Young People, Radical Democracy and Community Development 9781447362784

Table of contents :
Front Cover
Half Title
Series Information
Yound People, Radical Democracy and Community Development
Copyright information
Dedication
Table of contents
List of figures
Series Editors' Preface: Rethinking Community Development
Notes on contributors
Acknowledgments
Part I Young people: radical democracy and community development
1 Introduction: Young people, radical democracy and community development
The rationale
Social movements: theoretical sources and practical outworkings in community development work
Young
Radical democracy and community development
Structure and organisation of the book
References
2 Thinking/acting with migrants under neoliberalism: “It’s horrible to perceive solidarity as merely absorbing the sorrow of one side”
Introduction
Relational agency and intersubjectivity
Methodology
Becoming thinking actors with migrants: ethical paradoxes
Investigating the meaning of citizenship: breaking the moulds
The Kitchen, Forums and Migrant Letters: expanding the potential for radical democratic participation
Shared spaces of appearance
World-making as prefigurative practice: against depoliticised charity
Conclusion
Notes
References
Part II Young people acting together for eco-justice
3 Imagining the future under capitalism: young people involved in environmental activism in an economic crisis
Introduction
Youth activism and youth work in the era of recessions
The communist, non-political and reformist young climate strikers
The communist striker
The reformist striker
The non-political striker
What can we learn from these young people?
Conclusion
Notes
References
4 Community building for and through sustainable food
Youth Sustainable Food Network
Public eat-ins
Regulars’ tables and core group meetings
Community building for sustainable food
Community building through sustainable food
Sustainability for and through food for inclusive community building
Note
References
5 Daring, dissolving and dancing: making communities with water
Introduction
Waterways and water works
Water distillations: theories and practices
Low theory
Moving together in time
Conclusion
Coda: finding a form
August 2018
August 2021
Notes
Acknowledgements
References
Part III Acts of citizenship?
6 Community development, empowerment and youth participation in social-housing neighbourhoods in France
Attempts at mobilisation against urban regeneration in Sanitas and the difficult participation of young people
The time of community development through the lens of young people’s engagement
Institutions–youth nexus through participation and empowerment
Conclusion
Notes
References
7 LGBTQ+ young peoples’ sexuality and gender citizenship in digital spaces
Radical community development and sexual citizenship: what’s in a name?
Doing digital differently: how LGBTQ+ young people create and occupy online spaces
Individualism and collectivism: the who and how of developing a new and radical LGBTQ+ lexicon
Youth-led possibilities in community development practice
A new model for practice
Conclusion: The trauma and joy of radical democratic community development
Acknowledgements
Note
References
8 Enabling spaces for and with marginalised young people: the case of the Disha peer support and speak out group
The crisis of higher education in India
The philosophy and model of Disha: critical dialogue, praxis, engaged pedagogy and conscientisation
Critical dialogue and critical praxis
Engaged pedagogy and conscientisation
Disha peer-led sessions: the role of discussion and critical dialogue
Challenges of critical praxis
Community development: campus communities and persistent inequalities
Conclusion
References
9 Meaningful youth engagement in community programming in Kenya
Finding identity and belonging in a supportive community of peers
Being taken seriously as an individual and an organisation
Mobilising youth to challenge the status quo
Reflecting on Nzumari Africa’s approach to radical democracy and shared practices
References
Part IV Black lives still matter
10 Conceptualising community development through a pedagogy of convivência: youth, race and territory in Brazil
Introduction
Socio-political context
Monsterisation of Black youth from urban peripheral communities in Brazil
Pedagogies of monsterisation and practitioner attitudes towards young people
Towards a pedagogy of convivência/coexistence
Towards a citizenship paradigm
Decolonising community development: challenging dominant epistemologies to enable a citizenship paradigm
Beyond the ‘post-it paradigm’: enabling dialogue through convivência/coexistence
Conclusion
Notes
References
11 “I did not want the project to end. For me, it should last forever”: exploring a community development framework based on learned lessons from marginalised youth voices in Brazil
Introduction
The Escape Routes project
Principles, values and key concepts underpinning the Escape Routes project
The right to the city
Expansion of individual/collective horizons: challenging the presentification and particularisation of existence
Creation of alternatives: action for change
Humanising the gaze
Group composition and activities
Methodological approach
Participants’ engagement and views on the project
The right to the city
The expanding of individual horizons and awareness of human rights
Building trust and meaningful relationships: respecting and having mutual awareness of each other’s worldview
Practitioner engagement: a humanised and empathic approach
Impact on their sense of wellbeing and responsibility to change
Conclusion
Note
References
12 Burning Work: field map
Part V Practising hope
13 They are not your warriors: intergenerational tensions and practices of hope in young people’s environmental activism
References
14 Afterword: Community as prefigurative practice – practices of hope
Refusals: complete and partial
References
Index
Back Cover

Citation preview

Rethinking Community Development

Young People, Radical Democracy and Community Development Edited by Janet Batsleer, Harriet Rowley and Demet Lüküslü

YOUNG PEOPLE, RADICAL DEMOCRACY AND COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT

Rethinking Community Development Series Editors: Mae Shaw, University of Edinburgh, Rosie R. Meade, University College Cork and Sarah Banks, University of Durham

Rethinking Community Development is an international book series that offers the opportunity for a critical re-evaluation of community development – to rethink what community development means in theory and practice. It is intended to draw together international, cross-generational and cross-disciplinary perspectives.

Series titles: Arts, Culture and Community Development Edited by Rosie Meade and Mae Shaw Populism, Democracy and Community Development Edited by Sue Kenny, Jim Ife and Peter Westoby Environmental Justice, Popular Struggle and Community Development Edited by Anne Harley and Eurig Scandrett Ethics, Equity and Community Development Edited by Sarah Banks and Peter Westoby Funding, Power and Community Development Edited by Niamh McCrea and Fergal Finnegan Class, Inequality and Community Development Edited by Mae Shaw and Marjorie Mayo Politics, Power and Community Development Edited by Rosie Meade, Mae Shaw and Sarah Banks

Forthcoming in the series: Peacebuilding, Conflict and Community Development Edited by John Eversley, Sinéad Gormally and Avila Kilmurray

Find out more at policy.bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/rethinking-communitydevelopment

YOUNG PEOPLE, RADICAL DEMOCRACY AND COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT Edited by Janet Batsleer, Harriet Rowley and Demet Lüküslü

First published in Great Britain in 2023 by Policy Press, an imprint of Bristol University Press University of Bristol 1–​9 Old Park Hill Bristol BS2 8BB UK t: +​44 (0)117 374 6645 e: bup-​[email protected] Details of international sales and distribution partners are available at policy.bristoluniversitypress.co.uk © Bristol University Press 2023 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-4473-6275-3 hardcover ISBN 978-1-4473-6276-0 paperback ISBN 978-1-4473-6277-7 ePub ISBN 978-1-4473-6278-4 ePdf The right of Janet Batsleer, Harriet Rowley and Demet Lüküslü to be identified as editors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved: no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of Bristol University Press. Every reasonable effort has been made to obtain permission to reproduce copyrighted material. If, however, anyone knows of an oversight, please contact the publisher. The statements and opinions contained within this publication are solely those of the editors and contributors and not of the University of Bristol or Bristol University Press. The University of Bristol and Bristol University Press disclaim responsibility for any injury to persons or property resulting from any material published in this publication. Bristol University Press and Policy Press work to counter discrimination on grounds of gender, race, disability, age and sexuality. Cover design: Liam Roberts Design Front cover image: Ian Shaw Bristol University Press and Policy Press use environmentally responsible print partners. Printed and bound in Great Britain by CMP, Poole

This book is dedicated to the #FreeCihanErdal campaign and all those who are fighting for their citizenship to be recognised.

Contents List of figures Series editors’ preface Notes on contributors Acknowledgements

ix x xi xvi

PART I Young people: radical democracy and community development 1 Introduction: Young people, radical democracy and 3 community development Janet Batsleer, Harriet Rowley and Demet Lüküslü 2 Thinking/​acting with migrants under neoliberalism: “It’s 23 horrible to perceive solidarity as merely absorbing the sorrow of one side” Cihan Erdal PART II Young people acting together for eco-​justice 3 Imagining the future under capitalism: young people involved in environmental activism in an economic crisis Dena Arya 4 Community building for and through sustainable food Dominic Zimmermann 5 Daring, dissolving and dancing: making communities with water Róisín O’Gorman PART III Acts of citizenship? 6 Community development, empowerment and youth participation in social-​housing neighbourhoods in France Gülçin Erdi 7 LGBTQ+​young peoples’ sexuality and gender citizenship in digital spaces Sally Carr and Ali Hanbury 8 Enabling spaces for and with marginalised young people: the case of the Disha peer support and speak out group Sadhana Natu 9 Meaningful youth engagement in community programming in Kenya Yvonne Akinyi Ochieng, Su Lyn Corcoran and Kate Pahl

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60 77

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Young People and Radical Democracy

PART IV Black lives still matter 10 Conceptualising community development through a 167 pedagogy of convivência: youth, race and territory in Brazil Fernando Lannes Fernandes and Andrea Rodriguez 11 “I did not want the project to end. For me, it should last 187 forever”: exploring a community development framework based on learned lessons from marginalised youth voices in Brazil Andrea Rodriguez and Fernando Lannes Fernandes 12 Burning Work: field map 204 Christxpher Oliver PART V Practising hope 13 They are not your warriors: intergenerational tensions and practices of hope in young people’s environmental activism Dena Arya 14 Afterword: Community as prefigurative practice –​practices of hope Janet Batsleer, Harriet Rowley and Demet Lüküslü Index

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List of figures 5.1 Water drain cover on city street, Cork, Ireland 79 5.2 Water/​ uisce drain cover 80 5.3 A watery world, Cork, Ireland 82 5.4 Six ways for water 83 5.5 Group rehearsal, GWD, Cork, 2017 87 5.6 Lightbulb Youth Theatre, GWD, 2017 87 5.7 A rehearsal moment on the grounds by the river 88 5.8 Water covers 90 5.9 A drop of water (used as promotional image for GWD, Cork, 2017) 91 5.10 Water and concrete 92 5.11 Water marks 93 12.1 Elouise ‘Mama’ Edwards’ funeral, Manchester Central Cathedral 205 12.2 Scan of Anthony Brown’s permission bundle 209 12.3 At Convoys Wharf, 2019 211 12.4 Rhetorical studio 215 12.5 Manchester Central Library 217

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SERIES EDITORS’ PREFACE

Rethinking Community Development Communities are a continuing focus of public policy and citizen action worldwide. The purposes and functions of work with communities of place, interest and identity vary between and within contexts and change over time. Nevertheless, community development – as both an occupation and as a democratic practice concerned with the demands and aspirations of people in communities – has been extraordinarily enduring. This book series aims to provide a critical re-evaluation of community development in theory and practice, in the light of new challenges posed by the complex interplay of emancipatory, democratic, self-help and managerial imperatives in different parts of the world. Through a series of edited and authored volumes, Rethinking Community Development will draw together international, cross-generational and cross-disciplinary perspectives, using contextual specificity as a lens through which to explore the localised consequences of global processes. Each text in the series will: • promote critical thinking, through examining the contradictory position of community development, including the tensions between policy imperatives and the interests and demands of communities; • include a range of international examples, in order to explore the localised consequences of global processes; • include contributions from established and up-and-coming new voices, from a range of geographical contexts; • offer topical and timely perspectives, drawing on historical and theoretical resources in a generative and enlivening way; • inform and engage a new generation of practitioners, bringing new and established voices together to stimulate diverse and innovative perspectives on community development. If you have a broad or particular interest in community development that could be expanded into an authored or edited collection for this book series, contact: Mae Shaw [email protected]

Rosie Meade [email protected]

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Sarah Banks [email protected]

Notes on contributors Dena Arya is Doctoral Researcher in Politics at Nottingham Trent University, UK. Her life experiences bring a unique mix of skills and understandings to her research area. Having grown up in the UK as a refugee and worked for over a decade in the youth and community sector, she has a distinct position from which to engage in understandings of power in marginalised spaces. Her research explores the role that economic inequality plays in how young people participate in environmental politics. More widely her research interests include eco-​socialism and the politics of inequality. Janet Batsleer has spent most of her working life in the education and development of community-​based youth workers, who went on to develop grassroots projects throughout the Northwest and North of England. This local work has been shared both in the Greater Manchester region and in a number of international networks, drawing on strong links across Europe through the PARTISPACE network, which gave recognition to young people’s struggles for participation in eight European cities (www.par​tisp​ace.eu). Her most recent publications include Young and Lonely: The Social Conditions of Loneliness (J. Batsleer and J. Duggan, Policy Press, 2019) and Young People and the Struggle for Participation: Contested Practices Power and Pedagogies in Public Spaces (A. Walther, J. Batsleer, P. Loncle and A. Pohl (eds), Routledge, 2019). Sally Carr, MBE, is a nationally recognised UK leader in professional youth work and community development. For over 30 years, she has worked across the statutory, voluntary and private sectors, founding and leading regional and national youth and community work projects. Sally’s innovative and inspirational work has been recognised with several accolades including the Prime Minister’s Award and an MBE. Her contribution to equality, diversity and inclusion, as well as social justice, has garnered awards at regional and national levels. Since 1988, Sally has dedicated her life to LGBTQI+​ equalities work and youth mental health. Sally is currently leading a project to develop a model of Therapeutic Youth Work. Su Lyn Corcoran is Research Associate at the Education and Social Research Institute, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK, and Programme Officer at the Enabling Education Network where she edits the Enabling Education review. Her research draws on over a decade’s experience of (science and theory of knowledge) teaching in the UK and the international sector and of working for various international non-​governmental organisations in the fields of education, conflict, disability and street-​connectedness. Su xi

Young People and Radical Democracy

is interested in inclusive education –​particularly in relation to displaced populations of young people –​refugee issues, street-​connectedness, youth employment and social justice. The majority of her research focuses on East and Central Africa. Cihan Erdal is a PhD candidate at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology in Carleton University, Canada. Erdal’s ongoing doctoral research concentrates upon the experiences of young people who were engaged in activism for radical social change in Europe, primarily in the cities of Athens, Istanbul and Paris, during the 2010s and 2020s. Along with his academic work, Erdal has been involved in social movements as an activist for over a decade. He has taken roles in several political initiatives, particularly relating to youth, the left and the LGBTQI+ community. Gülçin Erdi is a sociologist and researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and a member of the research centre CITERES at University of Tours, France. She works on everyday resistances and social mobilisation in informal and low-​income neighbourhoods in metropolitan cities. She focuses on thematics like urban citizenship, the right to the city and spatial appropriation. Her recent publications are Identity, Justice and Resistance in the Neoliberal City (with Y. Sentürk, Palgrave, 2017) and ‘Right to the city and urban resistances in Turkey: A comparative perspective’, in Michael E. Leary-​Owhin and John P. McCarthy (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Henri Lefebvre: The City and Urban Society (Routledge, 2019). She also published with colleagues in April 2020 article entitled ‘Innovations in citizen response to crises: Volunteerism & social mobilization during COVID-​19’ in the Interface journal. Fernando Lannes Fernandes is Reader in Community Education at the University of Dundee, UK. He has been working with urban inequalities and human rights in Brazil for almost two decades. Between 2001 and 2009 he worked at the Observatory of Favelas, a Brazilian civil society organisation, where he was responsible for the area of violence and human rights, and later became one of the co-​directors. He remains connected to the Observatory of Favelas as associate researcher. He is also a trustee (non-​ executive director) for the Maria and Joao Aleixo Institute –​an international think tank organisation created by Observatory of Favelas. Ali Hanbury has worked for a local authority youth service as well as local and regional charities and in higher education. Since the late 1990s she has had a keen interest, passion and success in delivering engaging and educative programmes for young people and communities. Ali has particular skills and expertise in collaborative and creative partnerships, and has completed a PhD xii

Notes on contributors

(Lancaster University, 2016) using a participatory methodology with young women and their families. Ali has published on a variety of topics relating to work with young people, especially relating to inclusive relationships and sexualities education, sexual pleasure, and youth activism and social action. Ali currently works for the UK’s National Centre for Research Methods as Senior Engagement Manager. Demet Lüküslü is Professor of Sociology at Yeditepe University, Turkey where she is also chair of the department. She received her PhD in Sociology from Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris, France in 2005. During 2015–​18, she worked as a researcher on a Horizon 2020 project entitled PARTISPACE (www.par​tisp​ace.eu) funded by European Commission. She is the author of Türkiye’de ‘Gençlik Miti’: 1980 Sonrası Türkiye Gençliği (The ‘Myth of Youth’ in Turkey: The Post-​1980 Youth in Turkey; İletişim Yayınları, 2009) and of Türkiye’nin 68’i: Bir Kuşağın Sosyolojik Analizi (Turkey’s 68: The Sociological Analysis of a Generation; Dipnot Yayınları, 2015). Her areas of research include youth studies, social movements, the sociology of everyday life and cultural studies. Sadhana Natu is Associate Professor and Head, Department of Psychology Modern College, Ganeshkhind, Savitribai Phule Pune University, India. As co-​founder and director of the Centre for Inquiry into Mental Health, Pune, she combines feminist psychotherapy and critical psychology praxis with long-​standing activism in the women’s movement in India and works in solidarity with the anti-​caste movement. She is a qualitative and mixed methods researcher and has published articles on gender, youth, higher education and psychology. Her latest publications include Psychology and Gender: An Introduction (SAGE, 2021) and ‘Disha: Building bridges –​ removing barriers: Where excluded and privileged young adults meet’ in D. Stoyanov, B. Fulford, G. Stanghellini, W. Van Staden and M.T.H. Wong (eds), International Perspectives in Value-​based Mental Health Practice: Case Studies and Commentaries (Springer International, 2020). Yvonne Akinyi Ochieng is Director of Nzumari Africa, a youth-​led organisation, and Youth Engagement Coordinator with citiesRISE, Kenya. She is passionate about the human service development sector with over six years’ experience of working with young people at the intersection of public health, mental health and human rights. Yvonne has experience of engaging with national and international organisations in research and the design and implementation of programmes, aiming to leverage academic experience and a proven knowledge of efficient community outreach, grassroots campaigns and youth development.

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Róisín O’Gor man’s current research lives between embodied practices and theoretical understandings of performance. In 2015–​16 she organised transdisciplinary events: Performance & Politics & Protest (see https://​per​form​ance​poli​tics​prot​est2​015.wordpr​ess.com/​) and Bodystories (see https://​body​stor ​ies2​016.wordpr​ess.com/​) in collaboration with Women’s Studies director Dr Sandra McAvoy. Christxpher Oliver is a 2019 graduate from the Centre for Research Architecture master’s programme at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK. His research interests currently focus on political questions at the intersection of race, migration, sound and law. His work examines the process of creating forums as mediums to do political work, which includes mixed media techniques used to translate materials from the field into different forms of pedagogical and political communication. Kate Pahl is Professor of Arts and Literacy at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. She is interested in the potential of co-​production and arts-​based methods in research. Her work has been concerned with literacy practices in communities, with a focus on meaning-​making and everyday cultural practices. She has been involved, with Su Lyn Corcoran, in the ‘Belonging and Learning’ project, which has explored the ways in which arts-​based methods can support young people articulate their concerns to policy-​makers. Andrea Rodriguez is Social Psychologist and Lecturer in Dental Public Health at the University of Dundee, UK. She has a master’s degree in the Psycho-​sociology of Communities and a PhD in Psychology at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She is actively involved in community-​ based participatory research, health equity, public engagement and the co-​design of educational resources for health and social care professionals working with marginalised groups. Her work has strong connection with third sector and government agencies working with children and adolescents’ rights, popular education, community development and stigma reduction. For many years in Brazil, she worked with children and adolescent victims of violence and young people resident in favelas and involved in crime. Harriet Rowley is Senior Lecturer in Education and Community at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. Harriet’s research practice combines ethnographic approaches with arts-​based methods and relational practices in educational and community settings, to support individuals to voice their experiences. She has led and contributed to EU-​funded projects including PARTISPACE (H2020) and Partibridges (Erasmus+​). Harriet is co-​editing a book, Reshaping Youth Participation: Manchester in a European Gaze xiv

Notes on contributors

(with J. Batsleer and G. McMahon, Emerald, 2021). Recent publications include chapters in Young People and the Struggle for Participation: Contested Practices Power and Pedagogies in Public Spaces (A. Walther, J. Batsleer, P. Loncle and A. Pohl (eds), Routledge, 2019) and Learning, Arts and Ethnography (L. Ferro and D. Poveda (eds), Tufnell Press, 2019). Dominic Zimmermann is a sociologist and human geographer. He holds the position of Senior Research Associate at the Institute for Sociocultural Community Development at Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Switzerland. His research areas include sociocultural animation, sustainable community development, youth work, youth participation and body sociology. He currently researches on empowerment through embodied musicking practices by young refugees. In addition to his academic work, Zimmermann has been involved in community supported agriculture projects.

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Acknowledgements We would like to offer our sincere thanks and gratitude to all the contributors of this book. It has been our honour to bring this collaborative project together and we hope our paths continue to cross. There are various crises connected to both global and local struggles that frame this collection which could have delayed this book. It is testament to the dedication, creativity and goodwill of the contributors that meant that these powered rather than stalled our momentum. On behalf of the contributors, we would like to thank all the participants and anyone who may have offered technical skills or feedback during the writing process. In particular, we would like to thank the ‘Rethinking Community Development’ series editors –​Mae Shaw, Rosie Meade and Sarah Banks together with Sarah Bird, Emma Cook and the team at Policy Press for their encouragement and support for this edition. We also want to acknowledge the support of our colleagues particularly those we worked with during PARTISPACE (H2020) and Partibridges (Erasmus+​) together with those who have nurtured our thinking at the Education and Research Social Institute at Manchester Metropolitan University and the Department of Sociology, Yeditepe University, Istanbul. Finally, Harriet and Demet would like to thank Janet for her continued generosity, vision and support –​without which this journey would not have begun.

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PART I

Young people: radical democracy and community development

1

Introduction: Young people, radical democracy and community development Janet Batsleer, Harriet Rowley and Demet Lüküslü

The rationale This book contributes to the ‘Rethinking Community Development’ series from the perspective of young people and community-​based practitioners involved in emancipatory struggles and practising gestures of solidarity. It thereby contributes to developing accounts of practices of radical democracy and solidarity within the field of community development, and in common with other volumes in this series, critically re-​evaluates community development –​to rethink what community development means in theory and practice. Young people are often to be found at the forefront of democratic actions which seek to shift hitherto accepted norms of community. In this book, we are interested in this dynamic of change and unsettling. We are also interested in the relationship between young people’s activism which is self-​organised and that which is supported by youth workers or others acting as community development professionals. The book’s aims are set out as follows: • To show how a focus on ‘youth’ can contribute to sharpening under­standings of community development. • To foreground conceptualisations of radical democracy within the rethinking of community development. • To link developments within new youth social movements to the work of youth workers and community development practitioners and thus contribute to rethinking this relationship. This book is being completed in the middle of the Glasgow COP26 as the young activist leader Greta Thunberg declares the summit an exercise in greenwashing by the Global North. This serious economic, social, political and ecological emergency is the immediate and inescapable context for a book which brings together chapters concerned with the community-​and world-​ building practices of young activists in anti-​capitalist social movements, with 3

Young People and Radical Democracy

chapters by and about community development work by practitioners whose work has been led by their engagement with young people. As with other volumes in this series, the intent is to make a contribution to the rethinking of community development away from authoritarian populist tendencies and towards a radical democratic practice. In the first book of the series (Meade et al, 2016) the editors clearly identified the tensions within the term ‘community development’ and wrote of the dialectical nature of its progressive/​ regressive meanings. The current volume is certainly caught by that dialectic, as it pushes at the boundaries of thinking/​feeling/​acting ‘community’. Youth studies scholarship has underlined the problematic nature of transitioning to adulthood in our global neoliberal societies. This transition is no longer a linear one but a non-​linear and even chaotic one (MacDonald, 2011; Rogers, 2011). As Bayat and Herrera argue: Youth are at times described as the new proletariat of the 21st century. A combination of the youth bulge (when young people from 15–​29 years comprise more than 40% of the adult population), youth unemployment, and exclusion is believed by many to be a dangerous recipe that leads to political instability and civil wars, especially in the Global South. (Bayat and Herrera, 2010: 4; for reflections on the youth in the Global South see also Cooper et al, 2018; MacDonald and King, 2020). Chapters from the Global North and South underline the parallelisms as well as the abyssal lines (Santos, 2007) which shape all the experiences documented here. The parallelisms in relation to the treatment of ‘youth’ are striking and discussed later in this introduction; and it is in this context that abyssal lines in terms of responses to ‘suspect youth’ (Giroux, 2009) can also be recognised. The collection opens up the conversation about those responses. Contributions come from a range of contexts internationally and while only four are written by authors who have English as a mother tongue, all write in English as the universal language of academic work. For some, the traditions of radical grassroots community development are familiar. Most, however, are not writing directly from the ‘community development arena’ but draw on and use other terms for what can be recognised as broadly similar practices of engagement. Some of the writers are academics; some are youth workers or community-​based practitioners; some are now or have recently been young activists; some are all three. Not many of the voices here come from established community development programmes in universities. Academic reference points are as likely to be found in youth studies, social movement studies or engaged arts and education practice. But each of the chapters, through its focus on young people’s engagement with (or a stake in) radical democracy, offers a critical perspective with which community 4

Introduction

development thinking can engage. The term ‘community development worker’ is used as a generic term throughout the book alongside other more local terms (for example, ‘youth worker’) so as not to erase the specificity of the contexts out of which contributors write. Sometimes the term ‘popular education’ is used as an alternative way of referencing a body of practice which starts from the grassroots, seeks to work ethically on common ground, often in situations of sharp injustice, inequality and exclusion, in the interests of social and ecological justice (Banks, 2019). This introductory chapter develops as follows: first, we present, the theoretical sources and practical outworkings that are key to the debates and contested nature of community development as these emerge in social movements. We draw attention to the problematic but yet incomplete potential of community development as a field to rethink forms of collective action and struggle that connect meaningfully and ethically at the local and global level (Banks, 2019). In the second section, we consider the possible meanings of the key term ‘young’. We aim to dislodge the binary discourse often used to describe, on the one hand, young people’s democratic promise for the future, and, on the other, the dangerous and monstrous qualities assigned particularly to impoverished young people in urban peripheries. In the third section, we consider the two other key terms together –​radical democracy and community development. Here we draw attention to the importance of rejecting essentialising definitions of community. We briefly present the theoretical discussions in which chapters in the book are rooted alongside their practical illuminations of democracy as site of struggle. Solidarity and friendship across difference becomes a central preoccupation for contributors who are reimagining acts of citizenship against populism. By taking a perspective that places both young people’s activism in social movements and their experience of precarious life to the fore, we aim to highlight new possibilities for radical democratic practice of community development. In the fourth and final section, we provide an introduction to all the chapters which form the book and note the different registers which the collection assembles. We now turn to consider in more depth the key terms we have just deployed.

Social movements: theoretical sources and practical outworkings in community development work In 1989, the year which is identified with the final collapse of the Soviet Union and of ‘actually existing communism’, the activist-​philosopher Felix Guattari wrote: We live in a time when it is not only animal species that are disap­pearing; so too are the words, expressions, and gestures of 5

Young People and Radical Democracy

human solidarity. A cloak of silence has been forcibly imposed on emancipatory struggle: the struggles of women, or of the unemployed, the ‘marginalized’, and immigrants –​the new proletarians. (Guattari, 2014: 137) However, that cloak of silence was never complete and since then there have been repeated skirmishes which have shown that the emancipatory struggle and the gestures of human solidarity have not disappeared, even though the era of capitalist realism had dawned (Fisher, 2009). By ‘capitalist realism’ Fisher (2009) meant the form of capitalism, now usually termed neoliberalism, in which it is repeatedly insisted that there is no alternative to the current system, and that individuals who face problems within the system must look to themselves for both the cause and the cure to those difficulties. Thankfully the skirmishes which Felix Guattari (2014) wrote of in 1989 –​which show that the possibility of another way is truly alive –​ continue to occur, and many such skirmishes have occurred in the space of radical community development, where the challenge to the extreme individualism that accompanies late capitalism has been sharp (Ledwith, 2020). Much of the thinking in social movements emphasises solidarity, while exploring the question of how power can return to the people: the question of democracy. Alongside this emphasis on finding ways to extend democracy, there is what has been called a ‘post development’ turn (Westoby, 2021) arising from a renewed recognition that practices of ‘development’ have frequently threatened life that is held in common on an earth that is common ground. This sense of life lived on common ground leads to a strong emphasis, especially in eco-​justice movements, on community or commoning as a process of care and mutuality which extends beyond the human and embraces non-​human actors. The chapters here also concern both emancipatory and caring struggles; and emancipation is thought in complex ways and rarely if at all as linear progress. Many draw attention to loops and snags of time and to in-​between spaces, the cracks and crevices where community building occurs. It is striking too to notice and consider the ways in which young people’s activism, as well as that of community development practitioners, is grounded in a planet-​wide understanding even while engaging at a local level. The work of global capitalism, that has utterly reconfigured relations between local places throughout the world, has also created this new way of being among activists, who cannot and do not desire to escape the planet-​wide meanings, potentials and connections of locally circumscribed actions. The collection therefore contains a range of writing in which young people’s activism and also the dissidence of young people is presented, including their reluctance to engage in established systems, even those of community development. We draw out the implications of self-​organised 6

Introduction

activism, noticing the significance of both time and space. The differences between the times and spaces of young people’s lived experience including their activism and the times and spaces of institutions are noted in many chapters. Alongside institutionalised rigidities creating boundaries and regulation of time and space, there are permeable and shifting ways of being in the lives of young adults working for non-​governmental organisations, undertaking postgraduate studies and increasingly also working as self-​ employed creatives, building networks and obtaining funding where they can, even while often continuing to live with their parents and younger siblings, since independent housing is beyond their reach financially. Such young adults play a significant role as young activists blurring a too easy distinction between ‘young people’, ‘activists’ and ‘professionals’. One way of thinking about this context is to consider how global claims and struggles –​often instigated by young people –​become part of local intergenerational processes of community-​making. Chapters here highlight the ways older and forgotten wisdoms can become active as a result of young people’s connection with current struggles and this is expressed (appropriately in the far from entirely linear terms) in the writing of two artistic collaborations: the first Róisín O’Gorman’s account of a movement event concerning water (Chapter 5) and the second Christxpher Oliver’s poetic collage based on his listening to Windrush Defenders as a young activist researcher in a UK Caribbean community-​based research project (Chapter 12). The reach of community-​building work and the scales it operates on are also illuminated: the nature of the current global crises and the forms of young people’s activism which respond to them mean that all the contributors find themselves writing in ways which address all levels between the micro and macro simultaneously. As such, all the writers locate their work with ordinary people in local and particular contexts, and at the same time, immediately raise issues that have global reach. Theoretically, Paulo Freire’s entire body of work as an approach to popular education remains significant. Particularly for those writers who offer a social movements perspective on community building and community development, the work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe offers a post-​Gramscian resource. The symbolic violence inflicted on young people, frequently and systematically in racialised forms, is analysed in several chapters with support of Pierre Bourdieu’s thinking (Grenfell, 2014). This analysis of violence is developed further to explore the ‘states of exception’ and necropolitics which place certain populations seemingly and in effect beyond ‘rights’ and civility (Mbembe, 2019; Souza, 2021). The enabling of a counter-​hegemonic, humane and hopeful response to such nihilism is, for example, explored through attention to perspectives on the right to the city (Lefebvre, 1968; Harvey, 2017); on difference and on friendship and conviviality (Arendt, 1983 [1968]; Young, 1990; Derrida, 1997 and 7

Young People and Radical Democracy

2001); and on thought and action (Arendt, 1979). Such theoretical work draws our attention to new ecologies of knowledge and ways of being in the world which are emerging, even as the destructive force of the current system appears to grow ever more monstrous. The impact of the democratic movements of 2011 and of young people’s anti-​capitalist activism globally is a common, and at times, an explicit starting point. The question of whether and in what ways young people might be becoming citizens through their world-​making, community-​building practices arises constantly in this collection. How the forms of citizenship they might create come into being through their encounters with one another, and with Others who have been designated as ‘enemies’ and ‘without rights’ (typically refugees but also all Global Majority young people inhabiting the peripheral zones of conurbations) is a constant paradox, since this occurs within the existing increasingly totalitarian and exclusionary practices of nation-​states. Such acts of citizenship against the grain of powerful exclusions are the primary form taken in the examples in this book of the ‘process through which ordinary people collectively attempt to improve their life circumstances’ (Meade et al, 2016: 2). The experiences of young activists are vividly brought to life throughout to extend conceptualisations of radical democracy with a particular emphasis on seeking association, building networks and partnerships on genuinely equal terms, and on multiple forms of learning across difference (Young, 1990). This contributes to rethinking the relationship between social movements and the many grassroots steps taken by and with young people towards social and cultural/​affective practices of community. Those spaces and times in which community is rediscovered as a verb and a movement towards rather than as an essentialist and exclusionary identity are of particular importance. One way of thinking about these relationships of community-​making and world-​building, among those with differential access to many forms of entitlement, is to recognise community development work as a shared invitation to thought and action. Thus ‘acts of citizenship’ are present and flow from both the political organising of social movements, and in the active creation of the new social spaces, which are a recognisable feature of so much grassroots community development work. Throughout the book, the (in origin) European framework concerning liberty, equality and solidarity from which thinking about radical democracy emerged is complexified by the presence and thinking of writers and practitioners whose sometimes nomadic lives are threaded with experiences not only centrally from Europe and the Global North but also from the borders of Europe, including the peripheral zones of European cities, and from the Global South. The book contains examples of this from Brazil, England, France, India, Ireland, Kenya, Switzerland and Turkey. 8

Introduction

Creating a text within the Global North which nevertheless recognises that current global systems of knowledge are marked by the abyssal lines (Santos, 2007) created by colonised thinking is an inescapably paradoxical activity. However, overcoming abyssal lines of epistemic injustice is a necessary aspect of achieving social justice and human dignity. Doing so involves the demanding activity of creating lines of movement and dialogue that can promote conversation (Santos, 2007) and further movement towards ecologies of knowledge in which, as a minimum, dominant onto-​epistemological systems can acknowledge their limits. In very different registers, and with different theoretical starting points, the imperative to think/​feel/​act differently in order to unsettle colonial ways of knowing (with all their limits as well as the accompanying violence of their hegemony), can be found here. Discussions of struggles for emancipation and rights can therefore be found jostling across the pages of this book with considerations of appropriation/​violence and non-​violence. Young people laying claim to their own humanity and dignity (their own human rights and those of others) are doing so, in all of the countries discussed here (at least to some degree, and for some young people), in ‘states of exception’. That is to say, they are excluded from the very human rights the nation-​states lay claim to uphold. This at the very least leads to a questioning of such a discourse. It becomes an open question as to whether human rights discourses are forever based on exclusion and violence, above all of the more-​than-​human world. Across this collection, what is noticeable is how the exclusionary violence which shape the experiences of all too many young people throughout the world, is counterbalanced with ‘acts of citizenship’, which involve turning away from violence, towards a practice of care and friendship. Sometimes this celebration is rooted deeply in a both new and old forms of expression and draws on the aesthetic and performance practice as much as the intellectual resources of subjugated communities. Thus, the registers in this book also invoke the need to find alternative ways of expressing the sometimes-​joyful resistance to violence which happens in the community-​making, community development practices explored here.

