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Explores the nature of oral‐performative reading and text‐interpretive tradition in the scribal community (Yakhad) associated with the Qumran ruins and the Dead Sea scrolls. The focus is upon the conceptions of the authority of written texts and their oral‐performative transmission as embodied in the community's written representations of the study session of the community, its own practice of textual study preserved in the Damascus Covenant (CD), and the Community Rule (1QS). The chapter shows that despite a rich tradition of interpretive reading of scriptural works and others regarded as stemming from prophecy, the Qumran Yakhad had no sense of itself as bearing an ancient tradition, either oral or written.

This chapter explores issues of power in the relationship of the scholar and the community of study as well as the promises and limits of “native” research. It contends that scholars must take more seriously theoretical and methodological exchanges with community members, whether we are strangers or persons coming home.

This chapter focuses on volunteering and the VCS within communities of place. It reviews community studies, and community and public policy. It notes that the case study community of Brightville has been beset by economic deprivation, but has retained a strong sense of community. It also examines volunteering and communities, highlighting the case study of Brightville. It notes that for the last decade, the community has been an important focus for public policy, and Levitas (2000, p 191) argued that community became the central collective abstraction of New Labour, which had an increasingly communitarian mindset. It adds that community under New Labour is seen as a space of ‘opportunity, responsibility, employability and inclusion’.

This chapter describes a randomized controlled trial of the CTC system to show that it is possible to use this type of rigorous methodology to evaluate a community-based prevention system. This project, the Community Youth Development Study (CYDS), involved 24 communities in seven U.S. states. The methods used to recruit communities and state-level partners to the trial, as well as the measures used to collect data from community key leaders, service providers, coalition leaders, and youth in CTC and control communities, are described. The chapter also summarizes the study’s findings, including desired changes in community-level processes, youth-reported risk and protective factors, and youth-reported behavioral health problems. Estimates of CTC’s cost benefits are provided.

The Conclusion provides a synoptic comparative account of the book’s findings, arguments, and conclusions. The focus is what an analysis of local civics politics lends to an understanding of risk disputes. Importantly, the Conclusion, in focusing on the civic politics of risk, shows that common political rhetoric(s) such as claims to democracy, due process, progress, and justice can mean very different things in different civic contexts that hold considerable consequence for understanding what is and is not an acceptable risk. The same terms can mean very different things given social, historical, and material legacies and the civics and discourse that locally predominate. The Conclusion also reiterates the contribution that Community at Risk makes to an impressive stock of knowledge concerning risk management, perception, and dispute, as well as civic politics, organization, and community studies. The Conclusion’s intervention is, however, equal parts new findings and synthesis.

The Introduction develops the context within which the federal government’s biodefense plans emerged and on which they were justified, including 9/11, the anthrax attacks, and the successive menace presented by West Nile virus, SARS, and avian influenza and most recently Ebola. After discussing the context and moral panic that ensued over terrorism, which were used to justify the new federal biodefense agenda, the Introduction then turns to local manifestations of those plans and responses to them–the community cases whose civic responses are comparatively explored in Community at Risk. The Introduction then develops key terms and concepts that are relied on to investigate and understand the community cases as well as the research strategy deployed to gather relevant data, analyze it, and draw conclusions. The Introduction ends with a brief summary of how the book is organized by chapter.

Chapter 1 explains the theoretical backdrop and analytical framework that organize the book’s analysis. The chapter begins by outlining contemporary conditions in risk society where societal relations among civil society, government, and industry have been transformed in the twenty-first-century United States. In this context, risk and its management at the individual, local, and national levels have become the predominant concerns and bases for “risk dispute.” Chapter 1 also describes how previous scholarship has theorized risk management and risk perception, as well as civic and community engagement and risk dispute. The chapter ends with how Community at Risk contributes to this and related areas of research.

