This document discusses community development and social justice. It addresses how community development aims to challenge structural inequalities, discrimination, and promote social and environmental justice. It discusses theories from Gramsci, Freire, and Foucault around power analyses and how these inform community development practice. It also addresses issues of poverty and inequality, and how power and poverty analyses can help understand inequalities in society.

1. Community Development:
The practice of social justice
Margaret Ledwith
Emeritus Professor of Community
Development and Social Justice
University of Cumbria, UK

2. Community development
The practice of social justice
Contextualised in political times
Poverty analyses act as yardstick
Theory/practice unity of praxis

3. CD Praxis: a contested space
between top-down and bottom-up
CD principles: social/environmental justice
CD vision: just and sustainable world
CD values: ideology of equality
CD process: popular education for
participatory democracy
CD theory: analyses of power

4. 1995: National Occupational
Standards for CD
Community development:
challenges structural inequalities and
discriminatory practices
addresses structural disadvantage, exclusion,
discrimination and inequality
analyses situations and identifies change
through collective action
empowers individuals and communities
is about learning together from everyday life

5. 1: Power
Analyses of power: practice of
empowerment
Reframes CD skills
Personal as political
Speaking truth to power

6. Antonio Gramsci
Ideology as intellectual dominance
Critical education as a force for change
Hegemony
Role of the intellectuals

7. Paulo Freire
Process of critical discovery
Value base: respect, dignity, mutuality…
Conscientisation: critical insight
Collective action
Education is never neutral
Domesticating or liberating
Popular education: co-teacher/co-learner

8. Culture of silence

9. Popular education:
‘Questioning answers not answering questions’

10. Respectful dialogue:
Listening from the heart

11. Feminism and a politics of
difference
Personal as political
Feminism and Freire converge
Education for critical consciousness
Challenging dominant ideology
Collective action for a fair and just world
Diverge: patriarchy, racism, identity politics

12. Foucault
Metanarratives hide more than they reveal
Postmodernism fragments the collective
Foucault: power comes from everywhere,
above/below, in micro-relations of daily life
Calls for understanding race/gender
relations of daily life – see Peggy McIntosh!

13. PCS model (Thompson, 2006)
Personal
psychological
Community, cultural, commonalities,
Consensus, conformity
Structural power, social divisions,
Discrimination, poverty, privilege

14. Reflection and dialogue
In what ways do analyses of power
change the scope of your practice?
Has your understanding changed during
this talk?
Share your thoughts with the person next
to you.

15. 2: Poverty
Is poverty a human rights issue?

16. UNICEF
1979-1997: UK child poverty from 1:10 to 1:3
 State of the world’s children (UNICEF 2005): 1:2
children of world in poverty
Child wellbeing in rich countries (UNICEF 2007):
UK bottom of 21 countries
Is UK poverty a human rights issue? (Killeen,
JRF, 2008)

17. 1997: The Blair/Brown Promise
End child poverty by 2020!
Education, education, education!
Every Child/Youth Matters (ECM/YM)
Child Poverty Act, 2010

18. Human need v. human greed!
Bailout of banks
Global recession
Countries in crisis: USA, Eurozone
Austerity measures hit poor hardest
TUC ‘women and cuts toolkit’

19. Critiquing the Big Society
Strong on empowerment, weak on equality
No structural analysis of poverty
Charity not redistribution of wealth
Responsibility over rights
2020: absolute poverty for 800,000 more children
CPAG: Big Society unlawful re Child Poverty Act,
2010
Youth unemployment hit a million!

20. 1989: UN Convention on
the Rights of the Child
Right to survival
to develop to the fullest
to protection from
harmful influences,
abuse and exploitation
to participate fully in
family, cultural and
social life

21. Reflection and dialogue
In what ways do poverty issues affect the life
chances of the people you work with?
Is poverty a human rights issue?

22. 3: Inequality
How do power and poverty analyses help us
to understand inequalities?

23. Globalisation and the politics
of disposability

24. August 2011 Riots:
Criminalising children
UNICEF criticised UK judicial system for
locking up children
Breach international law on children’s rights
Children in custody most disadvantaged
Cuts in youth services

25. ‘A riot is the language of the
unheard’ MLK, 1965
Impossible to divorce riots from growing divide
Job prospects collapsed at bottom: through roof at
top
‘…a generation born of futility and resentment,
wholly unheard…seized opportunity to reclaim some
small and fleeting handful of power’ (youth worker)
Danny Dorling: ‘not the extent but direction of
inequalities that correlates with riot’

26. Decent childhoods for all?
Age 3: 7x serious socio-emotional problems
Early intervention vital
Gaps in policy and popular consciousness
Implications for human potential
Report on Decent Childhoods: need an economic
and social model with decent childhoods as aim
Wilkinson and Pickett: quality of life is now about
community and how we relate to each other

27. Fighting poverty, inequality and
injustice (Walker, Sinfield, Walker, 2011)
Deficit rhetoric: public spending is problem
Public sector: crucial bastion of social justice
Costs of deficit– poor pay 10x more than rich
Public sector can be reshaped not dismantled
Focus on poverty, inequality, fairness
Deficit discourse performs political function
Politics of the deficit: recast with public
investment as basis of social justice

28. Peggy McIntosh:
Invisible white power/patriarchy
46 invisible privileges:
I can be with people of my race most of the time
I can be sure my neighbours will be pleasant
I can shop alone, not followed or harassed
TV or newspapers represent my race positively
My skin colour will not work against my financial
reliability
I can be oblivious of the language and customs of
others
I can go home from meetings not feeling isolated,
out-of-place, outnumbered, unheard, held at a
distance or feared

29. Social justice framework
System of checks and balances at every
stage of the process
Placatory practice or transformative
practice?