Young What it means to be young is frequently presented in polarised ways. In the histories of community development as a practice, attention is paid to the role of activists in social movements in contributing to grassroots practice for social justice. Many of these activists have been, and are from, student communities. As activists, young people are often to be found at the forefront of democratic actions which seek to shift hitherto accepted norms in the social imaginary. In particular at the level of struggling over and imagining who and what might be included in the constitution of 9

Young People and Radical Democracy

national-​popular formations of the state, the public sphere, and therefore, in claims to citizenship and claims to rights (Anderson, 2006). Such a dynamic of change and unsettling is inevitably part of, necessarily woven into, the relationship between young people’s self-​organised activism and critical community development practices, and such unsettling can at times even be welcomed as part of progressive development. In contrast with this is the projection of violence and criminality onto especially the young dwellers in urban peripheries throughout the world. Working-​class and impoverished young people, including those living in the peripheral zones of cities throughout the world, are systematically demonised in hegemonic social imaginaries (Giroux, 2009; Tyler, 2013). Through the racialised lens (which both persists from the period of enslavement and colonisation by European powers, and which still constantly shifts and remakes itself), such young people are seen as a threatening population, associated especially with criminality, in the form of drug dealing and homicidal violence, despite most often being on the receiving end of such violence. Young people in peripheral zones are seen as the objects of policy rather than as subjects and protagonists in democratic life: they are routinely required to appear as the necessary ground for policy intervention rather than as subjects and citizens in their own right. An essential theme of radical community development from Boal and Freire onwards has been that those living in the most oppressed and marginalised zones need to be encouraged to see themselves and to become protagonists in the struggle for the transformation of dehumanising conditions (Freire, 1972; Boal, 2008). Yet (as has been widely recognised and is confirmed by chapters in this collection) there have been long-​standing difficulties, even for projects which embrace a Freirean ‘popular education’ approach to community development, in engaging with young people alongside members of older generations. Popular education principles of critical dialogue are easily abandoned for a more traditional approach of inducting young people as novices into existing systems. This creates many challenges both for community development practitioners and for advocates of radical democracy. The binary discourse in which young people are seen either as holding democratic promise for the future or as being possessed by monstrous and demonic destructive urges which ‘community’ needs to hold at bay is an entrenched discourse difficult to dislodge; one of the aims of this collection is to contribute to that dislodging. In the process of moving away from this binary discourse, attention to ‘youth’ serves also to sharpen and complexify understandings of ‘community’. It is remarkable, though unsurprising in the light of the forces of globalisation, to find the polarisation of discourses in relation to the young recognised across the contributions. Of particular importance for critical work to counter is the distinction between discourses associated with activism 10

Introduction

and, on the other hand, those discourses which emerge when young people are seen as the problematic focus of policy intervention or when, in weasel words, they are seen as asset-​bearing for policy and hence as contributors to community resilience. Before 18 years (in most countries in the world: 16 in Brazil) when they attain the right to vote, young people, as children, retain certain rights to protection and also certain limits on their agency as citizens. Youth may be seen in psychological and developmental discourses as largely synonymous with the later stages of childhood; often the period between puberty and adult life. But just as the term ‘stages of development’ is now widely critiqued in international development studies, so it is in studies of childhood and youth (Burman, 2017). Nevertheless, the critique of intrinsic ‘stages of development’ progressing in linear form from childhood to adulthood need not render invisible the real differences of potential and capacity, in both affordances and constraints, made available to children, young people and adults across social contexts. In sociological terms, the idea of ‘youth’ as a driver of social change (different in capacity from both childhood and adulthood) is long established, and this explains the continued significance of ‘youth studies’ within ‘generation studies’ in sociology. To study ‘youth’ seems to offer a privileged lens for the study of social change. The question of how each generation might become the carrier of the new and hence a vector of change across the whole social order, as well as how it receives and adapts its inheritance from the parent and grandparent generations has been a classic consideration for the sociology of youth. The ‘world-​making’ practices of young people can be considered as part of these gradual adjustments on which social systems depend on for their continuation. However, the young people who are the focus of discussions of activism in this book are not concerned with making adjustments to the capitalist system but are rather seeking to transform it and move away from it as a system. For those who are not activists, the struggles of economic precarity and dependency which are their everyday experience in the life stage of youth do not evoke a positive sense of capacities for social change but rather the perennial hustle for survival (cf Jørgensen, 2017). Young activists are and have been historically in the lead of movements for social and eco-​justice. In the past, the part played by students and other young people in such movements has extended into grassroots activism, including community development projects. Involvement in street protests can lead to a questioning of what more sustainable practices there are for engaging in the struggle to transform the system, while popular education, cultural projects and youth work projects are often an obvious next step for those committed to seeking social and eco-​justice. The question of who is able to become ‘an activist’ and what this means in relation to other young people who do not and perhaps cannot, for many reasons of life chances 11

Young People and Radical Democracy

and survival strategies, designate themselves as such, is a live one. Critiques of practices of distinction thus come into focus in many chapters in this book as they are widely considered in current youth social movements as part of a process of ‘checking privilege’ and creating well-​founded practices of allyship and solidarity. Practices of distinction, with accompanying symbolic violence, are the shadow side of what has become a ‘common sense’ language of ‘capitals’ in community development discourse. Projects are designed which offer to extend ‘bridging capital’ and explore what is problematic in the ‘bonding capital’ of those living in the peripheral zones. It is rare for the symbolic violence, which is intrinsic to the class system Bourdieu so powerfully illuminated, to be highlighted in this emphasis on ‘capital’ (Grenfell, 2014). Yet the symbolic violence is inescapable when the lens of community building is turned towards young people. To neglect the impact of symbolic violence in itself causes great suffering. Finding collective rather than merely individual ways of recognising, addressing and speaking back against the silencing of suffering, finding ways of acting together with joy and affirmation, is a complex process addressed in several chapters. Practices of symbolic violence are not ‘one off’: they are sustained and systemic within the social sphere and so are both organised and informal responses to them. This reality leads once again to a blurring between ‘young people’ and ‘young activists’. This is particularly clearly demonstrated here by Carr and Hanbury (Chapter 7) in their account of the work of UK-​ based projects developed alongside lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer +​ (LGBTQ+) young people: young people faced with homophobic denial and abuse of their queer belonging find a space online to develop their own lexicon and brave-​enough affirmative spaces. The discussion in this chapter, as elsewhere, shows clearly however that the self-​reflexivity, which enables such transformations, is a double e​ dged sword, which can place a burden of guilt on individuals seen as responsible –​each alone –​for their own personal transformations. This dangerous turn, born out of a desire for self-​naming as well as for ‘checking privilege’ makes the work of community building, community development and the search for collective forms urgent. In place of an emphasis on guilt, new thinking about response-​ability is called for. In search of collective forms, sometimes young activists seek to mobilise intergenerationally, to educate elders as well as learn from them, and create common ground through specific and local forms of engagement. Children and young adults as activists of different ages might be younger and older brothers, sisters and cousins, bringing fresh hopes and new practices to bear while resignifying already existing spaces as with the Youth Strike for Climate Justice. In other examples, it is the relation between what young people see and create, and what older community activists have already made, that is 12

Introduction

emphasised. Sometimes (as in Erdi’s account of Sanitas, Chapter 6) there is a gap between generations that can seem unbridgeable; elsewhere there is a continuity of struggle for life that needs to be and is being sustained, as with the work of Windrush Defenders (Oliver, Chapter 12). The use of the generic term ‘youth’ has been the subject of critique because of its power to homogenise and erase difference (Bourdieu, 1993). In this way the term ‘youth’ becomes a signifier for trouble and a carrier of symbolic violence. The term ‘young’ carries divided and conflicting connotations which emerge from the context in which the term is used. In the ‘Slow Food Movement’ in Switzerland (Zimmermann, Chapter 4) being ‘young’ may be enough in and of itself to carry positive and hopeful connotations; in the favelas of Rio (Fernandes and Rodriguez, Chapters 10 and 11) the term is always already racialised and caught up in a racialising process of monsterisation. Whereas in Chapter 8 (Natu) caste-​based violence occurring within Indian university communities is met and addressed by young people of different castes through peer support and in a community development based response. When difference emerges in the use of ‘youth’ as a signifier it is most often in the service of division and exclusionary practices. When ‘young’ is an unmarked signifier, it carries optimism; as a marked category, it accompanies the classed, racialised and gendered enclosures which mark out and limit young people’s experiences. Thus, the privilege of simply seeing oneself as the ‘unmarked’ young in relation to a parent generation becomes apparent. So, to be a ‘young activist’ is one thing; to be marked as a young Black woman activist (however positively this is affirmed) is always shadowed by symbolic violence. It is further worth noting, when the gaze of public policy attention shifts from those who are not formally seen as ‘activists’ but are simply ‘young’, that the power of symbolic violence directed against the young within these enclosures of ‘disposable populations’ becomes no longer symbolic but, at the extreme, murderous. This collection as a whole argues against such politics, offering instead a politics of friendship via an engagement with the possibilities of radical democracy and a sense of ‘in-​essential community’ as against an essentialising enmity, an ‘us’ against ‘them’. The ‘acts of citizenship’ with which young people whose voices resound throughout this collection are engaged emerge from the grassroots and enable those involved to make a claim on and in the public sphere, where previously they have been disallowed and treated with incivility. Whereas the call for ‘active citizenship’ can be understood as a desperate demand from ‘above’, in the face of the crisis in democracy, these ‘acts of citizenship’ by young people can be seen as those acts that change the forms, orientations, strategies, and technologies and modes of being political. They change the forms by undertaking acts of hospitality, organising kitchens and new kinds of social and educational spaces. Their orientation is often to work across 13

Young People and Radical Democracy

and against inherited divisions. Their strategies include taking up positions of leadership they are offered, but may also include a refusal of offers they perceive as tokenistic. They call both on new and forgotten or discarded technologies and modes. They embrace a new definition of the political from which new strategies and ways of organising emerge. This happens as new actors are brought into being, into the space of assembly, activist citizens who are claimants of rights and responsibilities, and through creating new sites and scales of struggle (Isin and Nielsen, 2008). In this collection, we are interested in whether such ‘acts of citizenship’ can be identified both in social movements and in community organisations such as those supported by community development workers.

Radical democracy and community development What we term ‘acts of citizenship’ here are all those courageous acts which open up the space for and build friendship in the face of the construction of walls and borders of many kinds. This emphasises the experience of community founded in difference for which the small words of place, the conjunctions, are indispensable as they both signify and bridge the spaces of difference as a creative force. Community is always community ‘with’ or ‘in’. It does not draw on a transcendental unity (Nancy, 1991). In the same way, the coming together of a people in a democratic system is not the consequence of their being subject either to a single sovereign, or of a state defined in enmity against others. Like community, democracy is constantly being brought into being in the context of an encounter, struggle with or even an embrace of difference. The field of thought concerning radical democracy (often understood as inaugurated by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe [Laclau and Mouffe, 1985; Mouffe, 2000; Emejulu, 2015; Mouffe, 2018]) has close links with Gramscian traditions in community development. It gives support to practices which seek to extend a democratic citizenship founded in equality, liberty and solidarity ever more widely –​and offers many resources for rethinking community development in the context of a struggle against authoritarian populism. The idea of democracy as a site of struggle and of ‘radical democracy’ specifically derives from many sources. Mouffe (2000) proposed that revolutionary ideas of democracy –​ since the period of the French Revolution –​had always involved a contrast between liberal forms in which ‘separation of powers’, contract and the rule of law are emphasised and more radical forms in which extensions of liberty, equality and fraternity (now sorority and solidarity) are continuously sought as the condition of rule ‘by the people, for the people, of the people’. In the opening contribution of this book, Cihan Erdal (Chapter 2) proposes a struggle between ‘a society of enmity’ based on the projection of hate-​based exclusion of ‘The Other’, 14

Introduction

and ‘a society of friendship’ in which boundaries become more and more open through hospitality and generosity and the public realm of citizenship increases. Erdal’s thinking here draws on the work of Hannah Arendt and has strong resonance with Peter Westoby’s (2021) work to offer alternative versions of ‘community’ to those inspired by authoritarian populism. As already discussed, holding a lens on ‘community’ from the perspective of young people opposing authoritarian populism requires a serious engagement with the racialised symbolic and physical violence inflicted on neighbourhoods and especially on their youthful populations. Several authors offer a particular focus on the ways those already involved in community development and community education address this. If authoritarian populism with all its symbolic violence and projection of hate on to the Other is one polarity of the struggle within and for democracy, then at the other polarity is hospitality, generosity, friendship and care, including care for the more than human (in a word, solidarity). Alongside this we can also identify struggles for greater equality of voice and representation; for greater freedom from oppression especially by state forces; and for freedom from the forces of ecological devastation inflicted by capitalism. The anti-​capitalist focus of current activism for eco-​justice is evident in Dena Arya’s account of activists in the Youth Strike for Climate (Chapters 3 and 13) led by Greta Thunberg, with the young activists emphasising the need for education in forms beyond that offered in the mainstream. It is also present in the forms of organising in Switzerland in the Slow Food Movement, where commodification of food is rejected (Zimmermann, Chapter 4). In the account of the solidarity work of young activists in Turkey, their current activism has its foundations in the anti-​capitalist protests in Gezi Park (Erdal, Chapter 2). In each case there has been a move from street protest to seek more sustainable ways of being in conflict with the prevailing capitalist system. In other chapters it is the desire for freedom from state violence that is to the fore, especially in the form of policing, punishment and control of citizenship status. This is interwoven with the need for freedom from identitarian controls and associated violence against those who do not belong or conform: the bullying, violence and trauma associated with racism, caste-​based oppression and homophobia (Chapters 7, 10 and 11). The processes through which such a freedom might come to be lived, and the possibilities and obstacles to living it are explored. They often involve struggles for equal and fair representation and voice, and the need to create and adapt new platforms to express this, including digital platforms. The account of the extensive work involved in enabling traditionally excluded young people, especially young women, to exercise power and voice and undertake acts of citizenship on equal terms with others is especially clear. The practice of solidarity and friendship across difference is a central preoccupation for all contributors. It is here above all that the thinking about 15

Young People and Radical Democracy

community can be found. There is strong emphasis in considering relationality, on processes of thought and reflection concerning positionality and power, on checking privilege and unlearning ways of being which repeat and reinforce colonial, class and caste-​based and controlling relationships. These are not only expressed through classically political forms of organising, but aesthetically and culturally, in the Global Water Dances and in the soundings of the Windrush Defenders (Chapters 5 and 12) which exemplify in their form many of the themes explored discursively in other chapters. Perhaps here, in an engagement with beauty, lies the antidote to the curse of guilt-​induced frozenness that individualised and neoliberal forms of reflexivity lay on those who the current system advantages, yet who still seek its transformation.

Structure and organisation of the book As well as the continuing crisis of the neoliberal capitalist system, giving birth to new forms of totalitarianism, which is the context for all the chapters of this book, the COVID-​19 crisis, the ecological and climate crisis, and the claims of the Black Lives Matter movement have all been present in the writing of this book. One way that this has been powerfully present to us all however has been in the forcible imprisonment of a key contributor to this book, Cihan Erdal. As we write the website FreeCihanErdal (2021) opens with the following text: Cihan Erdal is a queer Turkish Canadian PhD from Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. Cihan was arbitrarily and unlawfully imprisoned in Turkey for 9 months and was ordered released on June 15, 2021 by the presiding judge, pending the conclusion of the criminal trial. The release is conditional, and Cihan is subject to conditions. He must remain in Turkey and must report to the local police station twice per week. While this is certainly good news, Cihan Erdal remains under conditions that prevent him from returning to his residence in Ottawa, Canada, and separated from his spouse and family. He also remains at risk of future imprisonment based on charges that are clear violations of his freedom of association and freedom of expression. Under the circumstances, our fight continues. We want Cihan home! It is of course in part for this reason that we have placed Erdal’s chapter at the forefront of this collection and invited him to explain there the conditions –​ which he terms coalitional dynamism –​which have enabled him, despite the oppression he has faced and is still facing –​to make the contribution here. Erdal’s chapter (Chapter 2) was however planned as the opening chapter for 16

Introduction

other reasons and not those offered us through the actions of an increasingly totalitarian state machine. It explores the coalitional dynamics arising from activist work in Istanbul, in the web of relations with migrant communities, and shows from the beginning the connections between the explorations of democratic grassroots community development practice present throughout this collection and the new democratic social movements, characterised here by the young Gezi Park coalition of activists of 2011. The chapter stands alone at the beginning of this collection but, in its account of the relationship between a social movement spearheaded by young people and grassroots community building (which Erdal calls ‘world-​making’), sets the scene for the chief preoccupation of the collection. How can we understand the relationship between global social movements and the specific and particular forms which grassroots organising takes? And how to interpret and support those in-​between spaces through which practices of friendship take root, in a world increasingly shaped by a brutal politics of enmity? As Erdal himself states in the introduction to his chapter, the act of solidarity which made the writing of this chapter possible also gives hope that another academia, another friendship or another partnership is possible. Part II of the book, ‘Young people acting together for eco-​justice’, focuses on a series of contributions which explore grassroots activism by young people in response to the climate/​ecological crisis. We begin with Dena Arya’s (Chapter 3) very direct account which amplifies the voices of three young people involved in in the UK in the work of the Youth Strike for Climate. Arya explores how youth environmental activists in the UK conceptualise transformative change for the unfolding economic and ecological crises facing the planet. She details her journey as an activist and youth worker to illuminate how her own experience mirrors the difficulties experienced by three young people who were part of her ethnographic doctoral study. Despite having different politics, they are united in their need to counter the individualistic nature of capitalist society and reject the view that there is no alternative. Indeed, imagining and working towards an alternative is part of a global struggle which will not be solved through individual behavioural change but through collective action. Arya argues that there is a growing awareness of the relationship between class, capitalism and the environmental crisis among young people. Community development thus needs to meet the challenge of how it might provide allies to support young people’s visions of an alternative future and transformative change and, within that, to explore the role of popular self-​education that does not patronise or manipulate young people. Arya also contributes, as part of the Afterword, a reflection on her experience of COP26 through the lens of solidarity with Fridays For Future. Dominic Zimmermann’s chapter focuses on field research on the Youth Sustainable Food Network in Zurich, Switzerland, and aims to explore 17

Young People and Radical Democracy

the practice and role of conviviality in community-​making (Chapter 4). Zimmermann analyses the possibility of food playing an important role in bringing people together as equals and in enabling them to interact with each other. As in Erdal’s chapter (Chapter 2) where the kitchen becomes an initiative for democratic practice, in Zimmermann’s chapter, food’s importance for inclusive community building and community development becomes clear. Zimmermann’s analytic approach recognises both the affordances and constraints involved in working for system change. He draws attention to the need to shift the model of democracy and activism at work from one of consumer to that of food citizen, which, he argues, offers greater possibility of an impact on the economic structures of production that are at the basis of the food system. Finally, in this section, is Róisín O’Gorman’s poetic reflection on her own experience as a facilitator at a local level of an international platform, Global Water Dances (Chapter 5). O’Gorman focuses on a local iteration of an international event focused on dancing for safe water for everyone: Global Water Dances. In contextualising this large-​scale project (over 100 sites participated globally in 2017 and 2019), this chapter considers the ways in which communities form and dissolve on local and global scales, shifting the traditional boundaries and linear narratives of success which have led to this extraordinary era of crises, including climate crises. This chapter enables a more in-​depth look at one of the ways practices of movement can work in the in-​between spaces and thus support a move away from hegemonic platforms associated with development, and this (as with Chapter 12 later) is accompanied by the challenge of writing in different registers to evoke a fluid practice of community development which evade linear and progressive metrics in the name of a more lowly set of connections. In Part III of the book, ‘Acts of citizenship?’, we turn to writing in which community development projects, including youth-​led projects, are the focus of attention in terms of acts of democratic citizenship. Gülçin Erdi’s chapter (Chapter 6) brings another perspective on radical democracy to the volume as she discusses the challenges for community development and popular education by demonstrating the mismatches that can exist between the world of the youth in a neighbourhood targeted for regeneration and community development projects. Based on two years of fieldwork in the neighbourhood of Sanitas, France, Erdi problematises the concept of ‘participation’ and discusses how initiatives aiming to work for the neighbourhood can be in fact unrepresentative of the population leading to participation by the same (limited number of) people. The chapter emphasises the importance of not seeing youth as troublemakers and the importance of imagining what can be done together with the youth of the neighbourhood rather than by devising projects for them. Given this challenging form taken by intergenerational relationships and their potential 18

Introduction

racialisation, the following chapters serve to highlight what is gained when young people are to the fore in community development projects. Sally Carr and Ali Hanbury’s chapter (Chapter 7) is based on their combined 50 years of experience working in youth and community spaces in the UK. They propose a model which underlies the importance of community development practitioners creating spaces of mutual care which balance the need for individual sexual and gender citizenship with the collective dimensions of community citizenship. They highlight the tension of how new spaces in the digital world for young people to experiment with sexual and gender identification provide new agentic possibilities but risk more collective forms of care and recognition within and beyond the LGBTQI+​community. Radical community development practice therefore needs to recognise these new lexicons but ensure that ways of practising sexual and gender citizenship promotes greater freedom, equal status and care for all, rather than at the cost of individualism. This recognition of the significance of peer networks is echoed in Sadhana Natu’s account (Chapter 8) of Disha, a student-​based peer support and speak out network based in Pune, India. Disha both challenges the exclusionary practices based on caste experienced by students newly permitted to register at university and acts as a therapeutic focus in response to traumatic harm. In this chapter the link between forms of community development work anchored within a formal institution and thereby within the current hegemonic order and the role of community development work beyond and outside the formal structures is key. Natu’s account connects back to the issue, and paradoxes of, organising as an equal and democratic community across the divides created by privilege raised in earlier chapters, and forward to the discussion of racialised experience in the following section. In Chapter 9, Yvonne Ochieng and colleagues investigate meaningful youth engagement in community programming in Kenya in response to the presence of a youthful population. Young people, as experts in their own lives, are uniquely positioned to provide solutions to their challenges; yet, despite the demographic dividend of a large youth population, they are rarely included in community programming, or their role is tokenised and limits their potential. Nzumari Africa focus on youth leadership to create this systemic shift, placing young people at the centre of change. This chapter raises issues of tokenism in such practice and the role of peer networks which can challenge traditional hierarchies. Part IV of the book, ‘Black lives still matter’, draws together the connections between social movements, radical democracy and practice with and by young people through a focus on two contexts in which Black Lives Matter is an urgent claim. Fernando Lannes Fernandes and Andrea Rodriguez in their first chapter for the collection (Chapter 10), draw on their experience with marginalised 19

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youth to argue for the need for a paradigm shift in community development which promotes a pedagogy of coexistence rather than conversion. They begin with an analysis of how in Brazil, the UK and elsewhere in the West, social processes fed by racism and discrimination have led to the systematic monsterisation of Black youth. As with Erdi (Chapter 6), they argue that this process of dehumanisation has meant that they have become objects of state intervention, denying their citizenship while street-​level bureaucrats enact symbolic violence. They recognise how community development has become estranged from its radical and transformative roots. Instead, they argue for the need to re-​engage with reflexive practice that promotes dialogue and recognises the potency of inventive power of marginalised young people. In their second chapter for the collection (Chapter 11) Fernando Lannes Fernandes and Andrea Rodriguez elaborate how the theoretical concepts they outlined in their first chapter work in practice. Through the use of data from the Escapes Routes project carried out with young people involved with drug gangs in Rio, they show how a pedagogy of coexistence, informed by Freirean approaches, can support young people to develop critical consciousness and thus their right to the city. Through the promotion of a ‘citizenship paradigm’, they recognise how community development can inform action for change, not just at the individual level, but also express a hope for how particular urban spaces and their residents can be placed at the centre of a political agenda aimed at overcoming social inequities for all. The final chapter in this section is in a strikingly different register from others in the book. Christxpher Oliver, a young activist researcher in the UK, working with Windrush Defenders, has chosen to present a poetic collage of the community work he has been centrally involved in since 2019. In turning away from normative registers, which formed the academic, policy and legal discourse surrounding Windrush, this chapter raises not only very powerful questions about the long histories which underlie the Windrush Scandal in the UK but also the question of how the world of community development might be Caribbeanised. Colonial ways of knowing and erasing knowledge (literally in the form of destroying boarding passes), which are so powerful in the UK Home Office treatment of this group of citizens, are contested in the collage chapter, ‘Burning Work’. In poetic and visual form Oliver considers the archive, the gathering, the soundings and the forum as elements in a community research praxis towards justice which addresses, but is not limited by, a legal formulation. Finally, we return in Chapters 13 and 14 to an important thread of discussion in relation to radical democracy: the question of prefigurative practice (Amsler, 2015). Dena Arya’s in-​the-​moment analysis of the Fridays For Future presence at COP26 in Glasgow offers a context for a final discussion by the editors of practices of mutual aid, friendship and the development of a collective consciousness, as key elements of community 20

Introduction

development and community building as a prefigurative practice of hope. In this prefigurative practice, as this book shows, young people have a critical role to play in the creation of a radical democratic network of communities, and their acts of citizenship should not be minimised, misrecognised or overlooked. References Amsler, S. (2015) The Education of Radical Democracy, London: Routledge. Anderson, B. (2006) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso. Arendt, H. (1979) The Recovery of the Public World, edited by Melvyn Hill, New York: St. Martin’s Press. Arendt, H. (1983 [1968]) Men in Dark Times, New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc. Banks, S. (2019) ‘Ethics, Equity and Community Development: Mapping the Terrain’ in S. Banks and P. Westoby (eds) Ethics, Equity and Community Development, Bristol: Policy Press, pp 3–36. Bayat, A. and Herrera, L. (eds) (2010) Being Young and Muslim: New Cultural Politics in the Global South and North, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Boal, A. (2008) Theatre of the Oppressed, London: Pluto . Bourdieu, P. (1993) ‘La jeunesse n’est qu’un mot’ [Youth is just a word] in Bourdieu, P. (ed) Questions de sociologie, Paris: Éditions de Minuit, pp 143–54. Burman, E. (2017) Deconstructing Developmental Psychology, London and New York: Routledge. Cooper, A., Swartz, S. and Mahali, A. (2018) ‘Disentangled, decentred and democratised: Youth studies for the global south’, Journal of Youth Studies, 22(1): 29–​45. Derrida, J. (1997) The Politics of Friendship, London: Routledge. Derrida, J. (2001) On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, London: Routledge. Emejulu, A. (2015) Community Development as Micropolitics: Comparing Theories, Policies and Politics, Bristol: Policy Press. FreeCihanErdal (2021) Available from: https://freecihanerdal.wordpress. com/ [accessed 15 September 2021]. Fisher, M. (2009) Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, London: Zero Books. Freire, P. (1972) Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Giroux, H. (2009) Youth in a Suspect Society: Democracy or Disposability?, London and New York: Routledge. Grenfell, M. (ed) (2014) Pierre Bourdieu: Key Concepts, Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Guattari, F. (2014) The Three Ecologies, London: Bloomsbury Academic. 21

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Harvey, D. (2017) Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution, London: Verso. Isin, E.F. and Nielsen, G.M. (eds) (2008) Acts of Citizenship, London and New York: Zed Books. Jørgensen, N.J. (2017) ‘Hustling for rights: Political engagements with sand in northern Kenya’, in E. Oinas, H. Onodera and L. Suurpää (eds) What Politics? Youth and Political Engagement in Africa, Leiden: Brill, pp 141–​58. Laclau, E. and Mouffe, C. (1985) Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, London: Verso. Ledwith, M. (2020) Community Development: A Critical and Radical Approach, Bristol: Policy Press. Lefebvre, H. (1968) Le Droit a la Ville, Paris: Anthropos. MacDonald, R. (2011) ‘Youth transitions, unemployment and underemployment: Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose?’, Journal of Sociology, 47(4): 427–​44. MacDonald, R. and King, H. (2020) ‘Looking south: What can youth studies in the global north learn from research on youth and policy in the Middle East and North African countries?’, Mediterranean Politics, 26(2): 1–​23. Meade, R.R., Shaw, M. and Banks, S. (2016) Politics, Power and Community Development, Bristol: Policy Press. Mmembe, A. (2019) Necropolitics, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mouffe, C. (2000) The Democratic Paradox, London and New York: Verso. Mouffe, C. (2018) For a Left Populism, London and New York: Verso. Nancy, J.-​L. (1991) The Inoperative Community, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Rogers, R. (2011) ‘Instant adulthood and the transition of young people out of state care’, European Conference of Educational Research Urban Education Stream Conference Proceedings. Santos, B. de S. (2007) ‘Beyond abyssal thinking: From global lines to ecologies of knowledges’, Review, 30(1): 45–​89. Souza, M.L. (2021) ‘ “Sacrifice zone”: The environment–​territory–​place of disposable lives’, Community Development Journal, 56(2): 220–​43. Tyler, I. (2013) Revolting Subjects: Social Abjection and Resistance in Neoliberal Britain, London: Zed. Westoby, P. (2021) ‘A radical community development response to right wing populism’, in S. Kenny, J. Ho and P. Westoby (eds) Populism, Democracy and Community Development, Bristol: Policy Press, pp 55–​73. Young, I.M. (1990) ‘The ideal of community and the politics of difference’, in L. Nicholson (ed) Feminism/​Postmodernism, London: Routledge, pp 301–​23.