This chapter introduces “River City” and “Prairieville,” cities which illustrate the book’s arguments. Using ethnographic observations, the chapter shows that union leaders and business owners—who were once central in community governance—traditionally took leading roles in the local Democratic and Republic party. After the 1980s, these traditional leaders disappeared or shifted focus to economic development and withdrew from parties, thus allowing ideological activists to take over. The chapter then introduces the book’s central arguments. First, community leaders’ status competition, or game, is structured by federal policies, which changed in the 1980s as reforms in bureaucracies regulating finance, social service provision, and urban development created opportunities for community leaders who identify as partners to rise in public prominence. Second, the chapter argues that people use local public life as a heuristic for making sense of politics. Whereas older residents saw politics through the framework of a labor-business struggle, younger informants identified as apolitical partners or hyper-partisan partisans, identities that failed to provide a reliable political guide. The chapter also introduces the book’s analytical approach, which triangulates ethnography and archival sources in two cities with scholarship on American federalism, political parties, civil society, urban governance, and voting behavior.

The chapter reviews how EBIs are typically evaluated. Evaluation usually begins with small pilot studies that examine implementation processes and feasibility and gather input from community members on training and implementation needs. The next stages involve efficacy trials, such as randomized experiments to evaluate intervention impact and larger scale effectiveness and dissemination trials to understand how EBIs can be implemented at scale. This chapter describes how CTC has been evaluated following these stages. Early pilot studies examined its implementation procedures and feasibility, feedback from communities was used to improve the CTC system, and larger scale studies evaluated its impact on community rates of youth behavioral health problems. The research used to create valid and reliable measures of community processes is described, including the methods used to create the CTC Youth Survey that measures a comprehensive set of risk and protective factors and behavioral health problems across youth in a community.

Chapter 4 turns to the Institute of Community Studies, the Bethnal Green-based social research organization where Young and his colleague Peter Willmott published probably their best-known work, the 1957 Family and Kinship in East London. This and other Institute of Community Studies publications, such as Peter Townsend’s The Family Life of Old People, suggested that the family and extended family were crucial sources of mutual aid and social support for working-class communities, and that this aspect of working-class life had been overlooked by middle-class policy makers and urban planners who thought in terms of a more isolated and conventionally middle-class ‘nuclear’ family of parents and young children. This chapter shows that while Young and his colleagues did detect strong kinship networks in the communities they studied, their emphasis on the extended family was informed by a variety of contemporary developments in anthropology, psychology, and sociology, and by a political project to challenge the Labour Party’s emphasis on male labour and suggest that the extended family could provide an alternative to the workplace as a site of social solidarity. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the role of women in Young’s dystopian satire The Rise of the Meritocracy, which argues that Young idealized women, and the relationships between them, for being less defined by work and professional status.

In Chapter 5, I examine rights claims that are expressed and pursued outside courtrooms through a case study of a leading community organization, Coleman Advocates for Children and Youth in San Francisco, that has long advocated for children’s rights in the education arena. The purpose of this case study is two-fold: to demonstrate how the rights claims I have argued for can be powerful tools in democratic politics in the US, and to suggest ways in which deliberative theory needs to be revised in light of the inequalities that advocates face as they employ rights claims. I consider what type of citizenship and view of politics Coleman’s efforts endorse, and how it uses rights discourse to advance its education reform goals. I also consider how deliberative ideals may need to be relaxed to make room for rights-based advocacy in non-ideal conditions.

This chapter examines how urban sociology in and of China is interconnected in historical and disciplinary terms with Robert Park and the Chicago School. It analyses four dimensions thereof: 1) personal relations between Robert Park and Chinese students and colleagues who enabled his visit to China, namely Xu Shilian, Wu Jingchao and Wu Wenzao; 2) institutional embeddedness of the sociology departments at both the University of Chicago and Yanjing University within the funding structures and strategies of the Rockefeller Foundation in the 1920s and 1930s and amongst competing approaches to research in (urban) sociology; 3) empirical fieldwork and comparative community studies in the form of Fei Xiaotong’s research on small towns in China (early 1980s) and his conceptualization of rural urbanization which built on his earlier classic rural community study and influenced official Chinese urbanization strategies until the recent National Plan on New Urbanization (2014-2020); and 4) theorizing China’s “villages in the city” (城中村‎) in light of previous debates inspired by the Chicago School on “cities within cities” (Park 2015), the “slum” and “urban villages”. Based on these four perspectives the chapter addresses questions of legacy, creative impetus and possible limitations arising from Park’s program vis-à-vis urban sociology in China today.

