youth (PARTY) about the curricular goals of social justice education, particularly those focused on the meaning of academic standards and preparation for college and careers. Core debates within PARTY concerned the meaning and role of academic skill building and “standards” in the social justice class, and the relative value of academic versus vocational preparation for empowering Jackson students in their transition to adult roles. The chapter contextualizes PARTY's intragroup debates by connecting them to the realities of the postindustrial labor market and the historic struggle to define the purpose of high school at the bottom of the educational hierarchy.

This chapter considers the place of youth work projects, and of the importance of engagement, enjoyment, association and accompaniment in the life of neighbourhoods including those visited in the Loneliness Connects Us research. It highlights the work of the youth projects who were involved in the research study and the impact of the austerity on such projects. It suggests however that the commitment to ‘social action’ as a buzzword for youth work should be considered critically , as should medical models of loneliness which lend themselves to the suggestion that interventions by professionals such as social workers or youth workers are needed in order to fix the problem. Rather youth work is considered as part of a social infrastructure designed to facilitate informal learning, advocacy, mutual support and enlivening.

Environmental assessment has been defined as “a general conceptual and methodological framework for describing and predicting how attributes of places relate to a wide range of cognitive, affective, and behavioral responses” (Craik & Feimer, 1987). A primary purpose for assessing environments is to provide valid and reliable information that has utility in environmental planning, design, and management decision making. Implicit in the assessment activity is the assumption of identifiable relationships of physical environmental factors with descriptive and evaluative assessments, and with predictions of responses to places conceptualized in plans and designs, but not yet built. This chapter addresses the utility of research findings. Three primary questions are posed. Why are some environmental assessment and cognition research findings used successfully in decision making while others are not? What factors contribute to these outcomes? And how important are physical environmental factors in planning, design, and management decision making? The preceding chapters by Rachel Kaplan, Reginald Golledge, and Harry Timmermans provide the background for the following discussion. The first section of this chapter presents a brief review of similarities and differences among the three preceding chapters, with specific attention directed to interpretations or definitions of the concepts of assessment and preference, the use of physical environmental variables in the assessment process, and the roles of laypersons and experts in assessment. Potential uses for and applications of environmental assessment research are described in the second section. This is followed by a discussion of the differences between instrumental and conceptual applications and of factors that have been identified as influencing applications, factors such as communications between researchers and users, responsibilities for problem definition, and the context within which the research is conducted. This chapter concludes with a discussion of the opportunities for and probable limitations on applications of the preceding chapters by R. Kaplan, Golledge, and Timmermans. Four concepts and elements that are addressed in the three chapters have been selected for purposes of structuring a comparison among them. These concepts and elements—assessment, preference, roles of laypersons and experts, and physical environmental factors—are particularly salient to the issue of research applications.

Social movement organizers enhance direct organizing with media and other public relations work, hoping that increased visibility will reinforce strategic alliances, influence public attitudes, and forward desired changes in social institutions. The chapter begins by explaining how reflective organizers with the Rhode Island Coalition against Domestic Violence (RICADV) and activist-scholars in the Movement and Media Research Action Project (MRAP) established a working relationship. It analyzes the obstacles to mass media movement interaction then outlines three common U.S. models of movement-media public relations: independent media, social marketing, and media advocacy. Furthermore, scholars conclude that social movements might benefit from greater familiarity with social movement theories; collaboration between social movement organizers and scholars can improve both social movement theorizing and practice.

This introductory chapter studies the possibilities and tensions for co-produced research practices that emerge from the collision of long-established, community-oriented research practices, an increased institutional emphasis on community co-production in academia, and the ongoing critique of the key terms of these practices. Among long-established approaches to community-oriented research scholarship, Participatory Action Research (PAR) is squarely oriented to a particular vision of social justice and community defined methods and research questions. The chapter cites various case studies about what co-production looks like and some of the challenges that arise. It opens up the field and begins to illustrate in practice what the tensions and challenges of co-production are.

What we know and understand about our surroundings influences our evaluations of and behaviors in the physical environment. In addition, our reasons for using places, our goals and personal plans, bias the manner in which we acquire and store knowledge of places. The extent to which places afford the goals and plans we bring to them also affects environmental assessments. How much we like a place is colored by how well it meets certain functional objectives. Yet scholarly analysis of each of these topics has proceeded largely in isolation. The principal objective of this volume is to promote more thinking and analysis about the integration of these three, heretofore largely distinct areas of scholarly inquiry-namely environmental cognition, environmental assessment, and decision making and action in real-world situations. We are not attempting a broad theoretical integration across the many realms of human-environment studies as outlined for example in The Handbook of Environmental Psychology (Stokols & Altman, 1987). Throughout the present volume there is a distinctly cognitive bias, emphasizing the role of cognition as it influences assessment and action rather than studying how action or assessment might impact cognition. This cognitive perspective reflects the editors’ own intellectual training (experimental psychology) and also mirrors the current predominant view within each of the three areas of inquiry we investigate. However, as we discuss throughout this volume, this cognitive perspective may detract from a fuller understanding of how and in what way people interrelate with their physical surroundings (see also Saegert & Winkel, 1990, for a sociocultural critique of the cognitive perspective in environmental psychology). Furthermore, we focus our analysis of cognition, assessment, and action at the individual level rather than aggregating responses intended to characterize the environment at a societal or group level. Given that the principal objective of this volume is to promote integration across three areas of scholarship that have operated largely in isolation from one another, we begin by first describing each of these three main areas of inquiry. This is followed by a brief analysis of some preliminary attempts at integration. We conclude with a description of how the present volume is organized.