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2

Thinking/​acting with migrants under neoliberalism: “It’s horrible to perceive solidarity as merely absorbing the sorrow of one side” Cihan Erdal

Introduction Let me start by sharing the ‘must-​be-​told’ side of this research story for the chapter you are about to read. I was detained and arrested on 25 September 2020, in Istanbul where I came to do my doctorate field research including the interviews I was hoping to conduct for this chapter. Linked to a lawsuit related to the ‘Kobani protests’ seven years ago in Turkey, I was being held in an f-​type high-​security prison as a political hostage in what can only be described as a Kafkaesque absurdity. The kind editors of this book have been extremely encouraging and supportive so that my chapter can still be included. Between December 2020 and March 2021, my former master’s supervisor Associate Professor Derya Fırat identified potential participants through our connections with activists working in the field and academics who could act as ‘gatekeepers’. She recruited five currently engaged activists from the anti-​capitalist and migrant rights struggle. Beforehand, I prepared interview questions and shared the detailed intention of the research with Professor Fırat. We then exchanged letters regularly to advance the fieldwork. Professor Fırat, bringing her own expertise and integrating additional questions to deepen the interviews, conducted these semi-​structured interviews via Zoom. She played a crucial role in this research. With the participants’ approval, interview recordings were transcribed by my two close friends Zilan Kaki and Levent Soy. The organisation of this unusual process could not have been possible without my life partner Ömer Ongun. The articles and books I required were provided to me by Professor Fırat, my doctoral supervisor Professor Jacqueline Kennelly, Ömer, my lawyers and other visitors who came to see me in the prison. I believe I am not exaggerating when I say the process of writing this chapter behind bars has turned into a ‘coalitional dynamism’ in itself.

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What I am calling a coalitional dynamism implies more than a courteous act of solidarity shown within my situation. The people, my professors from Canada and Turkey, my life partner, friends, lawyers and other visitors, who had never gathered before to act together or even met each other, formed a community not only to free me but also secure me from the ‘extreme loneliness’ (Arendt, 1994) of an f-​type prison, encouraging me to keep thinking, writing and hoping behind bars. They acted together, putting their professional and emotional labour to work to comfort me in and for my writing. In doing so, they reached out to each other’s worlds, exchanged ideas and negotiated the means to improve the situation of their partner, friend, student or colleague. When I was receiving letters from them on the idea of the chapter or on the fieldwork, when the review of my very first draft arrived in prison, I felt that writing was hoping, and the borders and walls do not matter. The sense of community they provided opened the way for illustrating that ‘another academia’, ‘another friendship’ or ‘another partnership’ in this neoliberal-​totalitarian world wherein the destruction of the factual truth becomes pervasive is still possible. The sense of community they gifted allowed me to assert that those whose stories unfold differently from the way they had hoped, in other words, the defeated, whether they are exiled, stateless or imprisoned, can come up with new questions and methods. The coalitional dynamism which my people built up helped overcoming loneliness by experimenting in solidaristic action (Schaap, 2021: 30), carrying the strength to serve as an antidote to the powers that be, to the nihilistic processes and political evils. While enjoying my partial freedom and working on the latest version of this chapter ‘outside’, on the evening of 11 August 2021, I was following the news on Twitter with a great anxiety that hundreds of ‘angry’ people in Ankara’s Altındağ district were attacking Syrian refugees’ homes, workplaces, shops and cars (Hamad, 2021). The attacks that lasted two days in Ankara were not the first wave of violence against Syrian refugees in Turkey in recent years, but escalated this time in a political momentum when the government had faced harsh criticism over the recently emerging refugee wave from Afghanistan. Following Syria’s horrific decade of civil war which began in March 2011, Turkey’s government has a welcoming policy towards refugees in place (Sert and Danış, 2021). As the political climate had become tougher in Syria and the mass flows to Europe had dramatically increased by 2015, the European Union brought to the table an ‘EU-​Turkey deal’ to protect the walls and borders of Europe from the so-​called ‘refugee crisis’. With the joint action plan, Turkey became a host country with the largest refugee population in the world (over 3.5 million) who have to reside with the conditions of ‘permanent temporariness’ (İçduygu and Sert, 2019). Importantly, refugees, for both EU actors and Turkey’s government, have served as an instrument of bargaining for financial support and border security. ‘The deal’ (Sert and 24

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Danış, 2021: 200), which served first and foremost as a recipe for securing the neoliberal democracies of Europe’s boundaries in nation-​states, at the same time fuelled political debates in Turkey, triggering and mobilising dark sentiments towards refugees who have been widely approached by the host society as being the ‘scapegoats’ for the worsening social and economic conditions of the country. The Turkish government has long benefited from the atomisation of working-​class opposition over the ‘refugee crisis’ among several other controversial issues during the 2010s, and thus, the relationship between agents of social change and democratic public space has been subordinated within such a polarised political climate. Nevertheless, urban youth activists as the catalysts of the democratic struggles have adopted different forms of political engagement that have contributed to coalition-​building among the marginalised, subordinated or those rendered invisible (Castells, 2015; David and Toktamış, 2015; Fırat and Erdal, 2017). These forms of political engagement have helped foster important spaces of experience where democratic subjectivities of activist youth have emerged and been developed throughout the last decade. The main contribution of this chapter is to argue that the solidarity work of migrants and youth activists within grassroots organisations and other non-​governmental organisations (NGOs) permits us to witness democratic potentials that may challenge ‘neoliberal political culture’ and the rising of the ‘society of enmity’ as well as some constraints that the contemporary anti-​capitalist youth-​led activism faces under neoliberalism. Wendy Brown (2019) notes that neoliberal political culture set the foundation for the mobilisation and legitimacy of ferocious anti-​ democratic forces in the second decade of the 21st century, for widespread symbolic and material violence against the ‘other’ (migrants, asylum seekers, refugees, young people, women, people of colour, and the lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, intersex and queer [LGBTIQ+​] community). As Achille Mmembe (2020 [2016]: 62) notes, the contemporary era is ‘undoubtedly characterised by forms of exclusion, hostility, hate movements, and, above all, by the struggle against an enemy’.

Relational agency and intersubjectivity With particular attention to youth-​led activist spaces for migrant rights that appeared in Istanbul in the 2010s, this chapter examines the link between activist youth agency, their encounters with and interpretations of the worlds of migrants, and their ideas about radical democratic politics. The theoretical framework for this chapter draws primarily on an Arendtian phenomenological interpretive pathway along with the work of Pierre Bourdieu. The chapter specifically intends to highlight and interpret the following questions: How have the orientations of activist youth towards 25

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migrants as others influenced their understandings and imaginaries of ‘solidarity’, ‘public sphere’ and ‘citizenship’? How might a ‘web of relations’ at a ‘shared table’ with the migrants and those processes of ‘world-​building practices’ (Arendt, 1998 [1958]) be interpreted in relation to activist youth subjectivities and the politics of radical democracy? According to Bourdieu, ‘to think in terms of field is to think relationally: the relational (rather than more narrow “structuralist”) mode of thinking’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 97). Expanding the account of relational agency, Arendt’s phenomenological account of ‘public sphere’, ‘thinking’ and ‘action’ offers a deeper interrogation of the potential for youth political action under neoliberalism. For Arendt, the ‘public sphere’ simply refers to ‘where we are in the constant presence of others’ (Arendt, 1998 [1958]: 51). The public is a ‘web of relations’ in which we act ‘always in relation to others, and it is among others with whom we reveal our whoness through actions and speech’ (Kennelly, 2018: 10). ‘This disclosure of “who” in contradistinction to “what” somebody is –​his qualities, gifts, talents, and shortcomings, which he may display or hide –​is implicit in everything somebody says and does. It can be hidden only by complete silence and perfect passivity’ (Arendt, 1998 [1958]: 179). Putting the ‘web of relations’ and ‘world-​building practices’ into perspective involves gaining a better understanding of ‘whoness’ of young activists as well as of migrants with whom they act together. Thus this chapter conceptualises the ‘web of relations’ as allowing for the potential of political action for activist youth with the migrant community to give birth to the possibility of ‘inserting a new world into the existing world’ (Arendt, 1998 [1958]: 242), to the possibility of enacting a radical democratic project in a neoliberal and authoritarian world. For Arendt, the realisation of a public-​political space refers to a radical democratic structure, a ‘world-​in-​common’ which ‘relies upon the concept of plurality as a sphere of participation of “equal” and “distinct” human beings’ (Menga, 2014: 314). In Dimensions of Radical Democracy (1992: 226), Chantal Mouffe formulates ‘radical democracy’ as a never-​ending struggle ‘that does not imply a radical break but that can be done through a profound transformation of the existing liberal democratic institutions’. Importantly, Mouffe acknowledges Arendtian notion of public sphere, what Arendt calls the ‘space of appearances’, and provides us a radical democratic conception of citizenship and political community: ‘For Arendt, the public sphere refers to that sphere of appearance where citizens interact through the medium of speech and persuasion, disclose their unique identities, and decide through collective deliberation about matters of common concern’ (d’Entrèves, 1992: 146). As Kennelly (2018: 12) highlights, ‘acting politically –​participating in the public sphere, in Arendt’s language –​does not come easily and naturally to all, though Bourdieu would agree with Arendt that we all carry the potential 26

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for it’. Thus it is necessary to turn, simultaneously, to a Bourdieusian frame to illustrate the sort of structural constraints arising from the limits of neoliberalism and the rise of far-​right totalitarian politics which have prevented activist youth from expanding democratic spaces of solidarity with the migrant communities.

Methodology The chapter draws upon Ricoeurian hermeneutics in order to build analysis upon the self-​identifications and meaning-​making processes of four young activists (Selim, Gizem, Sezen and İrem; aged 25 to 35) from the urban centre of Istanbul. Semi-​structured, in-​depth, qualitative interview texts constitute the main body of the data analysed and significant importance is given to the symbolic models of sense-​making as described by the participants. Ricoeur’s (Kearney, 2004: 32) conceptualisation of ‘the long-​detour’, as well as the ‘self-​as-​another’ assists in approaching youth subjectivity ‘as a goal to be reached after the intersubjective detour of interpretation’. In other words, engaging in activist texts including symbolic expressions, metaphors, myth and stories leads us to the worlds of others and, therefore, to ‘a horizon of other meanings’ (Kearney, 2004: 132) beyond our subjective consciousness. The chapter pursues the symbolic meanings behind the socio-​political practices of activists, interpreting the processes in which activist discourse ‘has not only a world, but an Other/​another person, an interlocutor to whom it is addressed’ (Ricoeur, 1976: 72), in this case, migrants. The participants with whom the interviews were conducted are people1 who have been activists in Istanbul’s youth-​led anti-​capitalist space since the early 2010s. The analysis here focuses on four of them. In the context of the development of anti-​capitalist spaces in Turkey, considering the long silence (that is to say, an historical defeat for Turkey’s democracy following the 1980 military coup d’état), the period between 1995 and 2015 presents a very rich era for countercultural spaces. This historical period was marked by the rise of different social movements, the diversification of countercultural production including the fields of art and the strengthening of civil society. Since the second half of the 1990s, the student-​youth-​led movements, the feminist movement, the LGBTI+​movement, the anti-​militarist movement, the green movement and the Kurdish political movement have become significant actors in the public sphere, diversified, expanded their fields of political activity and created a strong activist culture. While driven locally, they established dynamic bonds with the international community, and presented valuable experiences for Turkey’s democracy as well as at the global scale. In the 2010s, in particular, Gezi Park marks a turning point where the ‘plural multitude’ gained self-​confidence and courage against the anti-​democratic mentality of the state. The young people involved in our 27

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research have played leading roles in building insurgent, solidaristic political spaces, including in Gezi, over the last decade. They have participated in the migrant-​rights movement in Istanbul, and as their stories of political engagement reveal, much of the youth-​led activism for migrant rights appears in a vast array of intersecting paths that include defending community, public rights and democratic citizenship against the neoliberal politics that have deepened xenophobia, racism and the erosion of democracy. Selim (he/​him, age 29), is a graduate student and a freelancer. With the help of friendships he had made in the activist space, he participated in the opening event of the Migrant Solidarity Kitchen in 2012 and continued to fight within the movement. Migrant Solidarity Kitchen (Göçmen Dayanışma Mutfağı) is a community kitchen in Istanbul’s Tarlabaşı district, with the aim to serve all migrants but open to anyone both for cooking and eating. Selim is one of the activists who had a leading role in organising the campaign for the trial process of Festus Okey. Festus Okey, from Nigeria, living in Istanbul and training to become a professional football player, was shot dead by the police at Beyoğlu District Police Department in Istanbul on 20 August 2007. Festus Okey’s murder and a long-​term political campaign afterwards brought to media attention as well as the awareness of activists the presence of African immigrants in Turkey, the conditions under which they lived, the rights violations to which they were subjected, and their demands for justice. In the years following 2012, Selim regularly participated in the forums of the Migrant Solidarity Network and organised various film screenings and socio-​cultural events with migrants in Beyoğlu and Tarlabaşı districts in Istanbul where different migrant populations live. Migrant Solidarity Network (Göçmen Dayanışma Ağı) is a horizontal network against the systematic oppression of migrants living in Turkey, and a political struggle based on the idea of solidarity with migrants. Gizem (she/​her, age 32), is a postgraduate, homeless and unemployed person, who has been occupying positions in the field of migrant rights activism, including holding professional positions in various NGOs, for the longest duration of time among the interviewees. In 2011, she joined the Migrant Solidarity Network, which was newly formed at that time. Along with participating in the Migrant Solidarity Kitchen, she has volunteered to find solutions to the various daily needs and problems of migrants she meets through solidarity networks (for example, supporting a migrant mother when she needs childcare, accompanying her to the hospital, taking into account language problems or possible discriminatory attitudes of hospital staff). She explains that she participated as an activist in the Occupy camp activities in Turkey, Greece and Germany, against the border regimes of Europe. Sezen (she/​her, age 28), is also a postgraduate. Today, she occupies a full-​time professional position in a German foundation that focuses not only on the field of migration but also works directly with migrants. Sezen, who occupied the 28

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role of ‘protection expert in the field’ in the Migrant Solidarity Association in 2017, summarises her work in two parts. First, she conducted studies on the access of migrants to basic human rights in four areas: health; education; justice; and access to socio-​economic mechanisms. Second, the Migrant Solidarity Association runs psychosocial support activities for migrants; in this context, she tried to establish and maintain solidarity groups with women and LGBTI+​refugees. Sezen has also worked under the umbrella of the We Want to Live Together Initiative, whereby various actions were organised to bring the problems of migrants to the public’s attention. The We Want to Live Together Initiative is an independent organisation that conducts activities with migrants to build a life based on equality and justice with all migrants living in Turkey. The Migrant Solidarity Association (Göçmen Dayanışma Derneği) is a rights-​based NGO established in 2016 by human rights defenders from various professional groups (doctors, lawyers, social workers, psychologists) who have been active in the field of migration and asylum for many years. İrem (she/​her, age 30), is a university graduate and a student of social services and child development. She also describes herself as ‘rights advocate’ and ‘consultant’ while working as a healthcare field representative in an NGO. As part of the Migrant Solidarity Kitchen in the first half of the 2010s, she kept in close contact with various migrant groups, especially with migrant children, and organised children’s workshops with them. Her story of activism continued with a professional migration worker role in Urfa (Turkey) with Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières). Later, in 2016–​17, she continued to work with migrants at a different NGO distributing non-​food items to those in poverty. İrem is in contact with the Kapılar (İzmir, Turkey) space, which she likens to the Kitchen experience in Tarlabaşı. Kapılar is a free social space, community centre and information point for the communities of Basmane, in central İzmir, Turkey.

Becoming thinking actors with migrants: ethical paradoxes The intersubjective spaces through which the young activists orient themselves towards migrants and refugees drive and enhance young people’s reflexive accounts of their own location and habitus. As Kennelly reminds us, in Arendt’s (1971) work, the activity of thinking is notably associated with political action in a way that situates thinking ‘as a capacity that stretched beyond habitual action’ (2014: 251) and thus it permits individuals ‘to think beyond the limitations of knowledge, to do more with this ability than use it as an instrument for knowing and doing’ (Arendt, 1971 in Kennelly, 2014: 251). Young activists, by thinking with others within ‘the space in-​between’, ranging from Migrant Solidarity Kitchen, Migrant Solidarity Network forums, counselee-​community worker conversations, 29

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neighbour relations in Tarlabaşı, ‘small but deep’ conversations in the migrant neighbourhood, to the solidarity built through friendship, begin to radically interrogate their ‘privileged’ locations. For instance, Gizem points out that she feels the ‘ethical paradox’ of speaking on behalf of the Other and doing activism for someone else: ‘As we engage in activism with migrant refugees … it made me realise that whatever issue or in whichever field we hold a political position in, first being aware of our own privileges and if we are saying something about others, to what extent we can communicate with others, to what extent we can establish an equivalent position, to what extent the organisation is non-​hierarchical, to what extent we can find a common point.’ (Gizem, interview) What led Gizem, whom we can identify as a homeless person as she is forced to live with her family,2 to this inquiry is witnessing the “dignified, hopeless, gloomy, foresight about nothing status” of young migrants from age 12 to 25 who were forced to become adults in the homelessness shelter where unaccompanied children and young migrants stayed in 2012 (Gizem, interview). In a similar vein, Sezen introduced her relationship with her Syrian flatmate into the conversation and says that she understood how citizenship is a privilege only thanks to this friendship. When Sezen points out that they could not go to the 8 March protest together, she faces the situation of not being equal with the immigrants: they are in allyship. Sezen presents this ongoing inequality and power relations inhibiting action as an important dilemma: ‘For example, we were going to go to March 8 [protest], and she is also a feminist. Although I was detained many times before, I freely go to March 8 [protests]. Nobody can deport me. At the most, I get beat up or go to jail. But I will not be left without a place. She could not come, was not able to come. Because if she is detained in that protest, she gets deported. So, the things we can lose are very different. Conversely, I have privileges: for example. I saw there what a privilege citizenship is.’ (Sezen, interview) Sezen explains that while she was working at Migrant Solidarity Association, she met her Syrian flatmate who was an activist and civil society worker at the Women’s Solidarity Foundation (Kadınlarla Dayanışma Vakfı –​KADAV) at that time. The political conversations which they had throughout their friendship, particularly their debates on the problems and necessities of the civil society that focuses on migrant rights, enabled them to create an allyship of two feminist women in the field of migration rights. Indeed, in line with Arendt’s discussion on ‘friendship’, they exercise friendship as a 30

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‘proper form of solidarity’ (Arendt, 1983 [1968]; Schaap, 2021). The Migrant Letters project exemplifies solidaristic-​coalitional action, which emerges from such togetherness. The writing workshop that built this solidarity was conducted with refugee women for ten weeks under the name of Migrant Letters (Göçmen Harfler in Turkish) during 2018. Sezen, who grew up in working-​class circumstances, says that such encounters have made her reflect and offered “an exemplary way of learning” for her: “How can I be a better egalitarian? How can I be someone who opens up space for others?”

Investigating the meaning of citizenship: breaking the moulds Taken together, both Gizem and Sezen, by means of their encounter with migrants, have been able to acknowledge structural patterns which shape their activist dispositions. They have learned to question the meaning of citizenship more comprehensively, of being a subject who is given the right to speak for another, and the stratified dimensions of lived poverty. Both Gizem and Sezen’s being at a ‘shared table’ with the migrants within the public-​political realm has helped them expand their comprehension of their ‘whoness’ –​their qualities, traits, perspectives and shortcomings –​and their capacity to become ‘thinking actors’. The young activists’ efforts in creating a shared table of common concerns with the migrants, but also their testing of the barriers that prevent the further flourishing of those democratic spaces of solidarity, opens and/​or enhances the possibility of the systematic exploration of the ‘unthought categories of thought which delimit the thinkable and predetermine the thought’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 40). Sezen, continuing to employ a self-​reflexive lens, explained how she realised that “the fireworks” were experienced and made sense of completely differently by herself and her Syrian flatmate. What Sezen references here are the massacres committed by Islamic State in Istanbul, Ankara and the Suruç district of Urfa, Turkey following the general elections that happened on 7 June 2015: ‘I also lost quite a few of my friends in the bomb explosions, I do not think I was experiencing ordinary things, but my flatmate once told me about the bombing of her own university and how she escaped to Turkey when she was a student at the University of Aleppo. Of course, you cannot compare suffering, but it is something completely different, that is, to experience this. Coming out of such a hot war. How can I tell you? This has broken the moulds for me. It is a very cold sentence when you say there is war, but when you see what comes from there in your life, you feel something completely different. When the fireworks are let off, I get angry and say, “why are you lighting fireworks, the birds are dying!”, and it is something else again to see 31

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her suddenly shut herself down and how that trauma comes back to her.’ (Sezen, interview) To further clarify how her experiences of living, acting and building solidarity together with migrants shatters her ways of seeing, Sezen reflects upon her encounter with a feminist woman in a veil: ‘One day, when I first started working at the Migrant Solidarity Association, there was a knock on the door. We could normally see who rang the bell of the building from the flat. This time they were completely covered, even their eyes; I had never seen such a veil in my life. I opened the door thinking that one of my friends was joking with me and went back to my place. Then they came into the room. There was a [male] doctor in the room, he stood up and left, and then this person showed their face. A woman. The first reaction I had was “how oppressed these women are, what a horrible life they have!”. Then she became one of my counselees and I soon realised that she was one of the most feminist women I had ever met. I mean, that has broken the moulds, strongly.’ (Sezen, interview) Sezen makes a clear admission of how important the concept of peace is to her now, even though she was an activist who formerly advocated peace. The ‘with-​the-​world’ that Sezen became part of, and which is occupied and shaped by migrant beings/​perspectives/​experiences, challenges and deeply transforms the meanings she is used to attaching to ‘war’, ‘fireworks’ and ‘peace’, her interpretation of ‘veil’, the meanings she drew on when relating to a woman in veil, and thus, the way she engaged with the idea of feminism, and even her interpretation of her activist friends’ relationship with migrants. Arendt (1971) developed the conceptualisation of ‘visiting’ the worlds of others and Sezen’s visiting of migrant beings’ worlds helps her ‘see past the categories and formulas that are deeply ingrained’ (Arendt, 1979, in Gallagher, 2015: 72) in her mind towards others, objects and practices in the social space. Moreover, as can be understood by these narratives (not only Gizem and Sezen but also İrem and Selim), thinking with migrants and refugees transforms their perceptual dispositions towards place and space along with the symbolic meanings they attribute to several ordinary images of life, in this case spending time by the sea: ‘When I look at the sea or something, death comes to my mind. When I went on a beach holiday, I did not feel comfortable. I would be thinking: “I am privileged, I am a privileged White [person], because I have not had to migrate like this, the most I might do is become an 32

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economic migrant”. … I even felt guilty at that time about pleasure. While the sea was a graveyard for Others, it was a pleasure place for me. But even that pleasure was not the situation anymore. I was feeling in betweenness. That feeling did not go away for like two or three years.’ (İrem, interview) As İrem develops a self-​reflexive attitude towards being “a privileged White person”, she also displays a new orientation towards the ‘sea’ through ‘the intersubjective detour of interpretation’ (Kearney, 2004: 32). She establishes an empathetic understanding with those who must migrate just to stay alive, reflects on the migrants’ experiences with, and interpretations of, the sea. The surplus meaning of the word ‘sea’, which unfolds itself within the use of metaphor of ‘graveyard’ demonstrates that İrem’s perceptual disposition sees a remarkable disruption, here written into her feelings and words. Gizem, Sezen and İrem each arrived at a reflexive, critical and ethical understanding of ‘their selfhood as another’ through the intersubjective experiences of plural encounters with migrant youth, women and the elderly within the activist realm. They were able to engage in meaning-​making processes which move beyond habitual thinking and embodied dispositions. The more migrant perspectives to which young people are exposed at a shared table, the more possibility there is for interrupting activists’ ‘established habits of perception by disclosing and, potentially, reconfiguring [their] common sense of the world’ (Schaap, 2021: 29). It is made explicit by all the participants’ narratives that as young activists think and interact into a ‘web of relationships’ with the migrants, they achieve a deeper comprehension of their ‘whoness’, and thus, the potential for their political action for social change –​‘to do more with this ability’ –​increases. To put it another way, the relational processes of constituting coalition-​and solidarity-​based action with migrant communities strengthened the participants ‘to work around (rather than accepting) structural, epistemic, and ontological obstacles that impede coalitions’ (May, 2015: 237). Young activists, therefore, become encouraged and more ‘capable’ in attending to subordination or exclusion, and can contribute to building democratic political communities together with migrants and refugees.

The Kitchen, Forums and Migrant Letters: expanding the potential for radical democratic participation Shared spaces of appearance The foregoing analysis showed how young people’s activist engagements in/​ with presence of the migrants expands the potential for coming to a ‘shared table’ and into a web of relationships. Here, not only the activists’ but also the migrants’ ‘whoness’ instead of their ‘whatness’ is revealed as a precursor 33

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to engaging in democratic practices. Gizem and Selim’s narrative of how they initiated creating a solidarity-​based space with the migrant community in Tarlabaşı in the 2010s signals the democratic potentials of enacting and expanding a ‘shared space of appearances’. This can be more explicitly seen in the excerpts from the participants that follow. ‘We had … a solidarity kitchen experience in partnership with migrants. Here in Tarlabaşı, predominantly African groups were coming in the neighbourhood, but Afghan and Iranian groups also came. Cooking together in a certain common area, sharing, organising various lessons, Turkish language courses, or cultural events, but doing them together. It is not a ‘give and take’ (I give; you take) relationship.’ (Gizem, interview) Selim refers not only to his participation with/​in the Kitchen experience but also the Migrant Solidarity Network Forums. Selim, like Gizem, depicts a democratic process in which the migrants who cannot get a salary from their bosses or are mistreated by their bosses, who cannot access public services due to identity card problems or cannot find the opportunity to socialise in their neighbourhoods, express themselves and seek solutions to their problems within a collective as equal and active agents: “In fact, we can say that it is a joint decision-​making method in decision-​making processes, maybe it would be correct if I name it as collective decision-​making and implementation of daily organisations” (Selim, interview). Migrant Solidarity Kitchen’s own description of their philosophy also helps us to make further sense of their experiments of the potential for a ‘shared space of appearances’: The kitchen is not solely about eating. Those who are willing to, can share their knowledge, abilities, and experiences with others through workshops. For what comes in handy for one, might also be a tool for the others. … This kitchen serves as a locus of solidarity and sharing against all sorts of borders that tear us apart. All the stomachs of the world unite! (Migrant Solidarity Kitchen, nd) Sezen tells of the Migrant Letters project, which, according to her, aims to prevent speaking on behalf of others, and intends to prove that migrants can participate effectively and disclose who they are to others in a democratic public space: ‘There is a dominant point of view that high quality work cannot come from immigrants. As we were discussing how to deal with this, we decided to organise a creative writing workshop. We worked for ten 34

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months to collect a multilingual book. We met with ten immigrant women every Saturday and set up a literature workshop with interactive methods at Filmmor. Then we had a translation process, and a book was launched. It became a space for immigrant women to express themselves.’ (Sezen, interview) World-​making as prefigurative practice: against depoliticised charity This narrative of world-​building practices produced with the migrant communities from below, as told by Gizem, Selim and Sezen, including Migrant Solidarity Kitchen, Migrant Solidarity Network Forums and Migrant Letters, also unfolds the potential for radical democratic participation for the migrants ‘by confirming the agent’s uniqueness, protecting them from internalising a sense of their own superfluity’ (Schaap, 2021: 45). Such spaces expand the potential for building a ‘world-​in-​common’ and radical democratic participation through which the migrants as equal and distinct agents can disclose their ‘whoness’ by speaking on behalf of themselves, acting with others in problem-​solving processes at a grassroots level, participating in the socio-​cultural events and developing ‘democratic forms of socio-​cultural accompaniment’ (Batsleer, 2016: 189). While recreating potential spaces and struggling for a better world, those human beings speak out, interact, exchange their perspectives, deliberate, persuade and even possibly face tensions and antagonisms. What young activists seek to actualise in Tarlabaşı neighbourhood, Migrant Solidarity Forums or Migrant Solidarity Kitchen should be recognised as the prefigurative grounds for enacting this kind of democratic political community. The activists’ prefigurative initiatives step forward to build and illustrate the idealised egalitarian projects or desired social change within the here and now, although not being protected from or innocent of the social stratifications and contradictions within themselves. In this way, the prefigurative experiences of young activists in Istanbul, the Kitchen, Forums and Migrant Letters, also project and transmit the knowledge, practice and related opportunities of alternative pathways in further stages of social movements. The participants’ ‘symbolic opening towards the future’ (Kearney, 2004: 7) suggests an alternative democratic political community by which political equality among human beings and the principle of ‘a right to have rights’ are essentially guaranteed. In other words, they may help expand not only the space of experiences but also the horizon of expectation of youth-​led activism, given that the emancipatory political imagination and imaginaries are blocked off, since within existing neoliberal temporalities (Traverso, 2016) utopian discourse with the idea of another/​possible world now seems a thing of the past. Importantly, such democratic, egalitarian accompaniment has been enacted through the experiment of a critical, ethical and complex conception 35

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of solidarity. In other words, the solidaristic practices that the youth activists exercised with migrant communities in Istanbul move beyond an individualistic, depoliticising empathy. They, therefore, enhance the capacity of their relationality towards enacting a shared space of appearances. For instance, Sezen critically explored and told of the ways that municipal representatives she had been in communication with as well as the dialogues she has had with her employer provided her with examples of the circulation of ‘the affective depoliticising tropes of charitable empathy’ (Kaika, 2017) in civil society that are clearly in conflict with the worlds of migrants and refugees: ‘The municipality’s approach to migrants actually says a lot about the host community’s approach to migrants. Once, they wanted to organise an activity for migrant children. Children would be taken to the pool. The children were very poor. Not all refugees are poor, but this group we work with was exceptionally poor. I said “OK, we can arrange a group and take them to the pool”. Well, they asked if the children would bring their own swimsuits. We do not work with such a group of children, and it was very difficult to explain. “Whose children did not have swimsuits in this life?” someone asked then. … These were very difficult for me emotionally, to see that abyss. Also, my employer at that time had the following approach: “I want refugees to come and cry here and talk about their troubles.” It is very scary to perceive solidarity as merely absorbing the sorrow of one side.’ (Sezen, interview) It was Sezen who made the remarkable suggestion which gives the title to this chapter: she added: “solidarity should not turn into an activity of cleansing remorse”. What Sezen’s sense of solidarity tells us is that as young people struggle together with migrants, as they try to establish radical empathic communication while doing so, and as their socio-​political actions in a solidaristic-​coalitional world are informed by their exposure to migrant life-​worlds, the radical democratising potential of their political actions and activist imaginaries becomes ever stronger. In particular, friendship plays a significant role in paving the ground for a shared space of appearances wherein migrants as democratic and active citizens can appear and co-​act with the activists in the public realm. From Arendt’s perspective, friendship, or, the ‘in-​betweenness’, moves beyond the dimensions of ‘some obscure brotherhood’ (1983 [1968]: 17) and provides the possibility for the conditions for one to connect to or visit another without prejudices, to co-​act, to inhabit a world-​in-​common, thereby, and in turn to ‘respond to the inherent worldlessness’ of themselves (1983 [1968]: 17). Friendship for Sezen and her Syrian friend can be perceived as mutual respect and trust, co-​acting and reappearing in public in a distinctness, 36

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perhaps more importantly, becoming selves ‘shining to’ and understanding each other. Such bonds pursued in Sezen’s friendship with a Syrian migrant make evident the power of human beings to strive to grasp the world of another, to think and act together in friendship as an accurate form of solidarity. The Migrant Letters project represents the embodiment of their such ‘in-​betweenness’, their common act pursuing the following question: ‘How can I be someone who opens up space for others?’ Young people, while visiting migrants’ worlds (involving their feelings, arguments, logics) and entering into an empathic communication in a solidaristic-​coalitional world, seem to be reflexively aware of the radical impossibility of achieving a true sense of the migrants’ world. For instance, Sezen reflects on the invitation to visit another’s world and reach out to her solitude. More precisely, while she gives an account of her struggle with the meanings attached by her Syrian activist friend to ‘war’ and ‘fireworks’, Sezen suggests the impossibility of arriving at a full comprehension of her friend’s orientation towards the world. Remarkably, Selim shares an anecdote that as they celebrated the 2017 New Year with a group of immigrants, during the celebration, they received the news that the Reina nightclub had been attacked. On 1 January 2017, a massacre at Istanbul’s Reina nightclub was carried out by the Islamic State; while celebrating New Year’s Day, 39 people were killed and 79 others were wounded. For Selim, the realisation of the incredible difference between his reaction to this news, and the reactions of the Syrian immigrants, affected him and his reflections of this encounter shapes his understanding. He ultimately accepts that they cannot see the world from the same point of view: ‘How can you stay so composed? … It shook me a little. Later, when I thought about how I should interpret this, I realised this; after all, the place where these friends came from was Syria. In fact, they came from a place of intense violence and war, where violence became commonplace and routine.’ (Selim, interview) There are yet more dilemmas. Another challenge to the potential expansion of the radical democratic coalition between activists and the migrant community is the emotional weight put on young activists’ shoulders that emerges from the suffering inherent in migrants’ lived experiences and from the limitations of anti-​capitalist activism under neoliberalism. Young people largely articulate the feeling of guilt and the gravity of responsibility that exists in the spaces of youth activism with migrants. For instance, Gizem explicitly remarks on “an activism which sometimes make themselves feel not good enough” in their attempts to better the lives of migrants, while reckoning with her knowledge of migrants’ traumatic experiences, dispossessions, insecurities and exclusions (Gizem, interview). Likewise, 37

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while Selim shares his enthusiasm for “being perceived as a human being who could find a solution” with/​for immigrants, on the other hand, he reflects upon his feeling of being under pressure, a gravity which is entangled with a sense of incapability: ‘When I got into this solidarity movement, I had no idea that it could evolve to this point. Then I realised that becoming a human being who talks with them in the neighbourhood and maybe find a solution together, affected me deeply. Sometimes I was wondering if I should walk through here [the neighbourhood] because the things I encountered sometimes devastated my comfort zone and my own privileged position. Sometimes, when I could not do anything, could not find a solution or could not respond to shared concerns in a network, I eventually found myself under a great weight.’ (Selim, interview) These dilemmas of social movement organising that we need to face present the obstacles for radical democratic participation not only for activists but also for migrants. As Kennelly (2018: 18) puts it, ‘while Arendt reminds us that everyone carries the potential to intervene in the public, Bourdieu highlights the constraints that mean not everyone can intervene and participate on an equal footing’. Gizem and Selim’s articulations of their feelings illustrate the felt reality that the migrants with whom they met in the realm of activism, despite the establishment of some prefigurative spaces of solidarity, remain living in conditions of poverty, precarious employment, homelessness, inequality in access to public services of health and education, everyday violence, and even living undocumented lives. When we also take into account Gizem’s interpretation of migration as “always involving being stuck in one place, being pushed from one place, trying to comply with the force of other patterns, schemes and restrictions” (Gizem, interview), it becomes clear that she continues to witness migrants’ experiences of being ‘superfluous stateless persons’. Similarly, Sezen’s self-​reflexive interrogation, which concludes with “the things we can lose are very different”, underscores the existence of comprehensive structural constraints imposed by neoliberalism that have prevented migrants from disclosing their ‘whoness’ to others through action and speech in the public-​political space. By being unable to address needs or solve an everyday problem for migrants or by self-​interpreting their privileged location as activists, bearing witness to migrants’ lived experiences of extreme violence as well as the destruction of factual truth of migrant life worlds within a ‘lying world order’, which set forth the totalitarian ground for a ‘society of enmity’, young people end up with bearing/​circulating negative emotions that have strongly constraining 38

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effects on their engagements in the political field. As Kennelly asks of the role of ‘reflexive modernity’ (Beck, 1997) in social movement organising: If inhabiting reflexive/​self-​reflexive attitudes under high modernity becomes habitual under multiple, implicit and latent forms, ‘then where do we go from here?’ (Kennelly, 2014: 251). We cannot however deny one possible trajectory in which, even in the ‘society of critical lip service’ (Beck, 1997: 261), the young participants in this research show with their practices of solidarity-​and coalition-​building that it is possible to move beyond ‘verbal revolutionary upheaval of convictions and conservative inaction’ (Beck, 1997: 260). But how then can young activists deal with the emotional burdens that are indeed the product of the governing rationality of neoliberalism, and that might impede coalition-​building among activist bodies and others? As Kennelly asks: ‘But what happens if reflexivity is understood as belonging to the pre-​ habitual doxa of the contemporary activist field? If reflexivity can no longer be relied upon to generate freedom from social constraint, what then of political engagement?’ (2014: 251). As a potential response from Arendt to this questioning, Kennelly takes us back to Arendt’s conception of thinking, as discussed in The Life of the Mind (1971: 11–​12): ‘We are what [wo/​]men have always been: thinking beings. By this I mean no more than that [wo/​ ]men have an inclination, perhaps a need, to think beyond the limitations of knowledge, to do more with this ability than use it as an instrument for knowing and doing.’ From this point of view, thinking can be proposed as a resolution for young activists within migrant rights movements to tussle with the habitual action and reactivate political activity through such continuous endeavour with-​the-​world. Placing ‘thinking’ at the centre of political activity may incite the call for hopeful grounds for a shared space of appearances, while helping agents of social change reckon with the dimensions of structural inequality within social movement organising.