Chapter 3 empirically examines the risk dispute that erupted in Davis, California, and how the community’s style of home rule civics and discourse shaped local deliberations regarding the University of California–Davis’s (UCD) biodefense plans. The chapter develops the role that Davis’s civic and political history has played in generating a field of political relations and set of value claims that heavily influenced civic dynamics in town. The chapter specifically focuses on the political-cultural resources mobilized to justify local opposition in the risk dispute surrounding UCD’s biodefense ambitions, while also addressing the counterclaims of those who supported the university and its plans. Chapter 3 demonstrates that the claims levied in the risk dispute emerged from a specific civic and political legacy; they were not new, although they targeted a new technology and risk management plan.

Chapter 5 empirically assesses civic response in Galveston where a managed civics and discourse predominated, wherein the civically engaged mostly downplayed the risks posed by federal biodefense plans and a local NBL and, instead, emphasized its possible contributions to their island’s and the nation’s—even the world’s—“progress.” Residents expressed little of the skepticism shared in the other cases and mostly faith in the power of humankind, with the aid of enlightened leadership, scientific knowledge, technology, and economy to progressively improve and reshape their island community for the better. As with the other cases, Galveston’s civically engaged relied on claims and justifications that emerged from a specific civic and political history. That legacy and the civic relations, conventions, and virtues associated with that history helped ease locals toward accepting and eventually embracing biodefense plans and an NBL as an asset to both them and their collective future on the island.

Bahia's Secretary of Education, Anísio Teixeira, developed modernization plans and enlisted social scientists as key members of his modernizing reform. He invited the U.S. anthropologist Charles Wagley to study Bahia's “primitive” people to target the modernizing efforts of state reforms more precisely. This chapter examines how Texeira's community-studies project collided with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) race relations studies, and how UNESCO researchers promoted the idea that Bahia's race relations are exceptional in Brazil and portrayed the state as a cultural treasure that should be maintained.

Chapter 4 relates response in Roxbury, Massachusetts—a section of Boston where a group formed in opposition to Boston University’s bid to host an NBL. Civic partisans there invoked a direct action style of civics and discourse reflective of local civic history, ongoing civic relations, and resonant civic virtues. In this context, the NBL was regarded as an environmental injustice insofar as its placement in Roxbury reflected the political disenfranchisement of neighborhood residents based on their race and class positions. Risk acceptability and dispute therefore echoed social and political history in which de facto segregation, municipal neglect, and ongoing marginalization of the neighborhood’s minority residents left them suspicious of both “white” trustee institutions and those from outside their neighborhood. Chapter 3 demonstrates that in Roxbury claims making emerged from a specific civic and political legacy where claims were not new even if the proposed NBL was.

Chapter 2 sets up the analysis pursued in subsequent chapters. It does so through a focus on the “risk communication” strategies deployed by local universities that sought to secure funding and support for their bids for an NBL. It was in those strategies that the local civic dialogue began in each civic and community context. It is in part the great similarity in risk communication strategies, coupled with variable local response, that makes comparing them so informative. Chapter 2 provides an important justification for the book’s comparative argument: that variation at the community level was mostly a function of local civic dynamics, not distinctive university risk communication strategies. In the context of established civics and discourse, even an issue like biodefense, while “new,” was locally understood via events, experiences, and beliefs that were a priori to it, requiring an analysis of such civic dimensions to apprehend and explain local response.