Search Results

This chapter discusses the issues surrounding the use of digital technologies by community archives. Community groups often find that the technical, financial, and logistical demands of maintaining digital resources are considerable. This tempts them to use commercial platforms whose longevity is not assured and which raise issues of privacy and manipulation. As everyone is increasingly working in a digital environment, the quality of that environment affects day-to-day life almost as profoundly as the physical environment. The health of the digital ecosystem on which we all depend affects the ability of community archives to achieve their aims of creating shared spaces of self-representation, collaboration, and memory. Every day seems to bring further revelations of the manipulation of social media, security breaches, personal abuse, and digital disinformation. These anxieties can make it seem that the vision of a digital space promoting community self-representation and collaboration is under threat.

This chapter looks at the notion of community with respect to the criminal justice and community safety sectors. It highlights how an emphasis upon community participation in criminal justice reflects broader developments in governance, whereby responsibility and accountability for crime is increasingly concentrated at local levels, whilst at the same time centralised control in terms of resources and target-setting is maintained. Furthermore, this comprises a form of institutional reflection that involves criminal justice institutions opening themselves up to the communities that they serve, with the lay public engaging with, as well as critiquing, rival forms of expertise. The chapter also discusses community representation within criminal justice and how community participation helps to create and sustain legitimised identities. Finally, it argues that despite the significant challenges that engagement with resistance identities (and indeed project identities) raises, it is important to stress that engagement should be actively pursued by government as a way of reducing further entrenchment and separation.

This chapter gives a short introduction to Wikipedia and the Wikipedia community. After describing the origins and growth of Wikipedia, and providing facts and figures, it examines some of the important rules and behavioral norms used on Wikipedia that determine its social organization. It concludes with a discussion of the informal representation of self among Wikipedians and how they convey those representations to the community through their user pages and actions.

Professionals working across the caring professions are subject to new policy directions where government places communities at the heart of decision making, and where there is an expectation of greater user involvement and participation. This generates theoretical and practical challenges in terms of what constitutes authentic involvement, how this affects the relationship between professional and service user/client/consumer, and how participatory practices are supported and sustained. The authors draw on their shared and separate experiences as professional evaluators working in community settings and health in the UK and Australia to examine the development of their ethical practice, concepts of emancipatory learning and inquiry and some tensions and dilemmas inherent in user involvement: tokenism, clashing agendas, differing professional cultures and representation. Relationships, power and readiness are proposed as key factors in day to day decision making.

Changes in two communities studied in the 1950s and 1960s by W. M. Williams (Northlew in Devon and Gosforth in Cumbria) form the springboard for reflections on the social roles of the clergy in a largely secular society. That the clergy are often called on to act as community spokespersons and honest brokers is not, as is sometimes argued, a reflection of the enduring popularity of religion. It is precisely because most people are not religious that the clergy can be seen as disinterested and valued for their organizational skills and their experience as public speakers.