Conclusion In this chapter I have demonstrated how coming into a web of relations at a shared table with the migrants generates and enhances the potential to make more democratic and egalitarian not only the present space of experiences but also the horizon of expectations of activist youth. Thereby, projecting a utopian discourse of democratic citizenship and public space in the Arendtian sense, which refers to ‘the imaginaire of rupture’, young people’s narratives mark a collective desire ‘for a society that is not yet’ (Ricoeur in Kearney, 2004: 138); so that the capabilities of youth-​led activism become strengthened against neoliberal political rationality which legitimised and gave rise to the displacing of the political and to dismantling of public spaces, and the depoliticisation of social-​global problems that are intersected with 39

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‘a toxic mix of nihilism, fatalism and a politics of revenge and resentment’ (Brown, 2019: 182). Simultaneously, our research requires us, nevertheless, to be sceptical about the limits of the potential outcome of such public-​ political relationality: the migrants, as activist narratives recurrently point out, remain undocumented and marginalised in the existing neoliberal society, and activists have consistently found themselves wrestling with the emotional burdens which are rooted in the experience of acting/​thinking with the migrant communities. It is instructive and necessary both to illustrate the emancipatory and egalitarian potentials which reside within the web of relations of migrant communities and activist youth, and to return to the other side of the coin and explore the limitations and obstacles for contemporary youth-​led activism with/​for migrants ‘to promote anti-​ neoliberal and anti-​authoritarian models, to redeem the future’ (Traverso, 2019: np). Notes I must make three notes about the widened age range of the interviewees in this research, to include people who are 35. First, I was seeking research participants who occupied the field of migrant rights activism in a predominant part of the 2010s in Istanbul, meaning that some of the participants would now be in their 30s. Second, as Fırat argues (Fırat, 2013) based upon her fieldwork conducted with educated, middle-​class youth in Istanbul, Ankara and İzmir between 2011 and 2012, the phenomenon of extension/​prolongation of the youth period in neoliberal societies stems from structural factors (unemployment of educated young people, inability to pursue the careers promised by diplomas, the lack of economic freedom and therefore the inability to leave the family home permanently). Third, due in part to young people’s adoption of anti-​capitalist political attitudes, they prefer to live outside the institutional established models and stay out of the system in the face of these structural factors, also prolonging their ‘youth-​ness’. All the names used in this chapter are pseudonyms. The texts of the interviews they gave were delivered fully anonymised to the prison. The research participants who agreed to participate in this research deserve the biggest thanks. 2 Based on the FEANTSA (European Federation of National Organisations Working with the Homeless) definition of homelessness (see ETHOS, 2005), Gizem fits in the typology of homelessness, under the category of ‘8.1. People living in insecure accommodation’, as she lives temporarily with her family due to the lack of housing. Gizem stated that she lived in a rented apartment until a year ago, but she had to move into her family because she could not afford the rent. According to the 2021 report of the Habitat Association, 52 per cent of the youth with a household income of 3,000 TL or less stated that they could not afford rent, electricity and water expenses. The numbers provided by Habitat confirms that a high percentage of young people and young adults, who are not financially independent to live on their own, have to reside with their parents in today’s Turkey. 1

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Kaika, M. (2017) ‘Between compassion and racism: How the biopolitics of neoliberal welfare turns citizens into affective “idiots”’, European Planning Studies, 25(8): 1275–​291. Kearney, R. (2004) On Paul Ricoeur: The Owl of Minerva, Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate. Kennelly, J. (2014) ‘“It’s this pain in my heart that won’t let me stop”: Gendered reflexivity, webs of relations, and young women’s activism’, Feminist Theory, 15(3): 241–​60. Kennelly, J. (2018) ‘Envisioning democracy: Participatory filmmaking with homeless youth’, Canadian Review of Sociology, 55(2): 190–​210. May, V. (2015) Pursuing Intersectionality, Unsettling Dominant Imaginaries, New York: Routledge. Menga, F.G. (2014) ‘The seduction of radical democracy: Deconstructing Hannah Arendt’s political discourse’, Constellations, 21(3): 313–​26. Migrant Solidarity Kitchen (nd) Available from: http://​gocm​enda​yani​sma. com/​tarlab​asi-​gdmutf​agi/​ [accessed 4 September 2021]. Mmembe, A. (2020 [2016]) Düşmanlık Politikaları [The Society of Enmity], Istanbul: İletişim Publications. Mouffe, C. (ed) (1992) Dimensions & Radical Democracy: Pluralism, Citizenship, Community, London: Verso. Ricoeur, P. (1976) Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning, Fort Worth: Texas Christian University. Schaap, A. (2021) ‘Inequality, loneliness, and political appearance: Picturing radical democracy with Hannah Arendt and Jacques Ranciere’, Political Theory, 49(1): 28–​53. Sert, D. and Danış, D. (2021) ‘Framing Syrians in Turkey: State control and no crisis discourse’, International Migration, 59(1): 197–​214. Traverso, E. (2016) Left-​Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory, New York: Columbia University Press. Traverso, E. (2019) ‘What we’re seeing now around the world is different from classic fascism’, interview by Democracia Abierta. Available from: https://​ www.opende​mocr​acy.net/​en/​democr​acia​abie​r ta/​enzo-​trave​rso-​lo-​que-​ vemos-​ahora-​en-​el-​mundo-​es-​algo-​disti​nto-​al-​f asci​smo-​clás​ico-​en/​ [accessed 20 December 2019].

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PART II

Young people acting together for eco-​justice

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Imagining the future under capitalism: young people involved in environmental activism in an economic crisis Dena Arya

Introduction This chapter explores how young people living in England, involved in environmental activism, conceptualise and practice transformative change in addressing the current global ecological crisis (Hufnagel et al, 2020). The aim of this chapter is to highlight that within youth-​led environmental activist spaces there appears to be an emergent culture of anti-​capitalism and a desire for radical system change. Despite the nuanced political and socio-​economic positions that young people arrive at their activism from, there are also common threads that tie their social imaginaries together for a future founded on social justice and collective values. How young people engaged in such modalities are developing communities steeped in hope for a better future warrants not only the eyes and ears of researchers and youth practitioners, but also necessitates the adoption or creation of platforms from which to have their voices heard. This chapter contributes, with joy, to that goal. The goals of this chapter fit into a wider understanding that is weaved throughout this book which sees practices of hope as embedded in radical community development. Imagining alternatives to the status quo necessitates hope and this chapter is part of a wider discussion this book presents around the rethinking of community development that rejects the neoliberal mantra that there is no alternative. Global concentrations of wealth have resulted in increasing levels of economic inequality. Oxfam (2021) now estimates that the richest 1 per cent own twice as much wealth as 6.9 billion people in a world population of 7.9 billion people. Looking to the national context, the UK is now one of the most unequal countries in Europe (McCann, 2020) with further income and wealth inequality on the horizon, exacerbated by the COVID-​ 19 pandemic (Blundell et al, 2020). Although trends towards increasingly 45

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unequal societies were already underway before the Global Financial Crash (Wilkinson and Pickett, 2010), post-​2008 such inequalities have accelerated (Bessant et al, 2017). Scholarship pertaining to economic inequality is growing and points to such inequality being a threat to liberal democracy (Piketty and Goldhammer, 2020). This has in particular served to further marginalise young people economically (Hart and Henn, 2017). The lived experience of young people during this period offers a context for their responses to both the ecological and economic crises.1 Recent research with young people involved in environmental activism highlights how they tend to see capitalism and the environmental crisis as interlinked (Arya and Henn, 2021). This chapter looks in particular at such young people’s experiences of this linkage. Those involved in the research tended to speak about humanity’s holistic relationship with ecosystems and the need to live in balance with nature, simultaneously rejecting ‘economistic’ views that conceptualise non-​human life as a resource in the service of humanity (Clark and York, 2005). Normative understandings of nature conceive of it as a resource which is available to humanity to exploit (Fraser and Jaeggi, 2018), so too are economic systems designed to drive up profit and wealth generation at the expense of the environment (Mirowski, 2013). Core to the argument this chapter makes is that young people appear to be critical of capitalism and hope for solutions to the environmental crisis that incorporate social and ecological justice. The following section outlines the writer’s personal journey that led to research this chapter is based on. This personal experience offers a keyhole through which to notice the recent social and political histories that have led to some young people’s seeming resistance to neoliberal capitalism. To further exemplify this, three individual stories will be expanded on, all drawn from ethnographic and interview-​based methods of qualitative research with young people involved in activism between 2019 and 2021 in England. These stories will offer the reader a snapshot of how some young people are reconceptualising transformative change and the struggles that emerge from the hope-​driven need to act in the face of such a colossal event in the trajectory of planetary history.

Youth activism and youth work in the era of recessions I engage in research with young people from the position of an activist-​ researcher and youth worker-​researcher. I do not aim for empathic neutrality in my research and instead recognise the value which reflexivity and positionality bring to making meaning of the worlds which researchers visit. For this reason, I have given space here to reflecting on my own experience of activism and youth work which has led to the ideas presented in this chapter. 46

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My first experience of activism as a teenager coincided with the Iraq war and was altogether by chance. I was walking along the Millennium Bridge in London, where I saw my first ever protest. I was 16 and it was a transformative experience. I had been a part of many discussions in my community about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq between 2001 and 2003. I remember sitting with my parents in the living room as we watched the bombs fall on Baghdad, feeling powerless and enraged. I grew up as both a Londoner and a member of the Iranian diaspora. I remember my father telling us stories when we were growing up about how he would swim across the Arvand Rood river to Iraq and back from his hometown in Abadan, a stone’s throw from the borders of Iraq. Despite not being Iraqi or Afghani, the structural racial capitalism that allowed for these UK and USA led wars to take place, played out as street level racism for myself and my community in those years. It was a complex time to be a young person of Middle Eastern heritage in the UK and the situation has never really improved. That day by the Millennium Bridge as I watched the protesters go past, I was astonished; they were marching, chanting and waving banners in the air against the Iraq war. I was enamoured by the scene, so much so that I decided to join in. I had never marched in unison with others in support of a political cause before. I walked silently alongside them, feeling both outsider and insider. Insider as this was our cause and we all had a common adversary. Yet I was an outsider because I could not yet speak their language. I did not yet have the confidence to raise my voice, make their chants my chants and enact my politics. In time, and with much practice, I found my protester’s voice and became an insider out on the streets as I demonstrated against countless adversaries, for countless causes until I became exhausted. My voice no longer carried no matter how loud I shouted, and I decided to turn my attention elsewhere to be a part of the transformative change I yearned for. Following a prolonged sense of exhaustion with activism, I turned my attention to community-​based youth work to find a space where I might have a greater sense of agency in contributing to social change. This led to a decade as a youth work practitioner, supporting young people mostly in low-​income areas of London. Since the onset of the Great Recession, working in the youth and community development sector, I have witnessed the young people I work with become more politically informed, agitated and motivated. I define politics not simply as a formal structure relating to institutions and actors, but as a process, concerned with the unequal distribution of wealth, resources and power which can be either social or institutional in nature (Hay, 2007). I have seen young people find creative ways to disturb, disrupt and engage with institutions, such as local authorities, to get their voices heard. Core to many of these interactions have been issues of inequality, particularly as many of the young people I worked with were 47

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either vulnerable to or lived in areas experiencing high levels of income inequality and deprivation. The political and economic narrative that has shaped the lived experience for many of the young people I have worked with began with the Global Financial Crash of 2008. At this time, I worked at a community centre for a London Local Authority known for having one of the highest child poverty rates in the UK. During this time youth service budgets were slashed, and community centres were either eviscerated or closed down. From reduced provision to the closure of entire services Conservative-​led post-​2010 austerity decimated community-​based organisations and scrapped the majority of the provisions offered (Smith et al, 2018). Beyond challenges in service delivery, my time with this Local Authority highlighted issues in how services often blocked young people from participating in any meaningful way to affect change in their local areas. The experiences of the young people I worked with reflected my own feelings of inefficacy in my activism. In these years my experiences led to an acute awareness of the silencing and exhaustion that is felt by young people when their agency is limited, and they feel unable to make a difference. My time as a youth worker over the past decade resulted in an experience of structural silencing; both of myself and of young people I worked with. In this context of neoliberal control of public services, community-​based youth work approaches which emphasise creativity and agency towards social justice and radical transformation are essential. The following stories of three young people involved in environmental activism explore commonalities in their visions and practices of building alternative spaces together. Drawing from distinct political identities and lived experiences of economic inequality, their reflections on the solutions to the environmental crisis offer the youth practitioner community development understandings with which to build solidarity and hope with young people towards social justice.

The communist, non-​political and reformist young climate strikers In recent years there has been a resurgence of popularity in environmental activism across the Global North and South which has been predominantly youth-​led (O’Brien et al, 2018). Youth Strike for Climate (YSC), is a significant grassroots group involved in this uprising. YSC is a youth-​led movement inspired by a young Swedish activist, Greta Thunberg, resulting in young people striking from school globally on Fridays since 2019. Research with such young people involved in environmental activism in the UK highlights the importance of hope as a key driver in their political actions for a better future (Pickard et al, 2020). Young people striking in this context have taken a tool often seen in political kits of trade unions 48

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and played out in workplaces and brought it into mainstream educational spaces. This symbolic action demonstrates how young people, recognising their power as consumers of education in a neoliberal system, can withdraw their participation with an aim to levy social change. Historically community development has been seen as a civic alternative to the strike, which until now has been the gold standard of workplace political action. Youth practitioners and those involved in community development, it is argued, can learn from these youth-​led repertoires of political action by exploring how young people they work with conceptualise and engage with such participatory methods. Increasingly young people appear to be rejecting formal institutional politics and opting for more radical political alternatives. The writer’s experiences with young people as a practitioner mirrors the difficulties that young people are presented with in working towards such alternatives. Often young people are silenced because of the constraints they are working within, be that institutional or otherwise. This is particularly true of youth work in a neoliberal context where radical change is far from welcomed (Taylor et al, 2018). The three young people involved in this research are from two chapters of YSC in England and broadly present as having different politics from one another. Despite this they all discuss the need for radical and transformative change to the existing system in order to bring about social justice in addressing the environmental crisis. The communist striker Fin is 23 years old, a recent university graduate living in a medium-​sized city in England. At the time of the last financial crash, they were 11 years old. Speaking on this topic, they felt that the 2008 financial crisis had had a profound impact on the lives of young people in the UK. They have experienced over half their lifetime in the era of economic crisis. They identify as a non-​binary Black person with a working-​class identity. Fin saw themselves as becoming political because of the development of the youth-​ led environmental movement, before which they had not been involved in political action. In the time I spent with Fin, I saw them engage in and facilitate ‘educationals’ (sessions where two or three members of the group would teach the rest of the group about the topic they had done research on), workshops, meetings, organising for protests and direct action. They wrote speeches and would often take the microphone at demonstrations to engage bystanders in dialogue. They would speak eloquently with me on walks to and from such actions about Marxism, socialism and class-​based inequalities. Fin saw capitalism as the main driver of the environmental crisis. They contextualised the issue of capitalism as part of a wider historical colonial and imperial narrative. They saw the environmental crisis and capitalism as inextricably woven together. Moreover, they saw this as a matter of social 49

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justice and felt that indigenous and minority rights played a central role in the solutions to the environmental crisis. They saw the solutions to the environmental crisis being led by oppressed groups such as the working class and indigenous communities. During the pandemic and ensuing COVID-​19 social restrictions the capacity for Fin and their fellow youth strike group to act was limited and much of the activities went online. They felt that the government lockdown had put off those who were less radical and less committed to direct action. They recognised the major challenges environmental activists had in enacting change. However, they felt that collective action that moved beyond individual behaviour change was at the crux of this issue. They were critical of the environmental movement and felt that working-​class people had been excluded from such spaces: “Because it’s been dominated by middle class reformists, people who like to do a bit of preaching about how we should be cutting down on palm oil usage and use reusable straws, ignoring the fact that the options are to get cheap food or starve” (Fin, interview). They also rejected individual behaviour change as a way of making transformative change. They saw young people to be situated outside of the labour market and therefore less embedded in the class struggle. For this reason, they felt young people were able to take more leading roles in the environmental movement as they did not have the same level of cynicism as adults or relationship with class. They saw YSC as having the potential to be radical, which they felt it had been, in some instances. Ultimately, they pointed to capitalism being the greatest challenge to the environmental crisis: “It is a problem to be faced by the whole international working class that needs to be clear in the necessity of smashing the capitalist system of exploitation in order to protect the environment and defend peoples’ health, lives and their way of existence” (Fin, interview). The reformist striker George is 16 years old and in secondary education.2 He has been involved in political activism since 2019. He lives in the north of England and described himself as middle class but not by London standards. While he felt that those from working-​class areas were left out of environmental activism, he also felt that there were issues of racism and classism. George is White British, and on reflecting on the inequalities that exist in taking part in environmental activism he spoke about his own experiences of Whiteness in the environmental groups he had been involved in. George felt that young White environmental activists can accidentally exclude their non-​White counterparts. He explained that at times White members of 50

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the climate strike group he was a part of would explain racial concepts on behalf of non-​White members instead of making the space for them to be heard. George spoke with a great deal of self-​awareness both of his own standpoint as a White, male young person and also as someone who had some socio-​economic advantages in comparison to others in his access to activism. Reflecting on some of the challenges presented to the YSC group he set up at his school, George spoke about the involvement of radical left-​wing political adult groups such as the Socialist Workers Party, who took part in their Youth Strike chapter.3 George saw their involvement as indoctrinating and was concerned about adults coercing young people towards certain modes of political thought. He was particularly concerned about the radical elements of such political coercion. However, George also saw radical change was necessary to address environmental issues. George then went on to get involved in Teach The Future (TTF). TTF is a campaign group led by young people which aims to embed education on the climate emergency and environmental crisis in UK education policy. George reflected on his experience as a member of TTF and critiqued the efficacy of the work that they did at TTF, which at times he saw as not radical enough. Despite being involved in institutional groups to make environmental change, George recognised that electoral politics alone could not make the transformative shift necessary to tackle the environmental crisis. Throughout our interactions George was explicit about his views on radical and reformist modes of social and political change in addressing the environmental crisis. He felt that both were needed, and in particular he felt that reforms could lead to radical changes. When speaking about the adult-​led parent companies that were a part of TTF he felt that their goals were centred towards sustainability and individual behaviour change. While George was supportive of these actions, he recognised that radical climate justice was fundamental to making change, however he did feel that there was space for both kinds of solutions. George also felt that conflict within the organisation was sparked by differences in opinions between the adult staff and the young people. While young people tended to veer towards more radical solutions, the adults instead pushed for greener jobs and sustainability. However, he was also concerned about how this meant that they could not be explicitly anti-​capitalist and what this meant for tackling the environmental crisis more generally. This experience demonstrates the kinds of silencing of young people that can take place when they collaborate with adults. “If we all said ‘capitalism, you need to get rid of that for the climate crisis’, we’d get blacklisted as an organisation … we are never going to get rid of the climate crisis for good without getting rid of capitalism” (George, interview). 51

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The non-​political striker Emily is 17 years old and is currently studying for her A Levels at a private school in the Midlands. Emily was hopeful about what could be done about the environmental crisis, in part this hope was generated by her involvement in YSC. Emily felt frustrated by how other people viewed her as ‘emotional’ over environmental issues. Yet she, like Fin and George, also felt that community learning was fundamental to shifting these kinds of perceptions. Her motivation for being a part of YSC was to develop her thinking rather than ‘making a massive difference’. She also felt that it was important for communities to come together and share different kinds of views. Like Fin and George, she spoke about the heterogeneity of the environmental movement and expressed that it was normal to have different views from each other. Emily felt that systemic change was needed while also putting forward that people’s individual actions were not the problem and that people needed to look at the wider context of the environmental crisis. Emily considered herself to be ‘very lucky’ and did not feel that any inequalities got in the way of her environmental action. However, she reflected on the issue of groups like Extinction Rebellion typically attracting middle-​class adults. She felt that the climate strikes were better as she felt that young people were more open-​minded. Emily reflected on how political she felt environmental issues are, expressing concern over the power wielded by corporations, who she felt had more power than governments. While Fin was very clear that the environmental crisis was a political issue and George felt that it was both a political and moral issue, Emily did not see herself as a political person. Instead, she reflected on her interest in environmental activism coming from a place of morality. However, she also recognised that these issues needed to be resolved through politics: “Motivation behind striking is a social justice issue and that shouldn’t be a political issue. It’s a human issue” (Emily, interview). Much of how Emily envisaged addressing these issues was through awareness-​raising and education. She defined radical as changing the status quo which she felt was necessary in the environmental movement: “But the term is a misused one … the Green Party say they are radical, but it’s not radical to suggest that everyone should have a good minimum wage” (Emily, interview). She saw radical change as something positive, but worried that others would see radical as something negative and disruptive. When it came to capitalism, she felt the push for people to be economically productive meant that they did not have time to reflect on their emotions or values, which she saw as imperative to understanding how the environmental crisis is

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unfolding: “Capitalism only supports the minority and that’s the problem, as soon as it’s scaled up millions of people lose out. I don’t think it can work sustainably and fairly on a global scale” (Emily, interview).

What can we learn from these young people? These three stories reflect the nuanced positions young people engage with environmental activism. All of these young people were at the very early stages of their activism journeys, yet they already had clear political positions from which to engage in the climate strikes; one rejecting the system all together in a drive towards communism, another choosing institutional reforms over no change at all and another conceptualising the environmental crisis as a moral one over a political one. Despite such varied positionalities, there are commonalities in their wider imaginations of the future and the barriers to that future. They all spoke about capitalism as something to be fought if the environmental crisis is to be resolved. It seemed that speaking out against capitalism was a way in which to imagine beyond it, and it was in this imagination where hope existed for them. Despite having different political positions, all three imagined realities beyond capitalism. The collective tone of the youth environmental movement is that it is anti-​capitalist in nature. There are high-​profile scholars such as Fraser (2021) and Bell (2020) who argue that the environmental crisis is an unavoidable consequence of capitalism. While these scholars’ arguments seem to align with the position of many of the young people interviewed as part of the wider research this chapter is based on, this is much less the case in adult-​led environmentalism. In her recent research on working-​class environmentalism, Bell states that ‘many environmentalists still consider that environmental harms can be managed within the parameters of reformed capitalism, or even the current neoliberal capitalism’ (2020: 227). This apparent stand-​off between youth environmental activism and more traditional forms of mainstream environmentalism highlights a shift in ways to imagine a future beyond the environmental crisis that necessitates for so many young people an end to capitalism. Over a decade ago Fisher described capitalist realism as the view that ‘not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it’ (2009: 2). The young people in this chapter however appear to reject the validity of capitalism as an economic system and generated a sense of hope that there is an alternative. There is a strong sense that young people involved in environmental activism tend to be aware of the individualistic nature of neoliberal capitalism and often reject it as a means by which to solve the environmental crisis. Reflections on what has enabled this

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anti-​capitalist consciousness to emerge point to a holistic understanding of social justice and the impact of economic inequality. Young people are seemingly situating themselves as part of a wider global community alongside members of the Global South and indigenous communities who are affected as a marginalised group. There is a hopefulness that exists in the face of a plethora of fears and anxieties for the future which many of the young people in this research brought up, often in relation to their lives and the lives of their future children. The realities they spoke about, based ‘on the science’, led to a sense of urgency that they felt necessitated their actions. Beyond these fears and anxieties were often anger and frustration at adults and powerholders who they interchangeably called out as capitalists, corporations, banks, the fossil fuel industry or simply the system. However, these negative feelings were almost always discussed as part of mixed palates of feelings that also contained hope and joy (Montgomery and Bergman, 2017). Hope was often discussed in line with collective action, rejection of the status quo and their ability to change the future. Many of the young people involved in this research did not appear optimistic about any kind of individual behaviour change as a solution to the environmental crisis. They instead focused on the importance of collective action despite the challenges that came from the structural silencing they experienced and their conflicting political positions.

Conclusion Although the tired trope that young people are apathetic and disengaged from politics is now shifting (Pickard, 2019), scholarship on youth political participation historically has not seen young people as a ‘vanguard of social change’ (Furlong and Cartmel, 2007: 137). Young people’s political action is often seen through the lens of individualised identities and at best the surge in youth environmental politics is attributed to lifestyle and post-​material values of self-​expression (Semetko et al, 2007). It is commonly argued that young people are moving away from class-​based political organisation centred on a resistance to oppression, towards a politics of the individual, focused on cause-​based and single-​issue politics and driven by post-​materialist values. However, this narrative does not take into consideration the limited understandings of how young people conceptualise politics and how this plays out in their political action and non-​action (Henn et al, 2002). Young people in England growing up against the backdrop of two global recessions and increasing economic inequality seem to have an acute awareness of the relationship between class, capitalism and the environmental crisis. Although class has not been top of the agenda for scholars exploring environmental activism or youth political participation in recent decades, young people 54

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involved in environmental activism appear to be reigniting this as a key point of concern. Post-​materialist theory attributes collective action and a rejection of institutional forms of politics to young people who are educated and find themselves ‘freed from the urgency of material survival’ (Henn et al, 2018: 716). The young people in this chapter, it is argued, took part in extra-​institutional collective action to address environmental issues for the material survival of themselves and wider societies they see themselves situated in. Their collective political action is seemingly geared at countering the individualistic nature of the capitalist society they find themselves in. In the national context, class and issues relating to inequality have been at the core of many youth-​led political actions from the student protests in the UK in 2010 (Rheingans and Hollands, 2013), the Black Lives Matter movement in recent years, the Votes at 16 movement (Eichhorn and Bergh, 2020), and recently the youth-​led environmental protests. While many young people were involved in such direct action, occupied buildings or went on strike for their own needs and futures, many also went for the future of others and did not get direct dividends from their actions (McKnight, 2020). Young people in this chapter, like many others doing their own politics (Pickard et al, 2020), conceptualise radical change in innovative ways that depart from normative understandings of political participation. A crucial ingredient for radical change for all three of these young people was education that existed outside of the mainstream. They, like many of their peers, devoted significant amounts of time to educating themselves. Whether fighting to get climate education into the national curriculum or to learn from, with and together, education was a key to imagining a future beyond the environmental crisis. Self-​education that leads to a critique of the status quo arguably is a radical act. Although not all radical forms of political action are left-​leaning or in support of social justice, diverse groups of young people, it is argued, are moving towards a politics of anti-​capitalism and equality. The forms of self-​education that happen outside of mainstream education are varied. These include watching documentaries online, running collective ‘educationals’ in groups to learn about a specific environmental topic, reading groups and social media (Arya and Henn, 2021). In this research I often observed, participated and learned through unstructured discussions with young people in the tradition of informal education in youth work. My own experiences as a young activist resulted in a sense of exhaustion with the lack of efficacy of my actions having spent years involved in similar forms of self-​education. This led to a disengagement from street politics where I felt I could not make a difference. In the last year-​and-​ a-​half as an activist-​ethnographer involved with youth climate strikers in England, I observed young people share similar frustrations, resulting in them disengaging from the YSC groups they were a part of. This mirrors 55

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the consequences of the lack of agency I witnessed among young people I have worked with. Although they demonstrated a strong desire to engage in community development activities, the tokenistic projects they were consulted on often repelled them from engaging further. There is therefore a need for adults (be they researchers, activists, or youth and community development practitioners) to act with honesty and authenticity when they ally with young people in projects of community development, since the young people are often able to point to the structural limitations of their own political agency. This raises the question of how adults in such roles might ally with young people in support of their visions of an alternative future that legitimately address the environmental crisis by addressing the exploitative nature of capitalism. This is particularly important as at times adults can be seen to be imposing agendas on young people that serve to further entrench the structural silencing that diminishes youth agency in such spaces. While this might appear an impossible task for those on the ground working in community development, this chapter asks that they, like the young people they work with, engage in practices of hope. Despite the neoliberal funding limitations on most youth projects, creating spaces where young people can imagine alternatives and have honest dialogue with adults about the realities of the economic systems that they exist in is one place to start. Given that community development in its infancy was centred on radical change, how this concept can be utilised by adults working with young people to create lines of solidarity and joyful rejection of the status quo requires adults to also be brave enough to imagine alternatives to the current system. Often when young people find spaces for collective solidarity with others, adults who get involved bring their own agenda and can take over. How adult allies can contribute to spaces of solidarity where the voices of young people are legitimately heard on their own terms needs reimagining. Adult allies have a great deal to learn from young people about hope and the process of collective education towards that goal. The capitalist system will likely not be brought to its knees with one revolution, despite the efforts and desires of many on the radical left. However, what adult allies are urged to pursue are the revolutions of thought, solidarity and reimagination that can occur in everyday life as emancipatory politics alongside the young people they work with. Notes Both economy and ecology come from the root of the same ancient Greek word ‘oikos’ which means home or dwelling (Shiva, 2020). 2 In the UK young people attend school until the age of 16 at which point further education is optional. 1

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Imagining the future under capitalism A chapter here refers to an individual group of youth climate strikers who are part of wider regional chapters that make up the Fridays For Future movement.