Mainstream academia assumes a dichotomy between active political research for problem solving and theoretically driven research on the problem. In many music academies, the researcher is trained to be a detached neutral observer in the field who is expected to be objective in the analysis of the data collected. However, socio-cultural problems such as poverty, conflict, ethnic and class inequalities, or rights to cultural representation, which affect musical cultures, do not exist in a political void. If our goal is for the research to have a practical and social impact, we need to question the conventional neutral methods of research in music studies. Drawing on the praxis of arts activists in Asia, Freire’s ideas about education and social change, and Appadurai’s concept of “research from below,” this chapter argues for a type of activist research that is both politically engaged and scholarly. In a case study on a theater tradition that was on the brink of disappearance, it emphasizes collaboration at all levels of research with members of the community whose problems are being studied, and extension of the right to research to nonacademics. Collaborative research engaging the communities themselves can be seen as an intervention whereby communities are empowered to question and voice their opinions about their socioeconomic, environmental, and cultural development and transformation. This study is located within the wider agenda of bridging the gaps between academia and practitioner, and decolonizing collaborative research where paradigms of knowledge flow across regions rather than from North to South.

The introductory chapter to each of the two volumes in Transforming Ethnomusicology offers a critical discussion of a range of socially engaged approaches as well as their deep historical roots that we consider foundational and fundamental to the ethnomusicological endeavor. These approaches affiliate variably with such intellectual traditions as Marxism, feminism and anti-racism, Post-colonialism and Indigenous Studies, Participatory Action Research, analyses of heritage practices and sustainability challenges, studies of intellectual property regimes and ecologies, and other work in ethnomusicology and cognate disciplines in the social sciences. Our aim is to deepen the conversation about how intellectual history has informed our discipline and to probe the premises, activities, and assumptions of scholars past and present who strive to respond to the concerns of the communities with whom they work.

The introductory chapter to each of the two volumes in Transforming Ethnomusicology offers a critical discussion of a range of socially engaged approaches as well as their deep historical roots that we consider foundational and fundamental to the ethnomusicological endeavor. These approaches affiliate variably with such intellectual traditions as Marxism, feminism and anti-racism, Post-colonialism and Indigenous Studies, Participatory Action Research, analyses of heritage practices and sustainability challenges, studies of intellectual property regimes and ecologies, and other work in ethnomusicology and cognate disciplines in the social sciences. Our aim is to deepen the conversation about how intellectual history has informed our discipline and to probe the premises, activities, and assumptions of scholars past and present who strive to respond to the concerns of the communities with whom they work.

This chapter questions the politico-epistemological potentials of and challenges notions of dialogue and collaboration in current scholarship on sound praxis. It addresses variable meanings of both dialogue and collaboration as general signifiers central both to social processes and the ethnographic experience. What motivates dialogue and collaboration, and how do variable motivations play (or not) in contexts of struggle for political recognition and valuing of forms of knowledge and practices under pressure from exploitation, inequality, and criminalization of the oppressed? The argument proceeds through three basic steps: (a) a synthetic examination of recent reviews of collaborative/dialogic/advocacy/applied/engaged work in both soundscape and music scholarship vis-à-vis the increasing and generalized self-awareness of local-global political struggles and tensions; (b) highlighting the role often ascribed to the so-called arts in mediating the negotiation of human coexistence in conflictive and post-conflict contexts; and (c) opening a debate on political-epistemological alternatives to research on sound praxis drawing on the theorists Paulo Freire, Orlando Fals Borda, and Luis Guillermo Vasco Uribe.

This chapter serves as an Introduction to the book. It discusses the book’s origins and the connections between the authors and their respective organizations – the Urban & Environmental Policy Institute and Civic Exchange. It describes how Los Angeles and Hong Kong and several Chinese cities such as Shenzhen and Guangzhou have emerged as global cities, the urban development strategies they have pursued, and the urban environmental challenges they face. It answers the question, why a book about Los Angeles and Hong Kong and their connection to China and identifies for all three places the six urban environmental areas that will be analyzed – ports and goods movement, air quality, water supply and water quality, the food environment, transportation, and open and public space.