3

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McKnight, H. (2020) ‘ “The oceans are rising and so are we”: Exploring utopian discourses in the school strike for climate movement’, Brief Encounters, 4(4): 48–​63. Mirowski, P. (2013) Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown, London and New York: Verso. Montgomery, N. and Bergman, C. (2017) Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times, Chico: AK Press. O’Brien, K., Selboe, E. and Hayward, B.M. (2018) ‘Exploring youth activism on climate change: Dutiful, disruptive, and dangerous dissent’, Ecology and Society, 23(3): 1–13. Oxfam (2021) ‘Mega-​r ich recoup COVID-​losses in record-​time yet billions will live in poverty for at least a decade’, Oxfam, 25 January. Available from: https://​www.oxfam.org/​en/​press-​relea​ses/​mega-​r ich-​rec​oup-​ covid-​los​ses-​rec​ord-​time-​yet-​billi​ons-​will-​live-​pove​rty-​least [accessed 22 October 2021]. Pickard, S. (2019) Politics, Protest and Young People Political Participation and Dissent in 21st Century Britain, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Pickard, S., Bowman, B. and Arya, D. (2020) ‘ “We are radical in our kindness”: The political socialisation, motivations, demands and protest actions of young environmental activists in Britain’, Youth and Globalization, 2(2): 251–​80. Piketty, T. and Goldhammer, A. (2020) Capital and Ideology, Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Rheingans, R. and Hollands, R. (2013) ‘ “There is no alternative?”: Challenging dominant understandings of youth politics in late modernity through a case study of the 2010 UK student occupation movement’, Journal of Youth Studies, 16(4): 546–​64. Semetko, H., Mutz, D., Rohrschneider, R., Peffley, M. and Inglehart, R. (2007) ‘Postmaterialist values and the shift from survival to self-​expression values’, in R.J. Dalton and H.D. Klingemann (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Political Behaviour, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp 223–39. Shiva, V. (2019) Oneness Vs The 1%, Hartford, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing. Smith, G., Sylva, K., Smith, T., Sammons, P. and Omonigho, A. (2018) ‘STOP START: Survival, decline or closure? Children’s centres in England’, The Sutton Trust, April. Available from: https://​www.sutt​ontr​ ust.com/​wp-​cont​ent/​uplo​ads/​2018/​04/​StopSt​art-​FINAL.pdf [accessed 22 October 2021].

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Taylor, T., Connaughton, P., de St Croix, T., Davies, B. and Grace, P. (2018) ‘The impact of neoliberalism upon the character and purpose of English youth work and beyond’, in P. Alldred, F. Cullen, K. Edwards and D. Fusco (eds) The SAGE Handbook of Youth Work Practice, London: SAGE, pp 84–​113. Wilkinson, R. and Pickett, K. (2010) The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone, London: Penguin.

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Community building for and through sustainable food Dominic Zimmermann

This chapter explores food-​related community building activities by young environmental and social activists who seek to change food consumption patterns and thus change the transnational food system.1 It seeks to understand the role of food and drink (hereafter ‘food’) not only as the object of their concern but also as a discursive and sensory socio-​material entity that is itself involved in the building of more sustainable local and alternative food communities –​and that can certainly be strategically employed for other community-​building purposes as well. Food is often present in practices of community development and community building. Traditionally, food has been addressed as an aspect of the experience of poverty, for instance in relation to food banks (Warshawsky, 2020), community kitchens (Hennchen and Pregernig, 2020), credit unions and microfinance for small-​scale agricultural production (Salami et al, 2020). Food has also been a frequent topic in community development programmes of community education concerned with poverty alleviation, for example through budgeting for healthy nutrition and with health prevention such as in the case of obesity and other forms of malnutrition –​likewise often among poor populations (Wetherill et al, 2019). Food is also frequently used as the basis for community cohesion work in multicultural contexts (Gatenby et al, 2011). All these discussions show that these interventions stumble in relation to the complex issues of power (both personal and political) that food practices embody. In this chapter a different perspective unfolds, one in which food itself is the central concern: the chapter is concerned with the role of food in community-​building activities that aim at systemic changes in the food system. To that purpose, it focuses on discursive, material and sensory aspects of corresponding social practices that involve food and at the same time foster community. Particularly, it concerns the work of a group of young environmental activists from Zurich, Switzerland, who engage in the promotion of a more sustainable food system as one of the central fields where action is needed towards a more ecologically sustainable and more just society. Their community-​building activities do not only include 60

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information on food and education for better consumption choices, but also affect-​laden activities such as common cooking sessions and joint meals in a convivial atmosphere: thus activities that form and perform community draw both on the affective power of food as well as the considerable time-​ spans food activities need. These activities also are closely linked to the ethical dimension of food as within joint cooking and eating ethical issues regarding food, specifically its (non-​)local, (non-​)organic and (un)fair production, are raised. Their activities can be understood as a part of international social movements and their local initiatives that aim at a different, more sustainable food system as opposed to a food system that is dominated by big food companies. This form of environmental and social activism is integrated in wider contexts of grassroots politics from below. It relates to glocalised networks of food activists as well as to local networks among environmental activists that go beyond the topic of sustainable food consumption. Many of the young people are part of transnational food networks and they are active in environmentalist groups with other environmental foci as well. Yet, their community-​building activity is not confined to activists’ circles; it ultimately reaches out to potentially all the residents of the city of Zurich and beyond. Hence, they address local communities in a context that is different from much other community building that addresses poor and other marginalised communities: although poverty undoubtedly and visibly exists in this financial nodal point of the capitalist system, Zurich is a city with a high proportion of people with good salaries, high education, accessible housing, and well-​functioning transportation, health and social systems, all in all resulting in a high quality of life for many (PICSA, 2019). Zurich is also a city with numerous important players in the industrialised food system, which the activists aim to transform towards more sustainability. As Sage et al suggest, such a more sustainable food system promoted by various social movements builds on new types of coalitions –​and communities: At its most basic level we might suggest that the application of sustainability to food production and supply is to secure diets with low environmental impacts, yet which deliver nutrition security and wellbeing for both present and future generations. Working towards the achievement of such a goal will require nothing less than a complete transformation of the existing global food system … we are witnessing the emergence of a loose coalition of diverse actors –​including peasants, urban dwellers, scientists of many disciplines and people who eat and who are concerned about their food –​that is beginning to offer a new vision for food production, supply and consumption. This coalition no longer operates entirely as protest: it performs opposition to the status quo, demonstrating that alternatives are not only practically feasible, 61

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they also deliver a host of other co-​benefits, including ecological regeneration, community building and improved wellbeing. (Sage et al, 2020: 1–​2) Substantial research on social food movements and local food initiatives has been carried out, however, ‘there are hardly any studies that deliver an analytical understanding of the organisational aspects of these collective food initiatives and the development of their activities’ (Hennchen and Pregernig, 2020: 44), nor of the community-​building strategies involving and evolving around food. Young people’s activism discussed in this chapter is contributing to the developing understanding of grassroots and community organising in relation to sustainable food. By giving an account of the Youth Sustainable Food Network (YSFN; a pseudonym) and by analysing practices of community, this chapter aims particularly to explore the place and nature of conviviality that evolves around food in community-​making. By involving people in food-​related activities, as well as by making use of food and food places, community development is practised and at the same time this conviviality is used to promote the activists’ agenda. Three different settings with different dynamics around food and different degrees of openness are presented here. These are the public eat-​ins, the monthly regulars’ tables and a core group reunion. The subsequent sections reflect on the activists’ community-​building activities for the development of a local community of small-​scale producers and consumers –​and of the place this can provide for the young activists themselves. Finally, the learning from the young people’s community-​building practices is extended to engage with inclusive community development and the chapter concludes with remarks on potential dynamics of community building through food as both an inclusive and yet potentially exclusive practice.

Youth Sustainable Food Network The members of the YSFN in the focus of this chapter see themselves operating to a large degree independently from the local section of their parent network, an international sustainable food platform. The young people understand themselves first and foremost as being part of an international youth-​led social movement that takes a critical and creative stance on consumption, agriculture and the food industry dominated by multinational corporations. They share an interest in a ‘better food future’, advocating a socially and ecologically responsible food system that protects biocultural diversity and animal welfare. This implies solidarity with the producers and demands a reorientation (and to a large degree relocalisation) of institutionalised food practices. To do so, they raise awareness on food 62

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issues and educate people to raise their nutritional competence, ultimately in order to mobilise their consumer power. The network in Switzerland is formally constituted as an association. However, for the activities no formal membership is required. There are local groups that gather regularly on a regulars’ table. In Zurich 10 to 15 young adults –​many of whom are professionals in the food sector –​organise events that are carried out in the name of the network. Many of the activities take place in settings where food is produced and consumed and where social or political activism becomes material, sensory and ethical all at once. During these events, importance is given to communal and peer-​educational practices on the right food choices: this is not only expected to enable the creation of a better (food) community but promises to effect change. Importance is also placed on an open and entertaining atmosphere. These events can take on various forms such as eat-​ins in public space, cooking discos and visits to local producers. Most importantly, the network organises monthly regulars’ tables attended by people aged from their early 20s to their late 30s. These events are open to anybody, and the group intends to be as permeable as possible. It declares itself open to people who just want to change their own nutritional habits as well as to those who would like to ‘start a worldwide food revolution’ (cf Roth and Zimmermann, 2019). In what follows, we enquire into some of the community-​building dynamics.

Public eat-​ins For newcomers, the first contact with the YSFN happens through their web presence, public eat-​ins or through one of their courses on sustainable food. The network distributes information on its events on its own homepage, through a mailing list and social media. Many of the core elements of its community-​building practices are already evident in the event notices: that is, fairness, organic production, regionality and seasonality of food, the avoidance of food waste and packaging waste. Also, conviviality and two types of communities are frequently mentioned: the community of people who gather to eat at their events and a community between producers and consumers, a link that needs to be made visible again and needs to be framed in terms of solidarity rather than conflict. Finally, there is a strong appeal to the senses; in the following example of an announcement of a public eat-​in by the network, the focus is primarily on the sense of sight, which in turn is reminiscent of taste experiences: Red juicy tomatoes, orange pumpkins, green-​purple artichokes: In autumn, nature once again shows us what it can do and presents us with colourful delights. We want to celebrate this colourful diversity with as many people as possible. … Let yourself be inspired by what 63

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is currently on offer at the market or by leftovers in the fridge, buy something delicious in the neighbourhood shop or at a farm shop. And bring something to eat or drink to the big eat-​in to share with everyone else! (YSFN Newsletter September 2016. Please note we cannot provide further details for YSFN material referenced in this chapter, as YSFN is a pseudonym and the real network needs to remain anonymous) Eating in community is the core element of the eat-​ins, which are aimed at a broad public and thus are held in spaces that are as public as possible. However, comfort food is never an end in itself for the activists who organise these eat-​ins, but a means to an end to establish a different food culture. For the activists, eat-​ins are ‘meant to bring many people together at one table’ with the goal to ‘draw attention to the people who grow, produce, sell and prepare our food. It is more than just a cosy get-​together: Together we make a stand for fair, local and seasonal food and turn our backs on food waste and fast food’ (YSFN Newsletter September 2016). The main purpose of these events is to sensitise people to the issue of and to provide information on sustainable food. Good food should become visible and tasteable. For this purpose, their food is not only staged as important, innovative and sensuous, but eating and drinking become a community experience. For instance, at these large eat-​ins there may well be food sponsored by producers, but an important part of these events consists in bringing and sharing food by participants, from starters through to desserts and encompassing all kinds of diet. At long tables or rows of tables, participants sit next to people who have already arrived: there are no individual groups as in a restaurant. Even if there is already food on the table eating does not start until after a short introduction, which clarifies the meaning and purpose of the eat-​in and only then people start eating together. The following observation at an eat-​ in with about 150 people illustrates this together with other core elements which stage community: [The young woman with the megaphone] introduces herself and 3 other young women as the OC and officially welcomes to the eat-​ in. She speaks with a lot of enthusiasm and joy. She emphasises what today is about: ‘Celebrating diversity of food and its producers’. She explains that the vegetable table decoration is made up of rejected organic vegetables that cannot be offered in the trade because they are ‘perhaps a little too crooked, a little too short, too big’ and asks us to take them home at the end. … ‘So don’t be afraid to take some of the leftovers with you at the end! …’ Then follows the thanks to all the 64

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co-​organisers and helpers who have lent a hand in the run-​up today, as well as to all the visitors. … ‘Both fish and meat are now ready and therefore the eat-​in will officially start.’ She explains that the helpers will now bring the bowls of food to the tables, which should then be passed on. She then calls on everyone to ‘enjoy and talk to each other!’ Finally, everyone claps and some, especially the helpers, shout enthusiastically. (Fieldnotes, Roth, 2016) Creating a happy and communal atmosphere is part of the programme and talking to others is expected. Passing on the food also contributes to the sense of community; it always provides new surprises and new topics of conversation when new food is handed round. Sitting together with strangers for a little longer allows conversations not only about food –​with most of those present having a pronounced interest in food topics –​but also about professional backgrounds and personal stories. Conversation moves beyond small talk to enter into more profound discussions. A young woman in her early 30s with short blonde hair wearing a helper’s shirt sits down at the table with us. … Some other helpers do the same at other places. Then the helper tells us about the idea [of the network]. It seems to me as if she is fulfilling her ‘mission’ here. In my perception, however, she does not speak in a lecturing way at all, but rather in a storytelling way. (Fieldnotes, Roth, 2016) Activists and facilitators try to be as ‘undogmatic’ as possible. Instead, enjoyment, exchange, information and offering role models might spur people to rethink their own food practices. In this sense confrontation is present, but usually disagreement is not expressed as a direct confrontation with attendees. At the end of such eat-​ins, another potentially communal element comes into play: the visitors can take leftover food or surplus vegetables with them. However, the eat-​in is intended to have further effects that go beyond the actual event, also encouraging those present to further engage with sustainable food, for example by purchasing the network’s seasonal calendar or by coming to another event, such as the monthly regulars’ table.

Regulars’ tables and core group meetings Once a month, a regulars’ table with around 20, sometimes up to 40 people, takes place at different locations. As at least one observation at a big eat-​in has shown, decidedly ‘young’ people are invited to the regulars’ ­tables –​although the network members do not have a strict idea about what 65

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‘young’ means and there is no age limit to the regulars’ tables. The regulars’ tables are open to anyone who is interested. However, many of the people who attend the regulars’ tables are roughly under 30 and either belong to the inner core of the Zurich group or come from other organisations in the sustainability or food sector and are heavily involved with the topic in their private or professional lives. Once again, community is created also around food. What makes the regulars’ tables distinct –​apart from their smaller size, stronger homogeneity among attendees and their greater frequency –​is that the exchanges at the regulars’ tables events are more structured in order to network and exchange around topics of sustainable nutrition within a wider ecological community. The corresponding script is explained to people who join the regulars’ tables: ‘First, we eat together, then we present our own projects, then external people can present their projects. We want to keep the official part compact so that there is still time for informal discussions at the end’ (fieldnotes, Roth, 2016). In this way the networking functions mirror both those of business and of some traditional forms of community development. First upcoming network events are announced and then the stage –​or rather table –​is open to attendees who are not part of the network. In this time slot, a wide variety of projects, initiatives or start-​ups are presented. Finally, the regulars’ tables are concluded with dessert, during which the seating arrangements are broken up and the informal part can begin. Dessert goes well with individual, less structured networking, small talk and friendship, which might also be considered important ingredients of the ongoing community building. The community that is networked here is one in which professional and civic engagement often overlap. These networking meetings might be considered as an essential element of community development, with those present in the role of community development practitioners in relation to the wider network, as it is a professional as well as a personal and political commitment that brings them together. This more structured form of community building in comparison to the eat-​ins also seems to have a higher threshold in terms of access, particularly evident in the round of introductions. Before the meal each person present introduces themselves in turn. They are asked for their name, profession or organisation and for the food they have brought with them. The latter seems to be perceived by various people as a test of social affiliation. The fact that food is a mark of distinction seems to be accentuated in the context of the network’s demand for the right choice of food: Paula: Clara:

Everyone brings something [some food] and then explains it and then you’re already a bit involved in the group, exactly … Yes, it is an ideal icebreaker … 66

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Annina: Clara:

Although, at the beginning, people are a bit shy because they think: have I really brought something that is accepted in this … context? That’s right, that’s the downside, that’s an inhib-​, so when they come, they are shy, but maybe that’s why they don’t come at all. (Group discussion with YSFN members, Roth, 2016)

Bringing the wrong food is not actively reprimanded or commented on, which corresponds to their claim of being ‘undogmatic’ and open to all. Less suitable food is also brought to the table where it is simply overshadowed by more suitable food. Over time, the regulars learn from each other’s examples what is considered appropriate. The regulars’ table’s clear agenda also highlights their goals and blends with the YSFN’s ‘undogmatic’ approach which is motivated by their willingness to be as open as possible. Nevertheless, moments of social distinction related to food choices as well as potential exclusion through more formal, time-​ consuming meetings and the corresponding need for a certain commitment become more apparent in this setting. The latter is especially accentuated in the meetings of the ‘core group’. Here openness for discussion combines with the need for efficiency. The focus is much more on organisation, meetings and project work and less on the community-​building activity of eating. Several of the approximately ten active members of this core group are also active in other civil society initiatives or engaged professionally in the field of sustainable food. Their professional stance is mirrored in a high level of concern about resources, which is not only about how many resources the individual members can contribute but also the hope that eventually at least some income can be generated with certain network projects. In these considerations, efficiency and benefit calculations play an important role. Nevertheless, the grassroots democratic claim that everyone has an equal say is not abandoned. This results in a blend of claims that certainly involve conflicts about the right form of discussion which once more exemplify the manifoldness of this form of environmental and social activism. The aim is to include as many as possible in joint learning processes which build community while keeping a clear political, and for some, also professional agenda. As will be shown in the next section, these different claims also coincide with the building of different forms of community.

Community building for sustainable food Through the activists’ community-​building practices, a community of like-​minded people emerges, which can be described as a community of 67

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practice (Wenger, 1998): self-​managed groups of individuals who share a common interest, often a work role or similar tasks, and interact with the intention of improving practice. This community of practice consists of people who want to learn to change their own food choices and those of others in such a way that the industrial food system can be changed by ethical consumption. This is obviously not an easy task and therefore the community of practice becomes an important means to collaborate to make public actions possible, acquire skills and knowledge, be in contact with peers and thus informed on current developments in the field and, not least, be affected by the joint joyous and tasteful experience and thus motivated for further action. As the descriptions of the eat-​ins, the regulars’ tables and the core group meetings have shown, these interactions take place in settings that are differently accessible, where learning is more or less structured and addresses different topics from skills to making the right food choices to organisational skills in the contexts both of a social movement and professional enterprise. In order to change the food system and to transform markets against the concentrated market power of large, often multinational food producers and distributors, the young activists are also working on another community, namely the one between local consumers and local (small) producers. This second strand of their community building goes beyond networking, sensitisation and the joint development of competences in communities of practice; it aims at a societal change and addresses the economic exchanges in the food system they want to reorient towards exchanges within local communities. Therefore, they promote a strong identification on the part of the consumers with the producers, which should lead to corresponding solidarity on the part of the consumers –​and thus willingness to pay more for organic, fair, clean and local production. As has been shown in the fieldnote descriptions, the young activists ensure not only that conviviality and interchanges among the in-​the-​moment community of eaters can unfold at eat-​ins or at regulars’ tables, but that also the community between consumers and local (small) producers is addressed. This connection is also present in food grown or made by small-​scale producers, thus emphasising the value of the solidarity as people experience that local food is not only more sustainable, but also fresher, healthier and tastier. The two forms of community building are intertwined through discourse and through food. Both discourse and bodily engagement with food together serve to bring the producers and the economic and social relations behind the food back into awareness –​which counters the invisibility of most humans (and many other species) in the industrialised food system. This community building could be understood as an alternative form of economic and business promotion, but ultimately it is a political act for the food activists. Even if the label of politics or the political is not shared 68

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by all members of the core team, there are also members who explicitly understand this engagement as ‘political’, in a way that can connect to Laclau and Mouffe’s (1985) understanding of the political as being founded on an agonistic confrontation. Moreover, the political-​confrontational aspect is also understood as a special feature of the youth network compared to the parent organisation, as two members of the core team explain: Clara:

Annina:

Clara: Annina:

[The network is] intrinsically already something very political. [They go on to add that this is not perceived the same way on the adult platform, which] has been parallel to politics … didn’t have any claim either to change something, but that’s the point, isn’t it? And it wasn’t either about being publicly influential but just about meeting people who already have exactly the same political opinion, who don’t look for the argument at all and where you just go somewhere for a nice meal together … no questions have been asked, also because it has been very closed group. Yes that’s true: politics is automatically a confrontation. It’s like that. And there are also very political discussions with us. And I confront and am confronted again and again. So, for example, when it comes to nationalism, that’s something that concerns me: So, such a closing of a market in connection with my liberal, partly liberal attitude … there are always topics where you automatically must think: ‘Where do I stand?!’, ‘What-​, what do I feel exactly? What are my values?’ That’s the way it is. (Group discussion with YSFN members, Roth, 2016)

So, the conviviality of good meals is necessarily combined with highlighting the political economy of food. Through their engagement these activists position themselves as a political actor, as a counter-​voice to hegemonic practices in a food system. They do so mainly by holding up alternative practices that stand in opposition to environmentally harmful and exploitative conditions and that express solidarity with small producers and farmers. These alternative practices are lived out in a pleasant mood, apparently with little overt confrontation. Behind these actions, however, there is a political agenda with a high degree of reflection of both the agonistic position represented (which is reflected, among other things, in the dissatisfaction with the allegedly insufficiently consistent actions of the parent network) and on the forms of ideally open and democratic interchanges, collaboration and peer learning at their events and of organisational meetings. 69

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The resulting solidaristic community should allow for more diversity than the previous system: diversity of producers, diversity of food, diversity of ways of eating and diversity of ways to influence the food system including new roles of empowered prosumers. The engagement of the food activist offers new narratives on shared pasts and futures and it opens up new subject positions for new participants in the food system. Mediated through the senses new positions are designed for small producers and for more responsible consumers against a hegemonic discourse, which is strongly dominated by industrial food production oriented towards efficiency criteria, standardisation and long supply chains controlled by large food corporations. In the envisaged food system, more participants have a say thanks to structures that rely on communitarian bonds creating a space beyond the requisites of standardised food production. Quite symbolically, even crooked vegetables find their place in this new food system. It is a hopeful future that is propagated at the eat-​ins, a future that not only brings more agency for consumers and small producers and that is more communal and solidaristic but a future that ultimately tastes better. This increased agency for at least the more active participants can be conceptualised as a shift from a subject position of consumer to a food citizen. ‘A Food Citizen is someone who wants to, can and does shape the food system for the better, and encourages others to do the same’ (New Citizenship Project, 2017; cf Campisi, 2016: 1–​5; Lozano-​Cabedo and Gómez-​Benito, 2017). The corresponding increase in agency enables an impact on the economic structures that are at the basis of the food system –​ and this seems to be a key element to break out of the constraints of a consumer democracy where consumers can mainly decide on the offer but –​as we do not live in a neoclassical world of perfectly functioning markets –​where, ultimately, consumers only partly decide on the way the offer is produced. To achieve a more radical democratisation of the food system and increase the scope of food citizenship, not only is more equality of influence necessary, but also of shaping the rules of (food) democracy itself: who should decide how and on what grounds food is produced? The young activists are widening the field already. To obtain a more radical transformation, it will also be important here whether the people who are not centrally involved in the social movement or professionally engaged in the field can be more involved in the shaping of the political economy of food production, or whether they are primarily given the place of involved consumers –​and thus primarily a kind of consumer democracy is pushed forward. It seems plausible that a more inclusive community building could be at least partly engendered through common meals and the affective power of food, which will be looked at in more detail in the next section.

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Community building through sustainable food More time spent together in an enjoyable and joyous atmosphere is conducive for people to interact with each other. Slowing down seems important. The food that someone has brought with them serves as an ‘ideal ice-​breaker’; people become easily addressable through it. Sustainable food becomes tangible and tasteable and should motivate people to further engage with the topic. Moreover, the rules of engagement (like bringing organic food, producing no food waste) are communicated and many of the involved people serve as examples but deviations from these norms are not reprimanded. Synchrony is established through common starting of meals, tactile connections and in turn new common surprises are created through the passing on of food. The sharing of food ultimately awakens memories of Marcel Mauss’ (1966 [1925]) work on the power of the gift, which obliges reciprocity but at the very least makes the eat-​ins and regulars’ tables become communal works. The organisers and helpers at the events additionally support these connecting processes: people are actively encouraged to exchange with each other and members of the core group sit down with others to talk about sustainable food at the eat-​ins. Apart from the common start of the meal, where the importance of the event is remembered once again and participating producers are made visible, as much as possible should happen informally at the eat-​ins, where the focus is on eating in common, while at the more informal regulars’ tables and the core group meetings, eating plays an increasingly minor role. The more food is eaten, the more informal and low-​threshold the occasions are. This is achieved with appropriately positive-​minded language and joyful expressions of the organisers and helpers, who circulate in the space at the eat-​ins, appealing to joy and sensual enjoyment. Sitting at long, beautifully decorated tables or rows of tables is a particular way of experiencing community and connection. Yet not all tensions can be dealt with in this way, as food in the end is a highly controversial subject. The issue in the foreground here is not ethnic or religious cultural differences of different gastronomic traditions or regulations. For most people, abstaining from (pork) meat is hardly an obstacle to visiting the eat-​ins, as the dishes are labelled accordingly and the wide selection of vegetarian or vegan dishes makes it easy to choose food that suits one personally. There is openness with regard to what people choose from and what they bring in the first place as long as the food is local, fresh and ecologically produced. At the eat-​ins and other events, ‘exotic’ as well as local dishes are eaten, mixed and experimented with. In addition, techniques such as the preservation and recycling of leftovers, which were associated with poorer or more traditional milieus, are being

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revived and held in high esteem. The participants seem to fit the ‘cultural omnivores’ thesis (Peterson, 1992; Peterson and Kern, 1996: 199) quite well. ‘Cultural omnivores’ exhibit a wide breadth of cultural tastes so that at first sight different types of foods or diets do not seem to present obstacles to participation in food activities. However, [t]‌hose consumers that do appear to practise cultural omnivorousness tend to be from the highly educated middle and upper classes. Being a cultural omnivore takes an investment in skills, knowledge and judgment that can be used to create a particular identity based on socially valued and differentiated consumption choices that, in effect, reinforce social distinction. (Williams, 2017: 193) It is not just the mere fact of eating anything that qualifies the cultural omnivore but that [s]‌he is a food savvy that can navigate adequately through different food cultures. Also in the case of the young food activists, people are required to choose wisely. Moments of social distinction concern the ability to make ethically correct decisions. In the scenes presented earlier, this became clear above all in the rounds of introductions, in which people introduced themselves by naming the food they had brought along, but in principle this mechanism of distinction might be omnipresent as it is ingrained in nutrition itself. The young activists are aware of the potential for distinction and the complexity of ethically correct food choices, which is why they try to act as role models rather than dogmatic lecturers. Nevertheless, the normative agenda is basically set. As Bourdieu (1979) and many milieu studies, specifically also studies on the cultural omnivore thesis, have shown, consumption patterns divide along milieu boundaries and normative guidelines in this regard (Williams, 2017). The call for sophisticated renunciation or reorientation may open up new identities in certain middle-​class milieus, but is it also attractive for other social milieus? Could these settings even be intimidating? These questions need to be to be kept in mind for community development projects through food. It seems at least plausible that the somewhat more closed settings such as the regulars’ tables have an exclusionary effect on members of people with less cultural capital (an effect that could be further intensified by the fact that many of those present are also involved with food professionally). The less food-​savvy might fear (or find) that they do not have the appropriate skills or the necessary time for an intensive engagement with sustainable food and this will not at first be a top priority for those struggling with poverty. It remains unclear how much this is also the case for the eat-​ins that at first seem very low-​threshold as every person eats and thus seems to be able to connect. However, the strongly staged engagement with sustainability and anti-​consumerism might become a marker of social class 72

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or milieu, thus creating feelings of non-​belonging. This is not to advocate here that the work of inclusion of the entire of society should be carried by these young people or any other single similar group –​they are already doing their fair share. If it were a matter of community development understood as ‘a social and political practice with a particular commitment to cultivating democratic engagement of communities’ (Shaw, 2017), then the extension of democratic principles into new spheres of the social initiated by the food activists requires additional consideration of class-​or milieu-​specific aspects.

Sustainability for and through food for inclusive community building In the light of the political goals of the social movement, this resulting question of inclusivity for often marginalised groups appears to be of secondary importance; the aim is to show alternatives, to impart knowledge, to motivate and to pave the way for more sustainable economic structures. In the sense of a consumer democracy, first and foremost, the largest possible number of people, ideally with purchasing power, should be able to make sustainable consumption decisions. But the extension of radical democracy also requires an extension towards those largely excluded from consumer power. From the strategies of the young food activists presented in this chapter and the subsequent more theoretical considerations we can get a few hints how this could be done. The eat-​ins seem to offer a low-​threshold setting as everybody eats, but not everybody eats in the same way. An inclusive community building would certainly include reflections on how prescriptions about what and how to eat, how to handle and how to talk about food become markers of social distinction (part of this is at play when the young activists promote an ‘undogmatic’ approach). Moreover, exclusionary dynamics could be mediated by bringing these differences to the fore through dialogue and with a focus on targeted inclusion of people from different social milieus into the organisation of such events with dialogue starting in people’s own milieus and in their own spaces, such as, for instance, their neighbourhoods, meeting points of ethnic communities or groups of sport fans or youth clubs. Food seems to have an excellent potential to connect people if the exclusionary potentials are reflected on. Yet the sensory, discursive and material dimensions of food might turn out to be a more cruel than joyful point of connection when there is only a very limited budget available to a household. This could be partially addressed by linking such low-​ threshold eat-​ins with activist and professional groups that are central to food community building by actively targeting people and competences of marginalised groups. This way, more people would be integrated in the food 73

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system as more than mere consumers, and in the medium term also as more direct shapers of economics bonds within a community-​based food system which could extend to participating in the food production. As exemplified in this chapter, participation in a newly shaped food system can also extend to carving out one’s economic niche as a food professional –​a potential that could be further exploited in inclusive local community building as part of a ‘green new deal’. Finally, the proto-​political aspects of the communal meals become explicit when the conditions of food production become a topic as well as exploring individual and collective scope of action. The politicisation of food in an inclusive setting could also make the different references and starting points of different social groups and the symbolic violence experienced in relation to food in marginalised communities more visible. Since food is part of everyday life, conversations about food could ultimately lead to a better understanding of other realities of everyday life. Thus, people in the food system could become more visible again, not only on the producer side as promoted by the young activists but also on the consumer side where difficult experiences need to be named. Therefore, such work would also mean finding a form in which less positive experiences with food –​lack of food, discrimination because of eating habits, biopsychosocial problems around food such as eating disorders like anorexia or obesity –​could be addressed and possibly put on the plate. Eating together can spark positive dynamics that can be harnessed for community building and can lead to different, more empowered relationships to food. At least for some, this can open up new subject positions as ethical consumers or food citizens. It can also make them part of a social movement by addressing their gastronomic interests and talents (and reinforcing them). Furthermore, it can convey a sense of community and strengthen food skills through peer-​learning in a low-​threshold way. By eating together and staging it in a communal way, spaces for exchange also about other realities of life are opened. Even though dynamics around food can unfold differently in many settings where community development professionals are on the move (especially more marginalised settings), the young activists discussed here give hope for new approaches to food in community development. With a focus on exclusionary processes around food and eating settings and a concern for all the care work in the everyday lives of marginalised people, there is the potential to support social movements in becoming more socially inclusive, to raise awareness across a stratified field of the issue of sustainable food on the one hand and of poverty and other forms of food-​ related distress on the other. Ultimately there is the potential to move the strongly consumer-​democratic approach via food even more in the direction of a radical-​democratic idea, which in an egalitarian and inclusive manner provides new identities (in the so far hegemonic food discourse and new 74

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positions in the political economy) for a more local, more community based, more inclusive and more solidaristic food system. Note The chapter builds on results from an ethnographic case study stemming from the EU-​ Horizon 2020 project PARTISPACE (2015–​18) that sought to better understand styles and spaces of youth participation (Batsleer et al, 2017; Roth and Zimmermann, 2019; Walther et al, 2020). All the fieldnotes and group discussions used in this article were recorded by Patricia Roth (Roth, 2016), a fellow member of the Swiss PARTISPACE research team to whom I would like to sincerely thank for her kind willingness to make her records available for this chapter.

1

References Batsleer, J., Ehrensperger, K., Lüküslü, D., Osmanoğlu, B., Pais, A., Reutlinger, C. et al (2017) Claiming Spaces and Struggling for Recognition: Youth Participation through Local Case Studies, Work Package Report 4. Available from: https://​zen​odo.org/​rec​ord/​1064​119#.WjD1N ​ nlr y​ Uk [accessed 21 June 2022]. Bourdieu, P. (1979) La distinction. Critique sociale du jugement, Paris: Minuit. Campisi, J. (2016) ‘Food citizenship’, in P.B. Thompson and D.M. Kaplan (eds) Encyclopedia of Food and Agricultural Ethics, Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, pp 1–​5. Gatenby, L.A., Donnelly, J. and Connell, R. (2011) ‘Cooking communities: Using multicultural after-​school cooking clubs to enhance community cohesion’, Nutrition Bulletin, 36(1): 108–​12. Hennchen, B. and Pregernig, M. (2020) ‘Organizing joint practices in urban food initiatives: A comparative analysis of gardening, cooking and eating together’, Sustainability, 12(11): 44–​57. Laclau, E. and Mouffe, C. (1985) Hegemony and State Socialism: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, London: Verso. Lozano-​Cabedo, C. and Gómez-​Benito, C. (2017) ‘A theoretical model of food citizenship for the analysis of social praxis’, Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, 30(1): 1–​22. Mauss, M. (1966 [1925]) The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, London: Cohen and West Ltd. New Citizenship Project (2017) Food Citizenship: How Thinking of Ourselves Differently Can Change the Future of Our Food System. Findings of the Future of Food: A Collaborative Innovation Project. Available from: https://​drive. goo​gle.com/​file/​d/​0B0sw​icN1​1uhb​SGM2​OWdC​eXdQ​ZGc/​view?reso​ urce​key=​0-​VH3​e9ZM​NLMN​78bZ​S_​j9​zkw [accessed 21 June 2022]. Peterson, R.A. (1992) ‘Understanding audience segmentation: From elite and mass to omnivore and univore’, Poetics, 21(4): 243–​58. Peterson, R.A. and Kern, R.M. (1996) ‘Changing highbrow taste: From snob to omnivore’, American Sociological Review, 61(5): 900–​7. 75

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PICSA (ed) (2019) ‘Creating an inclusive prosperity cities index: Background and methodology’. Available from: https://w ​ ww.pics​ aind​ ex.com/w ​ p-c​ ont​ ent/​uplo​ads/​2019/​11/​Creat​ing-​an-​Inclus​ive-​Pro​sper​ity-​Cit​ies-​Index-​ final-​PICSA-​rep​ort_​Nov2​019.pdf [accessed 21 June 2022]. Roth, P. (2016) Youth Sustainable Food Network Case Fieldnotes and Interview Transcripts for EU-​Horizon 2020 PARTISPACE: Styles and Spaces of Participation (unpublished), St. Gallen: Fachhochschule St. Gallen –​IFSA. Roth, P. and Zimmermann, D. (2019) ‘Essen und Trinken als geteilte soziale Praxis –​und als Teilhabe?’, in A. Pohl, Reutlinger, C., Walther, A. and Wigger, A. (eds) Praktiken Jugendlicher im öffentlichen Raum –​Zwischen Selbstdarstellung und Teilhabeansprüchen, Wiesbaden: Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden, pp 69–​87. Sage, C., Kropp, C. and Antoni-​Komar, I. (2020) ‘Grassroots initiatives in food system transformation: The role of food movements in the second “great transformation” ’, in C. Kropp, I. Antoni-​Komar and C. Sage (eds) Food System Transformations, London: Routledge, pp 1–​19. Salami, L.A., Adebosin, W.G., Saula, D.T., Adewale, T.A and George, E.O (2020) ‘Micro-​financing and rural economic performance in Nigeria: A review of literature’, Hallmark University Journal of Management and Social Sciences, 2(3): 192–​201. Shaw, M. (2017) ‘Community development: Reviving critical agency in times of crisis’, in S. Kenny, B. McGrath and R. Phillips (eds) The Routledge Handbook of Community Development, London and New York: Routledge, pp 26–​39. Walther, A., Batsleer, J., Loncle, P. and Pohl, A. (2020) Young People and the Struggle for Participation: Contested Practices, Power and Pedagogies in Public Spaces, London and New York: Routledge. Warshawsky, D.N. (2020) ‘Food waste and the growth of food banks in the global south’, in J. Crush, B. Frayne and G. Hayson (eds) Handbook on Urban Food Security in the Global South, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, pp 328–​40. Wenger, E. (1998) Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wetherill, M.S., White, K.C. and Seligman, H. (2019) ‘Charitable food as prevention: Food bank leadership perspectives on food banks as agents in population health’, Community Development, 50(1): 92–​107. Williams, L. (2017) A Sociology of Food and Nutrition: The Social Appetite, 4th edn, Melbourne: Oxford University Press.

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Daring, dissolving and dancing: making communities with water Róisín O’Gorman

Introduction This chapter focuses on a local iteration of an international event directed at dancing for safe water for everyone: Global Water Dances (GWD). In contextualising this large-​scale project (over 100 sites participate globally), this chapter considers the ways in which communities form and dissolve on local and global scales, shifting the traditional boundaries of linear narratives of success which have led to this extraordinary era of crises, including climate crises. The event allows us (a collective of children, teens, students, artists and academics) to express our concerns about water rights which began in response to particular protests around austerity and water rights current in Ireland but also allowed us to connect this water-​r ich and overflowing country to global water rights issues.1 Our aim was to think and move with water and each other and to contribute to a shifting sensibility about water as central to issues of social justice as much as an issue of environmental concern. Thinking through movement as a fundamental quality of water and using images and accounts of a direct experience of water from somatic training and practices, this chapter seeks out the dynamics of fluid bodies on the move. This fluid framework shifts understandings of the ways in which communities are integrated or disintegrated by foregrounding how community is understood as fluid, with processes in need of ongoing regeneration and reinvention. In attending to how we move together in time, how we dare a mingling of selves and others, local and global, this chapter aims at reframing our understanding of age, time and place, allowing for a playful remembering of our responsibilities to our environments and each other.

Waterways and water works Community is a fluid word and yet becomes a placeholder for many aspirations, hopes and dreams. Too often reality falls short or worse becomes an increasingly threatening nightmare. Youth also is fluid even as we mark 77

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time and have certain expectations of what might be around the next birthday corner (be it developmental milestones or social, financial, career achievements or declines). This edited collection draws on the possibilities for thinking through youth and community development together with an invitation to consider the radical and the root-​based work of change. The project and framework outlined in this chapter did not set out as a youth development project but as a responsive climate action and internationally platformed community performance project. In thinking with the keywords of this collection alongside water, this chapter considers how the fluidities of community and youth come to the foreground and asks how, in turn, does that allow us to perceive other pathways in which to sustain our communities and to understand community in fluid terms. To do so, this chapter investigates how movement-​based practices activate and embody a sensibility and awareness of water as a phenomenon that moves both inside and alongside the human body, all bodies. This approach troubles the mainstream understanding of water as commodity or external force and shifts our perceptions of and as water. Whether this can ameliorate issues and develop community action around water rights and public management of water or our engagement with water in personal, political or public ways remains to be seen. However, this work offers a response to the local and global range of crises where water permeates issues across a wide range of disciplines challenging us to find new ways of thinking water, not just thinking about it, but thinking with, and even playfully as, water. This chapter offers a range of registers to evoke how we live in common with water; alongside a discussion of a global-​scale community arts event, there are a range of images and passages, which record and foreground daily and local ways of being with water. This approach developed from movement practices in the performing arts; these practices extend into a writing practice which seeks to move performatively with water, to see what it does with us, to ask where and how we are water made, water marked and water moved. What makes you pay attention to water? Your thirst or need for a bathroom? Your water bill? A flood in your home? The supply switched off or contaminated? Do you have to walk to get water? The weather? Your swimming? The everyday ways in which it is gridded, entwined in our city streets? Water is transparent. It absorbs, swallows, carries away. It requires engineering to hold it, steer it, store it. As a part of this writing process, I have visually documented some of the water system covers in the city streets of this small town, Cork, on the southern edge of Ireland. They are everywhere, in multitudes. Sometimes every few feet, sometimes in clusters right beside each other. They are like quiet integrated scars on the city street –​do you ever wonder, what happened here, why are so many of these openings necessary, right here? The covers are just that –​they hide and yet point to water. Everywhere you go in this city, you are walking on 78

Daring, dissolving and dancing Figure 5.1: Water drain cover on city street, Cork, Ireland

Source: photo by the author

water (see Figures 5.1, 5.2, 5.4, 5.8, 5.10). They mark a trajectory and a still point. Still water, however, is not safe. Water needs to move. In moving perhaps we can know our wateriness differently.2 Some of the covers are marked with the Irish word for water: uisce (pronounced ish-​ka) (see Figure 5.2). Even saying the word in another language offers a different sound register and sensibility. For me, the Irish word gives a sound sense of water and thirst being quenched. The ‘ssh’ of its flow or pour, the ‘ah’ of satisfaction from taking a good long drink. What ways do you think water? See it? Remember it? Feel its animating presence? What makes us pay attention to the fact that we are more than half water? This strange fact animates the response of this chapter to the changing water marks in the Irish setting as one particular water-​site.

Water distillations: theories and practices Writings about water cross all genres, disciplines and forms. Water research permeates the many subfields of the sciences, arts and humanities and swims across a vast, varied and particular territory. Each discipline animates its relationship with water in particular ways and raises a focus and range of concerns; each locale has its own battles for water rights, access, ownership or histories around conflicts for resources or dam building to name but a few familiar markers. The extended horizon of water, its science, politics, histories, laws and philosophies, can only be navigated; its totality cannot be fully comprehended from any one point of view despite its apparent simplicity. This chapter attempts to circumvent the mainstream efforts to generate an ongoing ‘orgy of data’3 and to grapple with the scale of individual 79

Young People and Radical Democracy Figure 5.2: Water/​uisce drain cover

Source: photo by the author

experience, action and local sensibilities alongside larger frameworks of the global scale. This approach will not give us quantitative data on water quality; instead it will directly address qualities of water, how we move and are moved by it and how that can support different modes of address, of thinking about our social, political and community structures. I enter this swirl through the lens of daily encounters with water awareness in Ireland in recent years and will consider the GWD project as one which offers a community arts practices approach to thinking water. I read this event through a lens of ‘hydrofeminism’ (see Neimanis, 2012), inspired by work from material feminism and critiques of the Anthropocene (see Haraway, 2016) and through somatic practices (in particular Body-​Mind Centering), which offer registers with which to write and think water in ways which offer ways to imagine the frameworks for working with communities in fluid ways, where easy categories and linear expectations are set in motion. Weaving together these theories and practices results 80

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in a phenomenological and embodied sensibility and attempts to render encounters with water –​although fleeting and momentary –​as experiences that shape our embodiment nonetheless. Alongside images the chapter offers records of direct experience –​a sense of water, its forms and stories as a way to register and evoke a living with and as water (see Figure 5.3). This chapter then asks for bodies of water to be recognised as bodies of knowledge, often overlooked, easily feminised, and thus commodified, dismissed, silenced. These fleeting images and fragments of stories and even the performance event of GWD, offer forms which oscillate between and across registers –​between the local and global, between participation and playfulness, between action and idleness, between group and individual, between use and uselessness. These sites might well be overlooked as a mere trickle or at best a minor tributary to the larger concerns of water politics, youth work and community development. However, if we miss out on the playful, sensuous, pleasurable encounters with/​as water as well as the mundane and everyday aspects of our interactions with water, we miss out on fundamental water qualities that influence our daily lives with and as water-​based beings. As Kath Weston argues, there’s more to this than ‘thirst, politics and profit [which] do not bring down the curtain on explanations for the range of things that people do with water, much less what entices them into unsustainable uses’ (2017: 135). Water has a ‘visceral pull in a register other than thirst’ (Weston, 2017: 135). As she surveys some of the influential accounts of water politics and social justice, she laments that ‘even in the most exquisitely nuanced accounts, joy, levity, frivolity, and mirth have somehow gone missing’ (Weston, 2017: 155). She goes on to give a brief account of the shift in Northern India when the monsoon arrives with its hassles, but also signals harvest and reprieve from heat: ‘Water quenches many things, only one of which is thirst’ (Weston, 2017: 155). What might it take to attend to these registers, these rivulets and tributaries which offer not just survival but ‘practices of joy’ (as Donna Haraway says) and sustainability, not as minor or side issues but central to our concerns about water? And more speculatively, can these considerations seep into our thinking about how we make communities more broadly, how we can resist extractive drives to achieve in particular ways and to wallow in the simplicity of being together in time? Can this in turn de-​pressurise the trajectories of youth towards particular narrow achievements which leave too many floundering? These questions are beyond the scope of this chapter to address but perhaps they can simmer in the background all the while. There’s much more to this topic than can be addressed here, however, consider the range of sites of large-​scale moving in public and the affective draw to participate. Those events can create their own mythologies circulating beyond the event themselves. Individually we consider to what extent we might want to be absorbed into a crowd, mosh pit, flash mob, procession, protest, political 81

Young People and Radical Democracy Figure 5.3: A watery world, Cork, Ireland

Source: photo by the author

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rally or entrained in marching bands or army regimens, etc. What ways do we want to resist and express individual voice and particular circumstances? How do we find balance between what we have in common and what we recognise and value as unique and particular? How might these participatory events spur a sense of wider democratic social activism and engagement? In many ways this sensibility is just a return to what we know about water, perhaps it will not intervene in any way in the machinations of ‘thirst, politics and profit’, which give us plastic islands in the oceans and Figure 5.4: Six ways for water

Source: photo by the author

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microplastics and other pollutants permeating our drinking water, alongside the commodification of this vital resource and so-​called water wars. The scale and depth of the water crises are too much for any one body, and so, we come together, to talk, think and move. After all, as Neimanis (2012) writes: Not only does water connect us, gestate us, sustain us –​more than this water disturbs the very categories that ground the domains of social, political, philosophical and environmental thought and those of feminist theory and practice as well. Thinking about ourselves and our broader communities as watery can thus unmoor us in productive (albeit sometimes risky) ways. We are set adrift in the space-​time between our certainties, between the various outcrops we cling to for security. (Neimanis, 2012: 96) This unmooring asks us to move and think in new ways, to be open to other bodies and alterities. It can also mean just attending to the water ways all around us (Figure 5.4). In the context of community development work, how can a sensibility attuned to fluidity shift the possibilities of communities in formation? Allowing for flow, trickles and floods, how can we address the stagnations, in particular in the structural oppressions that permeate social and political life? Can attention to fluidity and our fluid bodies allow us to sustain when the tide of energy, hope or possibilities are at a low ebb?

Low theory As water seeks the lowest level, I seek a low theory –​one that allows for vulnerability, forgetting, fragility alongside playfulness, resilience, digressions, distractions, as strategies for soaking and seeping into the monolithic monologics of the rising forces of neo-​fascism, the norms of anger and violence, where bombs and phones are hailed as ‘smart’. As Halberstam argues: Low theory tries to locate all the in-​between spaces that save us from being snared by the hooks of hegemony and speared by the seductions of the gift shop. But it also makes its peace with the possibility that alternatives dwell in the murky waters of a counterintuitive, often impossibly dark and negative realm of critique and refusal. (Halberstam, 2011: 20) In movement terms this reminds us that we only really know as we go, or more directly Ingold argues ‘not that you know by means of movement but that knowing is movement’. (Ingold, 2013: 1) This practical and ontological mode offers a counterpoint to what Paul Gilroy (2019) identifies as osssified culture: lacking vitality but easily regulated. Gilroy also argues for a lowly 84

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orientation and attention to conviviality and care as ways of countering racial violences across many terrains and contemporary crises. We are challenged in these times to reconsider the fabric of our relationality and responsibility to one another as well as those quite literally in the water. Moving in registers which bring us together to dissolve our ossification, at least for a while, might remind us, as Gilroy does, that it is imperative to remain less interested in who or what we imagine ourselves to be, than in what we can do for one another both in today’s emergency conditions and in the grimmer circumstances that surely await us. Doing for one another is a fraught endeavour in structures teetering on the brink of collapse and one propelled too often with the perils of good intentions. Perhaps this is lowly and frivolous, even useless, but to reclaim the useless, not as useful, but as something vital, fun and connected, might offer some ways to rethink and reinhabit our lowly liquid selves. Conviviality and care, dancing and resisting the productive use of our time together offers a temporary counter to consumerist outcome-​based metrics. This is a form of resistance, like the slow wearing down of stone by water, it requires persistence over time.

Moving together in time As is the way with water, it can take time to find a course or path that makes sense. Reading, thinking, moving and talking led to the emergence of a group who also shared concerns for water, both water rights and ways of living with water, and to a broader transdisciplinary search for water ways of knowing and ways to rethink water as a commons not a commodity. We decided that to participate in the GWD event would offer a beginning platform for dance and discussion and potentially a shift in register around questions of water, connecting local issues within a broader consciousness-​ raising of global conditions. With colleagues, local artists and students we formed ourselves into a loosely self-​organising collective that we dubbed Bodies of Water (BoW). We described ourselves as follows: BoW is a transdisciplinary performance, research and advocacy network that investigates how we access, understand and respond to water through the human body, art, culture, and public deliberation. The network comprises of artists, community organisations, and a cross-​disciplinary cohort of academics, performers and students from Ireland and the United States. Together, this network seeks to build community with water and each other by exploring how this critical environmental resource exists beyond being merely subject to ownership or stewardship. Rather, BoW uses transdisciplinary research and performance to illuminate how water is us as much as it surrounds us. 85

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In 2017, 2019 and 2021 we organised a Cork iteration of the international event that is GWD. We see our participation in this event as part of larger ongoing research concerned with bodies, movement, perception and knowledge-​making, which asks us to attend to other ways of being and seeing in the world. The event offers a platform for specific situated local groups around the world to dance together. The central organisation provides a score for the dance event, including a shared piece of music and dance that all participants around the world perform on an agreed date. Alongside this element is the specific remit to work with local water issues and communities to develop a local dance. The appeal in part, for our community participants, was the echo of their movements in a wave around the globe. The idea of connecting in this way, however tenuous, clearly inspired people to participate. There is a reclamation of community, joy, celebration in the face of austerity, futility and the negation of human action.4 In our communities, the focus of the global event brought together in a dancing and moving community over the three iterations, we have been joined by different artists and students and in the online year of 2021 more activist groups engaged in online discussions. The event allowed different groups to work together in an open participatory structure, including, for example: Lightbulb Youth Theatre, Cork led by Fionn Woodhouse; Maria Sinnecker’s dance groups including children and a professional adult dance group from Dance Theatre Project Cork; a group of students and faculty from James Madison University, USA; and community participants based in Cork and a dance group led by Lisa Cliffe from a local school. And so, in 2017 and 2019 we danced by the River Lee at a site which is a flood plain, and where the river overflows from time to time5 (see Figures 5.5, 5.6 and 5.7). The year 2021 offered a different adaptive structure for individuals to share from their locations, shaping a different possibility but still holding a space to engage and reflect even as lockdowns limited our capacities to move and connect in person. Histories of flood: Process described by Fionn Woodhouse, Lightbulb Youth Theatre director (personal correspondence): The members of Lightbulb Youth Theatre worked together to create a piece of theatre/​dance/​playfulness for the Global Water Dances Cork. When first presented with the idea of their participation in GWD Cork, the members of Lightbulb Youth Theatre responded with undisguised trepidation at the notion of dancing in public, and some questions about what a water issue was? After initially talking through global water issues (walking to the well to get water, tsunami, torrential rain storms) and concluding that there was not any local water issues one of the students told a story of a local flood they had been told about by their grandparent that had happened a long time ago. This led to 86

Daring, dissolving and dancing Figure 5.5: Group rehearsal, GWD, Cork, 2017

Source: photo by Inma Pavon (with permission)

Figure 5.6: Lightbulb Youth Theatre, GWD, 2017

Source: photo by Inma Pavon (with permission)

at first a trickle, then a gush of similar stories that come right up to the present time with memories of seeing the River Blackwater in Mallow burst its banks and the changes in their own lives due to the 87

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building of flood defences along the river banks. By the end of the first session there were lots of notes taken and homework to find a news item about flood/​water in their local area. Over the following sessions the group devised a choreography of water from the physical form of how, why, where they use water in their daily lives. From swimming to toothbrushing to watering the garden and washing the dishes, members played with how to represent water, how to give body to this slippery substance. With the stories collected from news sources primarily focused on ‘the force of flooding water’ the group also devised a range of movements to show the destructive power of water. The persistence of water was a motif that the group returned to repeatedly –​if the destructive flood of water did not break something then a wearing down would occur, an ability to find cracks or cervices to exploit. These choreographies were refined and combined with stories of flood both local and international for the public event with the idea of water ‘finding a way’ becoming central to the physical score. This collective dance offered a site-​specific engagement with our local water worries while also evoking the need to pay attention to water worldwide. As Louise Boscacci puts it via Ettigner: There is no I without a non-​I. While Ettinger is concerned with enlarging a notion of with-​ness in thinking about human interdependency, resonant

Figure 5.7: A rehearsal moment on the grounds by the river

Source: photo by Inma Pavon (with permission)

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also is allusion to –​and some unsettling of –​the idea and practice of witnessing. Scholars such as Kelly Oliver describe witnessing in terms of the double meaning of observation –​to be an eyewitness, to see, to watch –​and to bear testimony. Here, I propose wit(h)nessing as a waymaker that enriches and extends the work of witnessing by embracing the teachings of affect and more-​than-​visual sensing and mattering in our humanimal encounters. (Boscacci, 2018: 343) Moving together in this coordinated way we are subsumed into the larger sense of community or even commons. Moving together in time triggers something beyond our notion of individual or self and soaks us up into movements beyond ourselves which then in turn individually impact us. This process is not necessarily recuperative or empowering, it may also be sinister or just dull, however, awareness of movement and affect can attune us to the operations, potential and power of social mechanism in which we are either willing or unwitting participants.6 While acknowledging the potential diminishment of individual agency within the movement choir structure, Eddy offers that: A contemporary view of Laban’s movement choir invites a dialogue between self-​expression and group cohesion. With awareness of the popularity of flash mobs and the urgency of the physical and social need for help on our planet, it can be useful to capitalize on the joy and camaraderie of movement choirs. (Eddy, 2017: 259) This joyful engagement offers a way to participate in a lively register beyond the event itself in an ongoing daily practice of attuning to how we move and are alive in the world, to resist the pressure for ossification (for longer discussion of movement choirs see Counsell, 2004). To attend to the primacy of water is to attune to the primacy of movement. To move is to articulate water. Invitation: Pick up a bottle of water. Shake it about. Hold the bottle still, and watch how the water keeps moving for a while longer, feel its movement. Now, wave, shake or jiggle your whole body, or even just a limb, about, for a few minutes, then hold still. Attend to the swishing sensation. That is your fluid body. That is, you and I are both from water before birth and right now it flows in your blood vessels, seeps between and within your cells, the light bouncing into your brain via your eyes is a strange perceptual dance of fluid and electric connectivity. Can you take some time to follow that flow and swish? To fly and be still beyond this page/​screen? Where do you want to flow to right now? Perhaps that invitation was too much. What, wave about water in a bottle? Is this a kind of nonsense or a kind of knowledge? As Peggy Phelan 89

Young People and Radical Democracy Figure 5.8: Water covers

Source: photo by the author

has argued, we are very slow in our institutions to embrace movement-​ based thinking: Indeed, the rather slow pace of dominant institutions lumbering towards consideration of dance and performance illuminates something quite radical in the core of movement-​based thinking. As a philosophical and epistemological injunction ‘movement’ punctures the ideological assumption that the centre is permanent, stable, secure. Thus, the task before us is to shift from a consideration of the aesthetic dimensions of movement to a consideration of movement as ethical principle and practice. (Phelan, 2010: 22) Phelan identifies the draw to the aesthetics of movement practices which often dazzle us with the extraordinary virtuosity of the performer. However, her plea is for a deeper consideration and recognition of the epistemologies 90

Daring, dissolving and dancing Figure 5.9: A drop of water (used as promotional image for GWD, Cork, 2017)

Source: photo by the author

of movement. Sheets-​Johnstone also argues for us to acknowledge our primary existence as movers, which in turn asks us to recognise how our discursively driven institutional life is as one that overlooks and undervalues the kinetic. Along with our forgetting of our mother-​tongue of movement (Sheets-​Johnstone, 2018: 6) we have also forgotten our aqueous formations which would attune us to collective synergies –​that is, that everybody, every (individual) body, has come from, flowed from, another body. Remember: You have been carried, swished and swimming, fished and fostered; fluidity gives you form and function. What other frameworks for knowledge, what means for action are possible if we rethink climate change crises through acknowledging movement as an epistemology not a means to an end? In this way, the pressure for climate action can be spurred on by the youth movements from around the globe but it also asks everyone in the global community to participate, not just to pin it on the actions of youth alone. 91

Young People and Radical Democracy Figure 5.10: Water and concrete

Source: photo by the author

Conclusion The point of view offered in this chapter is not new; the question might more aptly be, following another choreographer, Carol Brown, how do we remember what we already knew? From ‘So, remember the liquid ground’, she asks: What if paying attention to the fluid membranes of our bodies, to the liquid ground of our beginnings, to the connection between the salt of our tears and the salt of the sea, to the pathways to and from as well as along the shifting edge of the sea formed the basis for a choreography that navigates between the diverse histories and meanings of water and convenes a relationship between that which is considered fluid and that which is grounded? (Brown, 2015: 21) Brown’s question implies another –​which is, what is at stake in that remembering or forgetting? What might we have to do differently if we 92

Daring, dissolving and dancing Figure 5.11: Water marks

Source: photo by the author

acknowledge (Figure 5.11) our water-​based formations, inter-​relations, our water commons? We know that we are both water and not water, we are more than just one or the other. This is a strange or uncanny knowledge, and yet all too familiar. How might we orient ourselves in this relational overflow –​do we want to make hard lines, and pour concrete into it, try to contain it, become merely consumers or customers? Or with a much livelier sensibility, do we want to find ways to move with, in, beside, and inside and around water? In moving together, do we forget or remember?7 Water runs us; it runs both inside us and alongside us; it might well run out or overrun us (in many places it has already). The partiality of waterbodies within is in fact the whole story as without it we are nothing. We are in relation with water, it forms us, informs us. If we do not listen to the water, it will move from babble to roar. To move with and as water attempts a language of water, of its insistence and necessity to move. We only have so many choices as to our next move, we are in fact at the water’s mercy as much as is it at ours. 93

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Coda: finding a form August 2018 On a surf board for the first time in years. My balance is different, I’m out of shape for this. But I have the time to look at this surface shift and foam, rise and fold. It’s a reasonably gentle day, the sun is out. There’s the odd jellyfish and lots of seaweed. The shadows on the ocean floor send shivers down my back. I’ve been away too long. This otherness frightens me again. But I am thinking about water now in new ways too. I used to watch the form and movement to see where I can join in, to flow and follow the pressure changes. Now I see the skin and texture. It is beyond me, this salty force, the swirling life juice. Its scale and churn and horizon stretch the limits of imagination and what the eye can see. I know there’s sewage and plastics here but I can’t see them. I know we are causing havoc but I feel the release into this vast body of water as a sudden wave breaks over my head. I ditch the board and take my seven-​year-​old out into the waves. We just jump and dive. He goes under a lot which is terrifying. I hold him and we are both carried by the waves. I am reminded of carrying him in my body and squeezing into a wetsuit at seven months pregnant. He likes to think he was surfing before he was born. I like to think that we all were. August 2021 I feel the pull and pleasure again of time by the shore. Pandemic times still loom and linger. The effects still wear us, but here we are again looking at that vast horizon. My now ten-​year-​old has headed into the waves with his dad. I stay on shore with my second son who is now seven. He is wary of the sea and enjoys throwing stones and building barriers. He shouts as the waves crash through his sand walls and overrun his moats. He wants to build ever higher and deeper. Time is running out. I get a quick dip in by myself before we head home. I’m not good at swimming alone. The freezing water seeps into my sternum and the wild thoughts of what lurks in the deep seep past the barriers of my mind. I focus on breathing and a point in the distance and pull towards shore. Time is running out. We know this, but it doesn’t help. We can just pull together or pull apart, dig higher walls or surf the possibilities. We like to think we still have choices. I hope that we do. Notes See Hearne et al (2018) and Hourigan (2015) for more detailed arguments and context on the Irish water wars. 2 Through practice in this way we can see what other knowledges can come to the fore; this chapter follows the forms of research through arts practices, often called Practice as Research in British contexts for example. Seehttp://​www.bris.ac.uk/​parip/​ 1

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Daring, dissolving and dancing This is David Poeppel’s phrase decrying the ‘epistemological sterility’ of neuroscience experiments that focus on very narrow informational frameworks in their research (see Rennie, 2018). While Poeppel is criticising work in his own field, this view can be applied more broadly as we daily see how this intoxication of information drives much research and allows political action to be delayed and deferred while the threat of climate change and its entourage of weather events, shortages, pollutions and extinctions roll on at full speed. 4 See https://​global​wate​rdan​cesc​ork.com/​about/​ 5 How we deal with this inundation still challenges the city which needs access to the water and its heritage. Concrete walls and flood barriers are proposed by the Office of Public Works but these have garnered significant local objection. See http://​savec​orkc​ity.org 6 The Fluid System: ‘The fluids are the transportation system of the body. They underlie presence and transformation and play a major role in the overall counterbalancing of the tension and relaxation, rest and action. The characteristics of each fluid system relate to a different quality of movement, touch, voice, and state of mind. These relationships can be approached from the aspects of movement, mind states, or from the anatomical and physiological functioning. All the fluids in the body are essentially one fluid –​largely made up of water –​that changes properties and characteristics as it passes through different membranes, flows through different channels and interacts with different substances. We identify the major fluids as cellular, intercellular (or tissue or interstitial), blood, lymph, cerebrospinal (CSF), and synovial’ (Bainbridge Cohen, 2008: 67). 7 Brown is describing the framework for her site-​specific dance project, and there are also a number of other projects that address similar terrain in varying ways. See, for example, an eco-​sexual approach led by Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle (https://​earth​lab.ucsc. edu/​proje​cts/​); the Hydrocitizen project (https://​www.hydro​citi​zens​hip.com/​); Sing for Water project in support of Water Aid (https://​www.water​aid.org/​uk/​get-​invol​ved/​eve​ nts/s​ ing-f​ or-w ​ ater-​lon​don). These sites offer collective action and research and in a similar mode of multiple sites dancing for environmental justice, see Anna Halprin’s Planetary Dance: http://​www.pla​neta​r yda​nce.org/​ 3

Acknowledgements This chapter is based on the article ‘Water marks and water moves: Community arts and thinking with water’ by Róisín O’Gorman, published in the Community Development Journal in 2019 and is reproduced with the kind permission of Oxford University Press. References Bainbridge Cohen, B. (2008) Sensing, Feeling, and Action: The Experiential Anatomy of Body-​Mind Centering, Toronto: Contact Editions. Boscacci, L. (2018) ‘Wit(h)nessing’, Environmental Humanities, 10(1): 343–​7. Brown, C. (2015) ‘So, remember the liquid ground’, in S. Whatley (ed) Attending to Movement, Axminster: Triarchy Press, pp 19–​36. Counsell, C. (2004) ‘Dancing to utopia: Modernity, community and the movement choir’, Dance Research, 22(2): 154–​67. Eddy, M. (2017) Mindful Movement: The Evolution of the Somatic Arts and Conscious Action, Bristol: Intellect Press.

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Gilroy, P. (2019) ‘Never again: Refusing race and salvaging the human’, The Holberg Lecture, 4 June. Available from: https://​holber​gpri​sen.no/​en/​ news/​holb​erg-​prize/​2019-​holb​erg-​lect​ure-​laure​ate-​paul-​g il​roy [accessed 18 Dec 2021]. Halberstam, J. (2011) The Queer Art of Failure, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Haraway, D. (2016) Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hearne, R., Mark, B. and Audrey, K. (2018) ‘Taking liberties with democracy? On the origins, meaning and implications of the Irish water wars’, Geoforum Online, 25 August. https://​doi.org/​10.1016/​j.geofo​ rum.2018.08.003 Hourigan, N. (2015) ‘Role of community is key to understanding Irish water protest confrontations’, Irish Times, 28 February. Ingold, T. (2013) Making: Anthropology, Arc haeology, Ar t and Architecture. Oxford: Routledge. Laban/​Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies (2018) Global water dances. Available from: https://​global​wate​rdan​ces.org/​ [accessed 15 May 2018]. Neimanis, A. (2012) ‘Hydrofeminism: Or, on becoming a body of water’, in H. Gunkel, C. Nigianni and F. Soderback (eds) Undutiful Daughters: New Directions in Feminist Thought, New York: Palgrave, pp 85–​99. Phelan, P. (2010) Move. Choreographing You: Art and Dance Since the 1960s, London: Hayward. Rennie, J. (2018), ‘How brain waves surf sound waves to process speech’, Quanta Magazine, 22 May. Available from: https://​www.qua​ntam​agaz​ine. org/​neuro​scie​nce-​crit​ics-​learn-​how-​brain-​waves-​link-​to-​spe​ech-​20180​522/ [accessed 20 June 2022].​ Sheets-​Johnstone, M. (2018) ‘Why kinesthesia, tactility and affectivity matter: Critical and constructive perspectives’, Body and Society, 24(4): 3–​31. Weston, K. (2017) Animate Planet, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.

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PART III

Acts of citizenship?

6

Community development, empowerment and youth participation in social-​housing neighbourhoods in France Gülçin Erdi

‘A young man from the neighbourhood, no matter how he is a leader, if you put him in the street all alone, he is nothing. Alone, he no longer has any power. His power comes from the neighbourhood.’ (A young boy from the neighbourhood) This chapter investigates the gap between this young man’s sense of how his power derives from the neighbourhood of Sanitas and the practices of ‘empowerment’ associated with established community development projects in that same neighbourhood. In France, the language of empowerment, associated elsewhere with community development, is more usually associated with ‘animation’ and ‘popular education’. As for community development workers elsewhere, the theoretical foundations laid in the work of Paulo Freire are evident in the histories of Community Associations in the neighbourhood of Sanitas, but this does not appear to create an openness to the young people of the district: a long-​standing issue for community development practice in both France and elsewhere. Laclau and Mouffe in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (2009) claim that deliberative democracy with the will to build consensus oppresses different viewpoints especially with regard to race, class, gender and, we can add, generational perspectives. According to Laclau and Mouffe, it is only with radical democratic methods that oppressive power relations can be made visible, renegotiated and altered. Starting from this idea, when we talk about radical democracy, we are talking about a praxis coming from the roots of democracy itself; in other words, a praxis far from a set of procedures but rather an infinite process of deconstruction/​reconstruction of the substance, forms and limits of collective existence: a dynamic irreducible to any institutional state and coming clearly from grassroots initiatives. Laclau and Mouffe (2009: 269) suggest that if we want to return the original signification to the term ‘democracy’ in the 99

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current neoliberal age, we should accept it ‘as a new matrix of the social imagination and as a fundamental nodal point in the construction of politics’. In addition, this should be done in plural ways including all individuals with all their rights as well as all struggles with their claims. This plurality is particularly important: with its democratic logic of the generalisation of equivalence it includes all social and cultural categories in the realisation of a collective participation including youth and children. It is therefore interesting to observe existing practices of democracy from the perspective of youth. This enables the analysis of how their place is conceived –​if it is conceived –​in existing democratic practices. Community development offers a perspective towards social equality in participatory processes. Practising radical democracy in urban space also requires thought about how and with which tools and methods such radical democracy becomes possible. The claim to ‘space’ is the main base of expression for all these practices. Henri Lefebvre (1974) argued that the production of space not only manifests various forms of injustice but also produces and reproduces them, thereby maintaining established relations of domination and oppression. Therefore, governmental practices in urban policy are not exempt. To resolve and mitigate the effects of this process is to realise the right to the city for everyone according to Lefebvre and this is also a radical approach of democracy in the city, going beyond the classical understanding of participatory democracy. Lefebvre proposes the right to the city as a right of all people living in the city to participate in decisions concerning their everyday life and to exist, with their own lifestyles, identity and cultural habits, in the city. The right to the city is then considered as a resistance to the standardisation of city life, including resistance to standard forms of participation. This necessarily goes beyond the institutions and become a perpetual invention of different forms of democratic participation and expression. In other words, I argue that space and its political construction matters for the realisation of a radical democracy. This chapter sets out to enquire whether, in a marginalised, low-​income neighbourhood with a significant young population, it is possible to see radical democratic practices from the perspective of democratic right to the city despite the weak social capital of residents. Are existing democratic tools, structures and participatory devices efficient and inclusive? Are there spaces, possibilities and a will for including youth in processes of community development? The question here is whether and how different participatory processes, including those conceived by governments in France, are able to build a democratic capacity for citizens or whether in reality they neutralise different forms of resistance, mobilisation and/​or protest built by those same citizens. Do implicit spatial assumptions of governments concerning so-​called ‘sensitive neighbourhoods’ not inflect the politics of participation and community development in those neighbourhoods? 100

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Methods of qualitative sociology were used for this empirical research undertaken between 2017 and 2019 for a locally funded research project entitled L’engagement et la participation au prisme du pouvoir d’agir. Enquête dans des centres sociaux et conseils citoyens en Région Centre-​Val de Loire (ENGAGIR) in a social-​housing and multiethnic neighbourhood, Sanitas, located in Tours, France. The objective of this project was to study the role of Community Centres (Centres Sociaux) in the empowerment of people living in the neighbourhood. The research focuses on a mobilisation against a regeneration project and on the relationship between different local groups like the Community Centre, the Citizen Council and the Sanitas Collective. I argue that the top-​down creation of participatory tools does not facilitate a real empowerment of residents in order to lead to a local radical democracy; in particular, it especially excludes the young. The main focus of the chapter is to analyse the tensions between different groups, especially between young and ‘racialised’ peoples and activists in associations, and between those young people and the Community Centre’s employees. It will also analyse the involvement of a young population in the everyday life of the neighbourhood in the context of urban regeneration.

Attempts at mobilisation against urban regeneration in Sanitas and the difficult participation of young people Sanitas is the poorest district of Tours Metropolitan Area, classified as a priority neighbourhood by the framework of Policy for the City designed in 2014. Policy for the City (Politique de la Ville) is a set of policies for urban cohesion and solidarity within the most disadvantaged districts. It aims ‘to restore republican equality and to improve the living conditions of residents by mobilizing all public policies’ (French Ministry of Territorial Cohesion and Relations with Local Authorities, 2014). The origins of this policy scheme was in a specific context marked by the arrival of the left to power in 1981. After several incidents of unrest took place in the social housing neighbourhoods of the French banlieues during 1981, a National Commission for the Social Development of Neighbourhoods (Commission Nationale pour le Développement Social des Quartiers, CNDSQ) was created and attached directly to the office of the Prime Minister. Hubert Dubedout, the mayor of Grenoble, was appointed as the president of the Commission who finally prepared the report Ensemble, refaire la ville (Together, Remaking the City) (Dikeç, 2006). In 2015, Sanitas had 8,227 residents with a median income of 7,500 euros per year. It is a 93 per cent social-​housing district. The population is quite young (48 per cent are under 30 years old) and the working class is overrepresented, as are residents of immigrant origin (27 per cent). Single-​ parent families are also significant. Among 2,200 families, there are 700 101

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single-​mother families. The unemployment rate (22 per cent) is more than twice that of the region (9 per cent).1 More than half of households live below the poverty line.2 As such, it is a neighbourhood which might classically be the focus of a community development approach. However, a closer observation of the neighbourhood shows clearly that there are numerous social and cultural initiatives and associations for families, children, cultural and sports activities. As one of the members of an association, ATD Quart Monde, told me, “even if the neighbourhood seems globally poor, it is very rich in terms of cultural and ethnic diversity and this is the treasure of Sanitas” (Beatrice, interview). The district is located in the city centre of Tours, behind the train station. It has already benefited from regeneration actions in the 1990s and then between 2001 and 2014. Today, it is one of the 200 districts of ‘national interest’ listed by the state as part of the New National Renewal Program (NPNRU), when a new phase of urban renewal was launched in 2017. According to this programme, the demolition of 430 social-​housing units is planned by 2024, corresponding to 10 per cent of the entire social-​housing stock with the objective of introducing further social diversity in the district. The main associations in the neighbourhood struggling for tenant rights, such as the National Confederation for Housing (CNL) and the Association for the Defence of Worker Consumers, are opposed to the demolitions. The representatives of these associations came together in order to create a collective of activists and to organise a mobilisation in the neighbourhood. In 2017, they founded Sanitas Collective in order to stand up for the existing social character of the neighbourhood and against the potential gentrification at the hands of local administration itself. In Sanitas, besides multiple associations working on concrete themes (help for schoolwork, support for families in poverty and for refugees, food and meal distribution, leisure and sport activities), there are three places of participation where social, cultural and political issues related to the neighbourhood’s life are debated and discussed: Sanitas Collective, the Community Centre called Pluriel(le)s and the Citizen Council. The Collective has about ten permanent members with some other people participating sporadically in meetings and activities. Of the permanent members, half are women and apart from two people, all are over 55 years old. All the permanent members are of French origin and only one occasional participant is of immigrant origin. There are no young people in the collective. The Pluriel(le)s was created in July 2013 with three main objectives: creating social cohesion, supporting youth and promoting multiculturalism. Supported by the National Family Allowance Fund (CAF) and the City of Tours, it hosts more than 64 associations offering diverse activities. There are 18 people on the Board of Administration, around ten permanent volunteers 102

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throughout the year (with a significant turnover) and 13 employees, as well as around 350 members and 2,000 users. While the most of the employees of the centre are relatively young (age 22–​40), the majority of its users regularly frequenting the premises are, in the main, either people aged over 40 or children doing schoolwork. Finally, the Citizen Council is composed of eight residents and eight people from associations active in the neighbourhood. It is hosted by Pluriel(le)s and meetings are facilitated by its director. The Citizen Councils were created in France in 2014 by a governmental decree. The initiative comes therefore from the top rather than grassroots movements. The composition of the council has stayed the same since its creation. For the most part, individuals who are already activists in different associations and Sanitas Collective are also members of the Citizen Council. Most of the individuals involved in these three structures are long-​standing activists; some of them do not live in Sanitas and all of them are White without migrant origin. They invested in Sanitas “because there was poverty and migrants who arrived and who needed help” (Nathalie, interview). However, they are not well known by the local residents who do not really recognise themselves in these militants from the middle classes and who are perceived as ‘White French’. The members are aware of this: “Young Africans at the corner who make barbecues have said of the Collective: ‘they are White bourgeois who deal with the urban renewal’. That’s why we must go and discuss with them, otherwise it constitutes a brake on mobilisation and for the Collective” (Martine, interview). This difficulty in creating links between the Collective and the residents of the area clearly represents an obstacle to mobilisation. It prevents the constitution of an ‘us’ which could make it possible to channel the feeling of injustice, by explicitly designating the Municipality of Tours as an adversary and to take action around the common objective of preventing demolitions and ensuring that the renewal project is carried out for the benefit of the residents. During a meeting of the Collective on 4 December 2017, one of its members said: “We should try to think of ways [by which] people can do things together. The question of trust is important.” The members of the Collective were aware of the fact that the mobilisation was not strong enough, but they believed that this was for structural reasons in the neighbourhood. One member argued that “people are mostly of immigrant origin [and live] in a country [which is] strange to them, they stay silent as they want to stay here permanently, and therefore don’t challenge the French authorities” (Jean, interview). What is interesting in the discourse of the activists of the Collective is the focus on ethnic origin as a barrier to engagement and mobilisation. Despite the presence of a significant young population, whenever someone from the existing community associations wonders why young adults are not engaged in different campaigns and 103

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mobilisations in the neighbourhood, the response is limited to an observation of ethnic and racialised barriers. Furthermore, ‘youth’ is often seen as a separate category of population and not considered as a potential support for engagement and participation but rather as a potential problem: they are seen as the people mostly responsible for the stigmatisation and the marginalisation of the neighbourhood. In this context, elderly residents feel intimidated when they meet young adults in the street: ‘I am fed up with the noise in the neighbourhood. The police should install speed bumps in our street because every weekend there are young people coming with their motorcycle and they make urban rodeos. It is unbearable and you cannot tell them to stop unless you want to be targeted and they will be hostile with you.’ (Elderly resident 1, interview) ‘There are always young people with their motorcycles and I’m always scared that one day they will accidentally kill a kid.’ (Elderly resident 2, interview) Another problem related to the young people and mentioned by all people I met in the neighbourhood is drug dealing. One of the activists of the Housing Association, CNL, says: ‘Before the urban renewal, there were well-​defined corners in the neighbourhood for the drug traffic. Everybody knew that. It was especially around the petrol station and behind the church. Now the petrol station and building near it are demolished and dealers don’t know where to go. There are regular police patrols and therefore they are now hiding their dealing inside the buildings and intimidating the residents if they protest against that.’ (Pierre, interview) In fact, among the structures of citizen participation in the neighbourhood, the Community Centre is the only place where young adults can organise and participate in a range of different activities. It is also the sole place where different forms of engagement and participation for youth are encouraged. However, it is also the case that in the Community Centre, their participation is considered separately with an objective of social empowerment in order to turn them away from delinquency or religious radicalism. The director of the Pluriel(le)s explains: ‘We must first encourage young people to take initiatives, to set up a project on something they like. They must already be motivated to push open the doors of the Community Centre and to know and 104

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participate in the activities offered to them. Most of them don’t even know that we have a specific youth programme, that we have a music and recording studio. Since we widely publicised about Ti’Studio, some young teenagers and adults come to make hip-​hop and rap and it allows them to focus on something. Participation in city affairs and democratic bodies is a second step. The latter can’t come if they don’t first learn to take collective initiatives around small projects.’ (Interview, Community Centre director) There is a tendency to see youth as a monolithic group having the same objectives and characteristics. It is true that in Sanitas, the young population have some similar characteristics including a low level of education (71 per cent of the population has no high school diploma according to the French National Institute of Statistics [INSEE]) and a high level of unemployment. It is nonetheless true that not all the young people of this district can be contained and confined in a single category with the same kind of professional and life objectives. On the whole, the reason for not seeing them in participatory processes and in mobilisations as citizens can be explained by different reasons, which are neither their lack of interest in democratic participation nor their delinquency or segregation within specific ‘ethnic’ communities. In Sanitas, around 18 per cent of youth between 15 and 24 years are unemployed (INSEE, 2016). Globally, the unemployment rate among youth in priority neighbourhoods of the Policy for the City scheme in 2013 was 24.6 per cent while the national average rate was around 13 per cent (Hbila, 2014). It means that, as in other priority neighbourhoods, in Sanitas, young adults have difficulties in managing everyday life and social and professional stability and combining that with having a perspective on the future. Their demands and needs are relatively immediate, like finding a job and an income. In addition, there is also the fact that talking about youth in French priority3 neighbourhoods, as elsewhere, has a gendered dimension. We should remember that before the law of Politique de la Ville (2014), these neighbourhoods requalified as ‘priority’ were called Zones Urbaines Sensibles (Sensitive Urban Areas). In other words, the category of ‘youth’ in these areas is actually synonym for young men who are seen as trouble. Whether for institutional representatives or members of associations, youth (jeunes du quartier) has exclusively a masculine character. Whenever community association members spoke about problems in the neighbourhood and the people they tried to encourage to come to the Community Centre, they presumed that it would be young men and not young women. Young women are often placed in the category of ‘women’ and ‘women’s activities’ as in ‘Atelier des Femmes Plurielles’: cooking, doing yoga or stretching, learning French or sewing. More could be done to encourage more social initiatives coming especially from young women. 105

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Public institutions and their inclusivity programmes have a tendency to characterise young women in neighbourhoods such as Sanitas as submissive and dominated by their father, brother or husband (Arouche et al, 2020) and therefore propose very few programmes of real empowerment, more often staying with clichés, especially in relation to women who wear the hijab. Therefore, in addition to the collective problems with youth in general, as discussed, young women also live with the problems of invisibility, with little voice and limited presence in public space. Their presence in public space depends on their status. If they are a student or find a job or traineeship, they have relative liberty, but this liberty may still be controlled either by members of their family or by the norms of neighbourhood life. It seems hard, however, for the older generation to recognise how they exercise agency. For example, Inaya, a young woman of 21 years old, working for an association in the neighbourhood, explained that, although her family allowed her to work, her movements and hours were controlled; she could not wear the clothes she wished and she could not have a boyfriend. However, she had found different ways and means in order to enlarge the borders of her liberty by organising valuable activities for her Senegalese community in order to gain respect (Inaya, interview). Nevertheless, the complexity of negotiations such as Inaya’s are not neglected and often supported in community development programmes as distinct from the neglect by public institutions. For example, after she organised activities to promote the cultural heritage of the African community, an association working in the neighbourhood hired her to develop work with the Senegalese community. The time of community development through the lens of young people’s engagement All young individuals regardless of their gender share the immediacy of job problems and the need for better conditions of life. This has effects concerning their participation and interpretation of democratic participation tools offered by institutions. According to an employee of the Community Centre, it is only possible to pay attention and to be interested in developing community and helping others in the everyday life of one’s neighbourhood, and therefore to contribute to the construction of a real citizen participation and a radical democracy, if you are comfortable and supported in your own life: “You can’t expect people to be interested in Citizen Council, participation or other things which demand time and energy when their stomach is empty, when they are expected to live on the minimum social wage” (Abdou, interview). Another employee drew attention to another aspect of living with urgent and immediate pressure: 106

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‘In fact, young people, they have just one problem … they find it difficult to imagine future plans. They want to bring the neighbourhood to life. There are many things they want to create … but, now planning projects, that seems complicated to them. What they lack is above all organisation. It is basically methodology. For them, it’s “right now”, that’s all … if it is not, they will not be interested.’ (Observation notes of Citizen Council meeting) This clearly raises the question of the articulation of institutional and political time and that of time in the lifeworld of young people, which follow distinct logics. For example, when young people formulate familiar requests for places of sociability like a self-​managed meeting room or premises for their leisure; by the time these demands have been managed politically and found an institutional outcome, the young people have already left the field of negotiations because it is too slow for them (Hbila, 2014). Thus, when young people’s involvement in a participatory scene brings them little or no benefit in return, they are disappointed and transmit their disillusion to their juniors. A young man encountered in the street says the following: ‘What is the point of participation? We have participated a thousand times in their meetings, and, in their day, our grown-​up brothers already participated a thousand times in their meetings, what was the point? We have met this professional or that elected representative several times. They know our problems. So what? It’s no use.’ (Abbas, interview) This statement shows clearly the spatio-​temporal gap between young people and institutions. The former live in the moment and have difficulty in adapting to the longer temporalities, especially those of institutional arrangements. This gap sometimes creates conflict between the expectations of young people and the response of existing structures in the neighbourhood. As for the Community Centre, it is not always easy to act directly since the public institutions do not always allow it to take initiatives even though it knows the neighbourhood better. The institutions are motivated above all by respect for the republican and secular principles of France. As a result, therefore, social and political participation schemes stay at a distance from the grassroots and do not leave very much liberty to employees as the budget of community centres come directly from national and local government in France. Institutions–​youth nexus through participation and empowerment In France, since the 1990s, different programmes aiming to reintegrate young people into the public sphere have multiplied. From Youth Councils to Parliaments and Citizen Forums, a whole set of tools have the aim of 107

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encouraging their participation but find relatively little interest among those first concerned (Arouche et al, 2020). Several people interviewed in the district indeed perceive these devices as tools aimed at favouring a certain type of commitment. Through unequally accessible modes of participation, there is a perception of carrying out a ‘selection process’ in order to promote a style of commitment responding to local political issues, at the expense of others that do not fit into traditional channels of participation. Generally, there are two major problems for ensuring the participation of young people in the existing institutions and structures. The first problem is the nature and the way of functioning of these places of participation that have in the main a top-​down and paternalist character. The second problem is the educative posture of agents/​representatives of local structures –​even when the latter are grassroots organisations vis-​à-​vis young people. If we start with the first problem, it is partly due to the forms and tools of democratic participation in France and to the Jacobin character of French state institutions consisting in the support of a centralised republican state and strong central government powers seen as the sole legitimate actor to transform society (Fassin and Fassin, 2009).4 This perception means that even in introducing citizen participation, it is left to the state bodies to manage the issue and to provide places for it (Bertho, 2005). This functioning has three perverse effects. First, it prevents citizens from easily appropriating the places of participation as they were not involved in their creation and therefore do not even sometimes know they exist. For example, the Citizen Councils have been created by a law and only in certain neighbourhoods qualified by their social and economic problems. This gives the impression that the state conceived these councils in order to prevent potential conflicts but not to drive a real participative initiative from citizens. Second, they are bureaucratic and complex structures requiring time and practical competence to understand their rules, duties and competences vis-​à-​vis public administration as well as their usefulness. This means that the access to these structures stays limited for the part of the population with a weak social capital and disadvantaged ethnic belonging, that is especially those of Arab or Muslim origin including young people (Slaouti and Le Cour Grandmaison, 2020). Finally, these devices paradoxically reinforce inequalities in participation. There is clearly an ‘under-​representation of people belonging to dominated groups (precarious youth, especially young, population of immigrant origin) in participatory experiences in France’ (Bacqué and Sintomer, 2011: 15–​ 16) as it takes time and knowledge to achieve the necessary skills (correct language use, ability to manage a meeting, to talk in public, to prepare official documents) in order to become part of these processes. In other words, instead of creating an empowerment for the excluded, they become the places where the self-​esteem of long-​lasting activists is enhanced. A member of the 108

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Sanitas Citizen Council explains his commitment: ‘because this district needs recognition, because I am linked to this district, I am part of it. I can bring my skills and contribute, through citizen action, to move the population towards more dignity, solidarity, consciousness’ (Sebastien, interview). French Policy for the City has therefore lost its initial affirmative character underlined in 1983’s Together Remaking the City, which insisted that it is necessary ‘to take into consideration diverse forms of participation, and not merely formal associational forms. There is not only one but several levels of intervention by residents in democracy at the level of the neighbourhood. … The quest was for the “democratization of the management of the city”’ (Dikeç, 2006: 29). Participatory structures are thus under the constant supervision of public institutions, ensuring that their members cannot emancipate themselves from the competences and borders defined by those institutions. This constitutes a real obstacle to imagination and initiative-​taking and is highly frustrating for young people who want to bring different projects to being and make them real in a relatively short time. Thus, during a meeting of the Citizen Council where the representatives of the municipality were present, I observed clearly that public decision-​makers do not consider the council as a real tool for citizen participation and empowerment. The local social development officer in charge of Sanitas underlined that: “the Citizen Council is not intended to provide institutional formulas. It is not your role, you have to leave that to the institutions. However, we can provide you with information. Be careful not to be the messenger of any demand.” (author’s notes from the meeting). The urban renewal manager at Tours Métropole continues in this direction: “We must not be fooled about participation, because there are subjects which we can discuss, but, for example the demolitions that have been decided in the neighbourhood are non-​negotiable. It is not for the residents to decide.” (author’s notes from the meeting). Members of the Citizen Council often feel this top-​down gaze. The Sanitas Collective had, for example, carried out a door-​to-​door survey among residents in the Marie-​Curie sector of the district. This initiative was very badly received by the Municipality. A member of the Housing Association, CNL, and the director of the Community Centre were called upon by a councillor who asked them: “What does this survey mean? We have done the official consultation in the neighbourhood. They are trying to do their own!” These words validate the observation that local elected officials and state representatives do not seem ready to recognise the value of proposals produced outside of their initiative and control (Bachir, 2018). One of the members of the Citizen Council wondered if: ‘The Citizen Council wasn’t it created in order to give the illusion of establishing more democracy? For the authorities, isn’t it created for clearing their conscience? Is there a real desire for constructive 109

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discussion and consultation with citizens? The council must be a real place of exchange, reciprocity, consultation for the good of the residents of the district. As for the neighbourhood renewal proposed to us, the Council has no say, is not consulted, cannot make proposals.’ (Anonymous interview, a member of the council) This paternalist approach is not compatible with what young people perceive as democratic participation either. A young volunteer at the Community Centre explains: ‘It is clear that in appearance we have some places to talk, a fake democracy that we put in place to say: “hey, have a look, there is a chance to discuss”, but what do we do with the discussion afterwards? That’s the problem. Listening is good, but are we taking the discussion into account? For example, a protest that comes from some young people, such as: “Yeah, that’s not normal, we want that”, well … they are heard. They are going to be listened during a meeting but after that, what happens? Over time, when this kind of meetings happens once, twice, three times, four times, nothing moves or the result is not what is expected, then young people may not believe in the system, no longer trust and say: well we are going to do otherwise, we will not ask for anything, it is useless. They express their anger by burning cars or by organising in groups in order to have some power in the neighbourhood but don’t work with us or no longer come to events organised for them.’ (Anonymous interview) In short, the whole question that arises for a community and its traditional partners is to know to what extent they are ready to hear the youth. Do a city and those involved with ‘youth policy’ actors value the voice of young people only when it meets their expectations? Are they ready to accept that young people ‘move the lines’, question the rules in force and, ultimately, produce new social standards? (Hbila, 2014: 13). This is one of the main issues for the promotion of young people’s participation in local democratic structures and returns us to the meeting of radical democracy and the right to the city, meaning the real transformation everyday practices of participation for all. Drawing on Lefebvre, the right to the city signifies in the most positive of terms the right of citizens and city dwellers, and of groups they (on the basis of social relations) constitute, to appear on all networks and circuits of communication, information and exchange (Lefebvre, 1996). In other words, the core elements of the right to the city are defined as the promotion of equal access for all to the potential benefits of the city, the democratic participation of all residents in decision-​making processes, and the realisation of residents’ fundamental rights and liberties, including 110

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those of the youth. The French urban policy, which seemed to promote this approach in the 1980s, has abandoned progressively this inclusive way of bringing solutions to priority neighbourhoods’ various problems. Rather, as Dikeç argues, ‘these neighbourhoods were conceptualised as self-​contained and dangerous areas with rigid boundaries for which the answer became often repressive and punitive state interventions addressed in spatial terms’ (Dikeç, 2006: 287). Another problem is the normative and pedagogic orientation of agents/​ representative of local structures. In France, Community Centres are created with the principle of ‘education populaire’, which means to create collective dynamics that allow the dominated people to jointly develop a critical understanding of society and the origins of social inequalities. It is about giving yourself the means to understand the world in order to be able to transform it. This orientation is, in reality, not so far from what a radical democracy should be. Moreover, the director of Pluriel(le)s underlines it clearly. Defining himself as an activist of ‘education populaire’, he says that he wants to “use the skills acquired over the years to enable people to take charge of their lives and to act together”. In his mind, the relationship between the community development worker and the local resident is evolving towards an ‘alliance’ in which the latter is a committed actor developing their own resources. As for the community development worker, s/​he becomes a ‘resource mobiliser’ and a ‘partner’ who facilitates the empowerment process (Deverchère, 2017). As the director underlined during a meeting, “they are not there to take the place or to speak in place of local residents” but to listen and support. Everyone must speak up and have the necessary time for this. It is therefore necessary to know how to be patient and to live at the pace of the other person and not at his own personal pace (Deverchère, 2017). However, in practice, these principles are not entirely followed and are sometimes transformed first in the style of assistance and teaching by the workers towards the residents and especially towards young people. Concerning the latter, according to Cortéséro (2014), what is observed in public structures like Community Centres is that work for youth aims to help young people achieve a social figure of the accomplished adult, defined by a set of psychosocial development standards. In France, policies for young people from low-​income, social-​housing neighbourhoods follow largely a logic of containment of ‘dangerous classes’ aimed at ensuring social peace through educational actions intended to make young people ‘reasonable’ (Dikeç, 2007; Cortéséro, 2010). Animation, the professionalisation of which, in France, is largely linked to policies for the infrastructure and management of social housing banlieues is part of a larger plan to ‘civilize the banlieue’ (Cortéséro, 2014: 53). Young people who depart from these standards then embody a deficit figure, and the work in their direction must be corrective 111

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and compensatory: they must be helped to reach the ‘dominant standard’ (Cortéséro, 2014). This kind of education whose objective is actually to teach the formal exercise of citizenship to the youth is often experienced as an institutional violence and a denial of recognition. For example, in 2018, the French government set up the programme of ‘Quartiers de Reconquête Républicain’ (Neighbourhoods of Republican Re-​conquest) in order to ensure the public security by increasing the number of police officers in some ‘sensitive’ neighbourhoods. Sanitas has been included in this programme that was harshly criticised by civil society organisations who accused the government of not being interested in long-​ term social solutions but of instead privileging physical repression. For the director of Pluriel(le)s, this programme makes no sense because the police will never be able to eradicate drug dealing. Instead, it increases social tensions in the neighbourhood and young people are very hostile to the police officers. According to him: “dealers are smart guys, they know their interest very well. In general, they don’t use drugs but only sell them. Some of them study and you can really discuss with them. When you want to discuss with an equal base, they listen” (anonymous interview). In any case, it is rare to simply ask young people what they want and how they would like to do it.

Conclusion The study of actors in local democracy such as the Community Centre and the Citizen Council at Sanitas shows that ensuring a broad participation of residents within working-​class districts is always a difficult task. Observation of the people involved in various initiatives within the neighbourhood indicates that they are very unrepresentative of the entire population of the neighbourhood. We see very few young people or people of migrant origin in the activities of participation and design of the Community Centre’s project and activities. They are very often the same people involved in different associations and projects, wearing several militant hats. Observation of the participation and advocacy initiatives of residents of Sanitas also shows the importance of the role of the Community Centre, which can be both initiator and unifier, as well as passive and demobilising. Its position seems to be largely dependent on the employees of the Centre and their involvement in structures and spaces of participation as community development practitioners. Some programmes and participatory studios initiated by the director of Pluriel(le)s seem to attract young people to attend the Community Centre and this could have the effect of giving back some confidence, to participate in the collective events and meetings, to respect others’ opinions and therefore to tolerate the contradictions. In that case, it would be more valuable to integrate youth into existing participation platforms and spaces rather than creating separate ‘youth’ platforms through 112

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which institutions expect their engagement in policy. For that, instead of a paternal approach, some researchers propose the term ‘user expertise’ as young people could be experts of their own territory and neighbourhood (Talpin, 2010; Cortéséro, 2014). According to Coussé et al, the education-​ centred approach is actively refused by young people, as it tends to erase class conflict and relations of domination (Cano-​Hila, 2017). In sum, the lack of participation of youth seems highly correlated to social exclusion and precariousness, especially in disadvantaged neighbourhoods. All public and community-​based programmes targeting their inclusion in various platforms of democratic expression should be imagined in the big picture that includes solutions to enhance their social conditions. In addition, they should abandon the perception of these neighbourhoods as problematic areas and consider them as resourceful areas by focusing on how they can value the neighbourhood, both the young men and young women within it, and what can they do together with young people and not for them. Notes All rates are taken from the French National Institute of Statistics (INSEE) including the number of single-​parent families. 2 In France, the poverty line is fixed at 60 per cent of a median revenue, or €1,026 per person. According to INSEE, there are 8.8 million poor people in France today, or in other words, 14 per cent of France’s population. 3 We should remember that before the law of Politique de la Ville (2014), these neighbourhoods requalified as ‘priority’ were called Zones Urbaines Sensibles (Sensitive Urban Areas). 4 ‘French republican’ tradition considers each person as a member of the national community; consequently, integration means assimilation into the national culture. In the 1990s, this tradition took the form of a ‘republican nationalism’; immigrants became the scapegoats for socioeconomic difficulties and the banlieues were perceived as a ‘threat’ to national unity. Despite the ethnic diversity of these neighbourhoods, they have commonly been described as ‘ghettos’. See Dikeç (2007) and the review of his book (Gilbert, 2010) where the quotation has been taken from. 1

References Arouche, S., Lardeux, L., Stebig, J. and Zobel, C. (2020) ‘L’engagement dans les quartiers populaires. Formes et modalités des initiatives des jeunes’, INJEP Cahiers de l’action, 56. Bachir, M. (2018) Et si les habitants participaient? Entre participation institutionnelle et initiatives citoyennes dans les quartiers populaires, Amiens: Ed.Licorne. Bacqué, M. and Sintomer, Y. (2011) La démocratie participative. Histoires et généalogies, Paris: La Découverte. Bertho, A. (2005) ‘Malaise dans la République’, Mouvements, 38(2): 14–​18. Cano-​Hila, A. (2017) ‘Youth and neighbourhood effect in Southern European cities: Some pending issues to analyse’, Revista Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales, 15(1): 131–​45.

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Cortéséro, R. (2010) ‘Entre l’émeute et le ghetto. Quels cadres de socialisation politique pour les jeunes des banlieues populaires?’, Education et Sociétés, 25(1): 61–​81. Cortéséro, R. (2014) ‘Empowerment, travail de jeunesse et quartiers populaires: vers un nouveau paradigme?’, FORS-​Recherche Sociale, 209: 46–​61. Deverchère, N. (2017) ‘Innovations et engagement des travailleurs sociaux en faveur du développement du pouvoir d’agir’, Vie sociale, 19: 91–​105. Dikeç, M. (2006) ‘Space, governmentality, and the geographies of French urban policy’, European Urban and Regional Studies, 14(4): 277–​89. Dikeç, M. (2007) Badlands of the Republic: Space, Politics and Urban Policy, London: Blackwell. Fassin, D. and Fassin, É. (eds) (2009) De la question sociale à la question raciale? Représenter la société française, Paris: La Découverte. Gilbert, P. (2010) ‘Badlands of the republic: Space, politics, and urban policy by Mustafa Dikeç’, Journal of Urban Affairs, 32(2): 282–​4. Hbila, C. (2014) ‘La participation des jeunes des quartiers populaires: un engagement autre malgré des freins’, Sociétés et jeunesses en difficulté, 14: 1–​17. INSEE (2016) ‘Population en 2013’. Available from: https://www.insee.fr/ en/accueil [accessed 7 September 2022]. Jean-Marie Bataille, ‘Origines de l’animation: l’hypothese Boltanski’, Agora débats/jeunesses, 2004, no. 36, pp. 76–87. Laclau, E. and Mouffe, C. (2009) Hégémonie et stratégie socialiste. Vers une radicalisation de la démocratie, Paris: Fayard. Lefebvre, H. (1974) La Production de l’Espace, Anthropos, Paris. Lefebvre, H. (1996) Writing on Cities, translated and introduced by E. Kofman and E. Lebas, Blackwell, Oxford. Slaouti, O. and Le Cour Grandmaison, O. (2020) Racismes de France, Paris: La Découverte. Talpin, J. (2010) ‘Ces moments qui façonnent les hommes. Eléments pour une approche pragmatiste de la compétence civique’, Revue Française de Science Politique, 60(1): 91–​115.

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LGBTQ+​young peoples’ sexuality and gender citizenship in digital spaces Sally Carr and Ali Hanbury

In this chapter, we explore radical community development through detailing and analysing the explicit examples of sexual and gender citizenship as practised in the lives of LGBTQ+​young people. We are drawing on a combined 50 years of working as professional youth and community development workers in the UK, and further experience of our own participation in youth projects and activities, volunteering and study in the field. Since 2005, we have worked together across local authority, national and regional youth and community development work organisations, including: Halton Youth Service, Greater Merseyside Connexions Partnership, Brook, LGBT Youth North West, SAYiT, The Proud Trust, Pride Sports and the Empowerment People. In what follows we unpack the use of the LGBTQ+​acronym, before outlining the development of a lexicon of sexual identities and citizenship, which arises from the struggle for life and acceptance of LGBTQ+​communities. We argue that, historically, the development of this lexicon has supported the emergence of the LGBTQ+​ communities and their community development organisations and networks. Such civic action is both of interest to, and facilitated by, the practices of radical community development. These same processes of development remain at work today and are now made possible and enhanced by the digital world. The powerful process of movements in sexualities and gender identities raises critical questions for us as radical youth and community development practitioners, most notably questions about individualisation versus collective community; and the joy and tensions therein. In a final development of the argument, we bring together our decades of professional practice to suggest a model that has been developed over the past 30+​years, by the chapter’s first author Sally Carr. Here this is briefly elaborated as a model of Therapeutic Youth and Community Work. We are choosing to use the acronym LGBTQ+​standing for lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer with the plus (+​) symbol providing an acknowledgement to many other identities that are impacted by LGBT-​ phobia within hetero and cis-​normative environments. Some authors, activists 115

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and professional practitioners will use the longer acronym LGBTIQQAA (or variations on this), which actively acknowledges intersex, queer, questioning, allies and asexual identities. We prefer the utilisation of the plus symbol as a way of demarking both those identities currently included, and the possibility of yet more identity categories being included in this umbrella term. We will return to this language of sexualities and gender identities as we explore the development of a lexicon of sexual identities and citizenship that arise from the struggle for life and acceptance of LGBTQ+​communities.

Radical community development and sexual citizenship: what’s in a name? In ‘Radical democracy and the internet’, Dahlberg and Siapera (2007) build on the concept of radical community development in the context of democracy in which they claim radical democracy is concerned with a radical extension of equality and freedom, following the idea that democracy is an unfinished, inclusive, continuous and reflexive process. Richardson (2017) highlighted, that over the last two decades, sexuality has emerged as a key theme in debates about citizenship, leading to the development of the concept of sexual citizenship. Utilising these understandings enables exploration of radical community development and sexual citizenship; these terms are used to provide a basis for our arguments in this chapter. By utilising the language and developing lexicon of sexuality and gender identities, we are highlighting a countercultural response to the terms that were previously created to describe these identities. Such hegemonic terminology has usually been created by people who are themselves believed to be outside of the LGBTQ+​communities, and such terms (often drawn from medical and legal discourses) position and describe identities as outside of the accepted heterosexual and cisgender norms. As the creation of new namings is the focus of this chapter, it is necessary to briefly outline some of the historical and cultural struggles found in the language of sexual citizenship. For LGBTQ+​young people the notion of community holds a multitude of complex meanings. Finding a community of identity means finding a place where folk oscillate around one another: having generally experienced a feeling of being different, an outsider, possibly even rejected, is powerful! Historically, and still today, when such exclusions have occurred, responses to this have resulted in self-​organised community development, in which difference and diversity is accepted. As such, we are bringing into focus the development of a specific lexicon, which supported the emergence of the LGBTQ+​community and its community development organisations and networks. Such practices now raise questions about individualisation versus collectivity and community, especially as these community responses are still very necessary as responses to trauma and hostility. We encourage the reader 116

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to hold these questions, and tensions, while reading this chapter as we, the authors, sat with it during the writing of it. The potential and the possibilities that arise from the trauma of exclusion create fertile ground for radical community development to occur, for example, in the development of crisis lines, buddying organisations and youth work projects from the 1970s onwards in the UK. At the same time, the normativity of much ‘place-​based’ community development was a challenge for individuals who felt themselves outsiders in their own localities. In the 1970s, youth centres and community centres were as often as not places where ‘outsiders’ found it hard to enter, to join in or to use their voice in. A key organising feature, therefore, of radical LGBTQ+​community development, is the offer of spaces and places that welcome extraordinarily high levels of difference; the defining commonality of the individuals in the community is their having experienced trauma as a result of the exclusionary forces of local communities, including often their own families. LGBTQ+​ community development provided an excellent example for community development more broadly as it demonstrated that a ‘whole’ community need not be homogeneous. LGBTQ+​youth groups operating radical community development on these grounds offer a great mix of sexuality and gender identities as well as social classes, ethnicities, faiths and more: something which often does not happen in other settings. The umbrella term LGBTQ+​in itself has a contentious history. It is built on language from ancient Greece (lesbian and bisexual) and White colonialist language (homosexual), which was coined by psychologist Karoly Maria Benker in the late 19th century as a means of naming people whose behaviour was seen as sinful and against natural law. The term ‘trans’ has been adopted as an umbrella term and is used to encompass a broader range of gender identities beyond the medicalised and pathologised terms such as ‘transsexual’ and ‘gender dysphoria’ often imposed on trans-​identified people. The normative terms often originated in the disciplines of law and medicine with categories which move towards identifying difference in the form of ‘othering’ and deviance. Understanding this trajectory of language use, seen through the lens of sexual citizenship, helpfully enables a critique of the ways in which social institutions exclude individual subjectivities, especially those deemed as deviant (Richardson and Munro, 2021; Richardson, 2017). For LGBTQ+​communities and individuals, creating a language of our own has been a necessity; a way to counter the discriminatory terms placed upon LGBTQ+​people. It is a practice of citizenship which responds to trauma with an affirmative development of language, services and community development activities; that counters the negative and aims to create more positive framings of having been ‘othered’ and excluded. Progress for some minority sexual and gender identities in proud self-​naming language development paved the way for more recognition, in the public realm, of 117

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LGBTQ+​minorities. For example, the terms lesbian and bisexual became more commonly used terms, marking them as different, but in synergy with homosexual and/​or gay. Lesbian and gay lives became more visible during the 1970s and 1980s, while often remaining fixed within the gender binary, and seeking equality within a heteronormative and cisnormative ‘symbolic order’ (Skeggs, 2004). Alongside the theoretical understandings and musings of sexual and gender minorities a political focus emerged on this new collective citizen group. During this period in the UK’s community development and youth work sectors, an important groundswell of services and informal support groups, at neighbourhood and community levels, were emerging. Born out of a lack of provision, support or information for lesbian and gay people, those individuals themselves, their friends and, sometimes, their families, would self-​organise, cultivating a community of identity, self-​help and mutual aid, and drawing on allies to support the cause. Examples in the UK context include the Gay Switchboard, Lesbian Line and the Campaign for Homosexual Equality. Radical community development, as a grassroots tool led by LGBTQ+​ young people, to discover, define and identify their/​our continuous development of sexual and gender citizenship, has been occurring for 50 years and has been accompanied throughout that time by the creation of terms to enable both self-​identification and mutual recognition and support. As is becoming clear, there is no one-​size-​fits-​all terminology with regard to sexuality and gender identities. Terms are as diverse as the people who use them; the lexicon proliferates and diversifies. This changing lexicon provides us with both a lens on and an example of radical community development in its attempts to include and affirm minorities. The language that created an identity lexicon in turn extends into new discourses and in doing so acts to create culture. Culture then paves the way to develop spaces for people, and the spaces became the homes to community development practice within. In the UK, Gay Switchboards and Crisis lines, which had run from people’s homes, developed into the establishment of community centres such as the London and Manchester Gay and Lesbian Centres. These local, city-​based centres also pathed the way for national campaigning platforms such as Stonewall (Formby, 2017).

Doing digital differently: how LGBTQ+​young people create and occupy online spaces The role of the community development practitioner, as it has emerged, has been to open up and create the spaces, to enable new practices to be developed by drawing on relationships as the critical resource. In turn the emergent community enables the personal development of individuals within 118

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it. In doing so we created a sector formed by connecting communities and making friendship a basis for community. If friendship as much as place or locality or family becomes the basis for community, then community development still requires a critical eye at the global level, situated in the specifics of the places and spaces from where people see and interpret the world and more specifically their worlds. These lenses should not be thought of as distinct from, or outside of, the digital spaces that LGBTQ+​young people occupy; rather they are distinctly related to one another. In the current decade, many of these spaces are in the digital landscape, and provide a different set of parameters for engagement by the community development practitioner. Akin to detached youth work perhaps,1 we enter this environment, the preserve of young people themselves, and we need to be respectful and act as invited guests, noticing where we are and taking our time to offer insights and inclusion. Digital and online communities are a native environment for many young people who have the means and know-​how to access and use these spaces, while simultaneously remaining a new and sometimes uncertain environment for numerous adults, including community development practitioners, whose role it is to support young people. For many young people the digital space is part of their everyday real-​life experience, where social and cultural capital can be exercised, whereas it may be limited in other traditional physical and adult-​orientated community spaces. Mobile and hand-​held devices with internet access mean that being away from the adult and family gaze in digital space is a regular possibility for young people. Previously, we have observed that this distance from the adult and familial gaze has been enabled only by greater physical moves such as LGBTQ+​young people going into further or higher education away from home in order to access a space outside of the family (Epstein et al, 2003). Enabling many LGBTQ+​young people to have the opportunity to explore radical democracy through internet use, and the freedom this provides for exploration about their sexual citizenship, Dahlberg and Siapera (2007) claim that such communication may advance democracy beyond the ways it is currently conceptualised and practised within present liberal-​capitalist political contexts. As radical community development practitioners we may already be late to this party and need to be genuinely led by young people. Online and digital platforms provide a space to meet, explore, learn and create together, often in the absence of adults and restrictions that may exist in other spaces that young people operate within. And while some adults raise concerns about the safeguarding of young people (as such unregulated and self-​governing spaces do present risks to young people) they also provide young people with space to grow, develop and be. Formby (2017) states that in experiencing community as part of a virtual space, such as online, or even in fictional and imagined ways, LGBTQ+​ 119

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people are thought to share ‘something’, and this ‘something’ becomes a point of great reflexive value. Such mutuality and common ground is something that will be returned to when we introduce the concept of Therapeutic Youth and Community Work later in this chapter. The artist Grayson Perry extends recognition to the value of such space and highlights that ‘fantasy isn’t all unicorns and rainbows –​it’s a refuge’ (Armistead, 2021), with the digital space being such a refuge from the trauma of everyday life as a LGBTQ+​young person. The creation of space, then, is an important process that makes possible the practical operationalising of collectives and thus community development actions. When young people come into and create such spaces as individuals or in pairs or groups, the acts of practising identity and utilising words and language to describe oneself is a powerful, radical, political act because there is also a collective witnessing of this which, usually and hopefully, is accepting, encouraging and celebratory of these identity proclamations. The refuge of the digital space combined with the absence of adult censorship and normative restrictions enables young people to create new possibilities for themselves, developing agency and capabilities to act on self-​ identification. The evolution of digital spaces has opened greater boundary-​ crossing opportunities and possibilities for connections globally, where young people with access to the internet can interact with each other, crossing borders, political regimes, religious beliefs, identities, ideologies and so on. However, not all young people have the wealth, status or freedom to access digital and online communities. Bell and Binnie argue that ‘the power that queer citizens enjoy is largely dependent on access to capital and credit’ (2000: 96), and for most LGBTQ+​young people globally, such capitals are limited or non-​existent. This has an impact on the options available to young people to connect and express with others in acknowledging, accepting, creating and expanding their sexual and gender citizenship, and consequently may have led to a privileging of access and the creation of Westernised definitions of development and progressively inclusive sexuality and gender citizenship. Nonetheless, the digital world does provide a sense of belonging to varied communities, and we suggest that community development practitioners, including youth workers, should attempt to replicate the possibilities of such belonging in the physical ‘in-​person’ settings that we operate in such as youth provisions, inclusive education, health, welfare, employment, faith, leisure and home environments. Having access to both online and physical spaces provides a generative and inclusive necessary pairing. This allows LGBTQ+​young people the conditions under which to thrive. It also enables the development of ally-​ship to support, encourage and advocate for young people in the period of youth or ‘adolescence’, where critical and supportive conversation, as a means to support and advance the young person’s sense of 120

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self, is necessary. Cultivating allies, we suggest, is an applied component of radical democratic community development in that it enables an extension of possibilities for being and mutuality: who we might identify with and create alliances with is changed through the very people we bring into the fold and associate with. Such work is crucial in enabling communities and societies as a whole to be more inclusive and affirmative of all those identities that are worthy of protection, recognition and celebration. Individualism and collectivism: the who and how of developing a new and radical LGBTQ+​lexicon The origins of popular education are found in community and collective learning and action for change. And notions of community as a necessary response to difficulties arising in industrial working-​class life have been explored previously (Batsleer, 2013). As we have argued, digital spaces have extended the possibilities for both mutual aid and change. However, some contemporary manifestations of change are more akin to competitive individualism than to striving for a collective good. Radical community development, at its literal centre, has the term community; a collection of people or peoples whose entity exceeds the sum of its parts. As outlined by Tett (2010), communities operate between the level of the individual and the social institutions which govern civic and political life and all individuals are part, whether actively or not, of several community groupings. For example, communities of place (where we live, work, play); communities of interest (topics we care about and organise around such as ecology and environmental issues); and communities of identity (who we are and how we exist in a world that discriminates against us, for example as a Disabled person, a lesbian person, a Jewish person). By focusing on the possibilities of links and connection at the community level we have seen collectives emerge where diversity can push the boundaries of the group and also give enough collective power to bargain and broker protection and change. This is where the community level offers up such potential and to which the digital provides a multiplying affect. On one level, the ability to self-​identify and express this self-​identification is possible due to the anonymity and magical thinking that LGBTQ+​ people can deploy in communities both online and in-​person. Suspending ‘reality’ and playing around with fantasy and fictional versions of themselves, LGBTQ+​people often find these spaces empowering. Not least because they can practice and perform multiple and changeable versions of their identity in a playful and safer space, but also as a result of the platforms they utilise to allow for ownership, co-​creation and iterative developments between themselves through open-​source software and user-​generated online worlds. Examples of these online platforms include Animal Crossing, Fan Fiction 121

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writing, github, and in-​person examples include Dungeons and Dragons, Comic Cons and ‘slice of life’ anime (Brooks, 2021). Such examples highlight a non-​normative figuring of what a community can be. Communities are being shaped to recognise and nurture difference and in so doing, extend their own understanding and knowledge of how people can identify. This is where the language of LGBTQ+​identities provides such compelling framing in that the plus (+​) symbol provides a signifier of something additional and possible, rather than truncating the acronym or attempting to constantly add letters and definitions into an unmanageable alphabet soup. Despite this, the acronym LGBTQ+​used in this chapter is increasingly under question, and rejected by many young people whose identity does not fall within the focus of this abbreviation. Some LGBTQ+​young people individually name their sexuality and gender with new and more specific terms (Hanbury, 2020), many of which do not currently exist in the popular lexicon available. The continuous possibilities of creating self-​generating terms is reflecting a more popular self-​creation and co-​creation of language, that provides an agility and possibility of self-​determination in navigating one’s own sexuality and gender identity. It has been observed over several decades that LGBTQ+​ people will increasingly utilise terms to indicate the specifics of their identities, often with the aim of achieving recognition and civic rights. While this is a powerful exercise for individuals, it is also important to note that it is only in 2021 that the UK’s national census has included (optional) questions to ascertain people’s sexual orientation and gender identity. This highlights how community development and youth work have been officially recognising and affirming those identities for decades, ahead of and in the absence of a systematic government data capture. It can however be argued that, for those young people in the West, the influence of neoliberalism has come to the fore in these spaces, whereby the pursuits of the individual have garnered greater focus and encouragement over community interest. In their edited collection New Femininities: Postfeminism, Neoliberalism and Subjectivity feminist scholars Rosalind Gill and Christina Scharff assert that neoliberalism is characterised by ‘individualism that has almost entirely replaced notions of the social or political, or any idea of individuals as subject to pressures, constraints or influence from outside themselves’ (2013: 7). For us, the pressing question therefore is whether this creation of individualised terminology reflects a positive element of identity or whether it is much more a reflection of the neoliberal forms of subjectivity. If the second is the case, it makes the possibilities of a radical democratic community development practice emerging much less rather than more possible. It is not a new phenomenon for marginalised groups to create new language and codes. As two examples, gay men’s lives are well rehearsed 122

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in the language of Polari (Baker, 2019). And ‘code-​switching’ (McCluney et al, 2019) is often necessary for many Black and minoritised ethnic young people, where they feel the need to switch how they express themselves when they are among people and groups of different backgrounds and authority, in order to avoid discrimination. The versions of selfhood we might witness and create are unknown if we are able to live without the need for continuous negotiation and navigation of potentially hostile environments. Looking at a world that only mirrors normative selves back to us means our communities become normative too. Despite challenges and alternatives, a community that fully includes is still yet to be imagined or practised. Despite all of the paradoxes discussed, collective demands are being made and visions of acceptance and celebration aspired towards, as we will provide examples of in the next section. Youth-​led possibilities in community development practice The 2020 global pandemic, COVID-​19, has driven the expansion of digital spaces for young people, often as the only space in which they can connect with others during periods of local and national lockdowns. Consequently, new and different forms of popular education and peer learning have flourished in these spaces. Commenting on the work of Paulo Freire, with regard to popular education, Giroux (2010) claims that popular education provides the knowledge, skills and social relations that enable young people to explore the possibilities of what it means to be critical citizens while expanding and deepening their participation in the promise of a substantive democracy. This assertion is practised within some LGBTQ+​youth and community development projects and services dedicated to education in the UK. We argue that this process of popular education starts with developing spaces for practitioners to establish competencies in radical reflexivity. Such critical reflexivity, which involves increasing awareness of political and social structures that govern and demarcate the lives and identities of its citizens, is vital in enabling the educator to truly and meaningfully practise community development. As part of this process, we must critique the behaviours that we ourselves may practise, that make us complicit in oppressive structures. The critical issue here is that, often, the more formalised salaried roles for youth workers and community development workers in the UK are created by, and exist within, the narrow parameters of regional and local government that encourage compliance with, rather than critique of, policy agendas. So, we must extend the frame of our vision when looking for examples and opportunities for practising in critical and reflexive ways. Here, we provide two examples from research and practice. 123

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As Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York, Michelle Fine’s critical Participatory Action Research project, Beyond Acceptance Research Project (BARC), highlights how: Youth consistently brought up the intersectionality of their identities –​ considering and sharing how their gender and sexuality intersected with race, ethnicity, class, education, regional experience, immigration, housing, and (dis)ability. Young people described an overall desire to share analyses and experiences of these intersections with their families and recognised that this requires family members reach beyond acceptance, towards understanding. (Fine, 2021: np) One of the key outcomes of this project was that young people wanted to name and discuss their identities on their own terms. This move ‘towards understanding’ is a recognition of significant progress that LGBTQ+​young people are aspiring for, by highlighting that it is not enough to simply be ‘accepted’ but not really understood or made sense of; they want more than acceptance. This movement, led by young people, is something which radical community development practitioners can learn from. It is about inclusive practice, whereby community, family and kinship develop inclusive understanding; a deeper knowing than simple ignorant acceptance, which is fragile and contingent (Gabb et al, 2019). Such practice will necessitate an intersectional approach, a key term in the world of equalities work, which gained recognition in the late 20th century to describe the multifaceted, interconnected nature of individuals’ identity (Crenshaw, 1991). Intersectionality, Kimberlé Crenshaw argues, describes the ways in which social identities overlap and connect, and how oppression is experienced in multiple, complex ways based on these intersections. So, to merely ‘accept’ a young person’s sexual orientation or gender identity does not go far enough. Intersectionality as a framework of understanding such complexities, instead enables and educates LGBTQ+​young people to develop acceptance and understanding of their multiple identities, and thus identifying their sexual and gender identity as elements within the broader context of their whole identity. Intersectional identities have, until more recently, been absent from discussions of sexual citizenship. However, Henderson (2015) draws our attention to social class, race and diverse genders and argues through an intersectional lens for more visibility and use of the term ‘queer’. Our second example is of a social action project funded by the UK Co-​op Foundation’s Youth Loneliness programme, which was managed by Sally Carr and delivered by Ali Hanbury. In 2019 a peer-​led social action project was carried out with LGBTQ+​young people in the northwest of England and completed in the summer of 2019. Seven LGBTQ+​young people were recruited and trained as youth researchers. The research aims were to: look 124

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into whether social action can be used as a means of addressing, and reducing, youth loneliness; and, provide recommendations to assist services in being more inclusive of LGBTQ+ young people in the social action opportunities they provide (Hanbury, 2020). The young people received several peer research training days before creating a survey. The research team decided to ask the respondents to their survey to self-​identify their gender and sexual orientation in the form of open-​ended questions. This was a political and social commitment to create an opportunity for multiple individual expressions of identity categories. From a response rate of 199, 34 different responses were given in response to the questions ‘how do you currently describe your gender?’ and ‘how do you currently describe your sexuality/​sexual orientation?’ Sixteen different responses were given in response to the question ‘what pronouns do you use’? And whilst the most prevalent responses were female, male, non-​b inary and transgender, the variety of responses demonstrates the breadth of language and terms that have emerged and are utilised when the conditions for this are provided. Some of these responses signal towards the evolution and flexible nature of radical community development and (digital) sexual citizenship: one example among many was ‘demi flux pan romantic’. The research team discussed the results, and these were summarised into a report for publication, made available as grey literature from LGBTQ+​youth charity, The Proud Trust. As part of the discussion the groups felt: Categories and words used to describe gender identities and sexual orientations are changing quickly. New words are being used and within the LGBT+​communities we are also learning as people choose different words to describe themselves. It gives people permission and validation when they do not have to use pre-​selected categories that might not feel right. (Hanbury, 2020: np) These examples demonstrate how the need for self-​governing identity markers are an important element of citizenship for LGBTQ+​young people, and when provided with opportunities to communicate them, they reap significant complex and nuanced results. Using and communicating such complexity and nuance is only part of the project of sexual and gender-​ based citizenships. And as seen in BARC, there is further work to be done beyond accepting and utilising a common language. We argue that this kind of research is critical participatory action research. It is determined to do something beyond ‘tell us and we’ll respond’; it is not a consumer/​provider relationship, it uses research to open up the issues, rather than finding answers. These research examples merge and cross boundaries with critical community development work and identify that there is always further 125

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work to be done, and it is with this in mind we now suggest a new model for critical community development work.

A new model for practice The need to create spaces in-​person, physical life and online and digital life, with young people and youth workers as community development practitioners, to enable discussions about individualism and collectivism, are vital. They are necessary if we are to enable the agency of the young person and collaborative group working. This shared deliberation is at the heart of our community development practice with young people, the community development practitioner and youth workers are themselves immersed in collaborative community activities. Youth and community workers and community development workers are encouraged to take a contextual approach, which takes in a wider perspective on young peoples’ lives and experiences, centred in their worlds rather than being viewed through an adult lens. This means an awareness and engagement with the multiple platforms and spaces that young people themselves engage in, especially the online digital world, as well as having an understanding as to the ways in which young people are practising and playing with their multiple and intersecting identities. We must work to adopt a person-​centred, strengths-​based approach, as opposed to an adult-​ orientated, paternalistic mode of ‘protecting’ young people. This involves a commitment to understanding the complex and emerging terminology they use, the influencers and inspirations in young people’s lives, alongside a social action approach that embraces being youth-​and community-​led. Social action should be seen as a facet of radical community development in so far as it challenges the normative, is focused on social impact, and enables progression to further and wider opportunities; it enables more. These elements ensure that a trajectory is carefully and proactively taken: from reflecting on the social order, increasing knowledge of the ‘issues’ with a view to action, which seeks tangible impact and subsequent next steps so that things do not come to a standstill. Community development practitioners in LGBTQ+​contexts need to not only enable continuing movement, but also to recognise and nurture its stirrings. All of this enhances the collective action necessary for youth and community development practitioners to navigate and negotiate alongside young people, the activities and actions needed to build collective approaches together. Ultimately, this is a struggle which together will address and progress radical democratic social change. Such reflections have led to the development of an emergent model based on radical community development practice; Therapeutic Youth and Community Work. This model is made up of three core components: 126

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• Self-​care –​the individual is encouraged and enabled to prioritise the care and protection they need to thrive. • Mutual care –​individuals, groups and communities are encouraged and enabled to care for themselves and others, making connections with people who reciprocate mutual care and ensure there is a collective approach to community care. • Resilient networks –​groups and communities are encouraged and coached in building networks beyond their immediate communities, identifying allied groups and communities that are inclusive and who can support and enable resilience in the face of potential trauma, exclusion and/​ or discrimination. The model, currently being developed by the first author Sally Carr, is non-​hierarchical nor sequential; instead all three components are necessary and interdependent. Carr’s thinking builds on the mantra of ‘people need people’ and on a commitment to ensuring that care and coping are not simply the best we can expect, and instead sees this position as a starting point for greater and mutually beneficial change. Therapeutic Youth and Community Work is aligned with the values, principles and ethics of community youth work (Banks, 2010; Sapin, 2013). The therapeutic value of youth and community development work is often understood and implied in practice, yet rarely documented in explicit ways. The charity Power The Fight have captured this sentiment in recognising that youth work itself has therapeutic value which should be recognised (Williams et al, 2020). Carr’s approach is intentional and embraces anti-​oppressive and participatory practices. It is genuinely co-​created, tipping the balance of power in favour of young people (Davies, 2005), which gives insight into the broader contexts of young people’s lives. It brings to the fore deep recognition and understanding of the trauma experienced by young people: individual, collective and, often, intergenerational trauma. Trauma that has been produced through discrimination, inequality and inequity. The consequences of these negative experiences can mean that many young people feel disempowered, have faced high levels of distress and are excluded and marginalised from communities and society. Trauma is an outcome of violence; violence (and violent reaction to violence) can be a defence against trauma. Therapeutic Youth and Community Work seeks non-​violent approaches to addressing trauma. This contextual approach to Therapeutic Youth and Community Work practice ensures the recognition of trauma –​naming the social, biological, psychological and institutional sites of trauma, and the impact of these experiences on young people. Therapeutic Youth and Community Work validates young people’s experiences, in their own words, stories and expressions. Using the deliberate act of self-​care, intertwined with mutual care, and resilient network 127

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building, it develops a sense of belonging, to affirm social and ecological interdependence. In doing so it helps to scaffold (Vygotsky, 1978) social justice and social action approaches in addressing trauma. When practised by young people, trusted adults and peers, Therapeutic Youth and Community Work develops strong social associations. Young people are at the centre of these, as assets, as partners in the practice, supporting each other in ‘troubling’ (Sandlin and Letts, 2019) the roots of the trauma they have faced. It involves co-​creating conscientisation (Freire, 1996), deliberate and sustained changes; across systems, institutions and individuals. Through this intentional and deliberate approach, young people feel skilled, able, confident, competent and supported to counter change, avoidant behaviour, and instead enact social and political progress. Such an approach interrupts the neoliberal project and instead actively encourages collectivism and community development in a radical way, a way that moves beyond the individual and situates us in our immediate (multiple) communities and in networks beyond our immediate affiliated groups. In so doing we intervene in spaces that diverge from our own, and through using a mutual care approach, we create alliances, friendships and resilient networks that, in turn, celebrate, affirm and care for us.

Conclusion: The trauma and joy of radical democratic community development As seasoned youth and community development workers in the UK, we feel that our roles in the lives of LGBTQ+​young people are ones to be celebrated and seen as a privilege. Often, LGBTQ+​young people and community members seek out our position as ‘trusted adult’ during –​or in the immediate aftermath of –​traumatic events. Utilising our privileged position as radical community development practitioners, we have the gift of imagining and modelling a more inclusive and joyous version of the communities we live in. Often the idea of a community –​as being something other than the geography of where young people have lived, been raised and schooled –​is new and exciting. Such possibilities have given rise to LGBTQ+​youth seeking and creating their own spaces, often digitally, in order to extend the options of places they can claim and create on their own terms. Being tolerated is no longer the end goal; LGBTQ+​young people are demanding affirmation and inclusion of their identities, and if/​when they do not achieve this, they are self-​organising and developing communities of their own. The new lexicons are where we start from as they are so present in young people’s lives but they cannot define where the work will lead. Such community-​development based understandings can assist in changing social lives and experiences, bringing with it ways of practising sexual and gender citizenship, and extending democratic life through greater freedom, equal status and care. 128

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Through framing this work utilising the Therapeutic Youth and Community Work model, we recognise the complexity and necessity of balancing the individual sexual and gender citizenship with the collective dimensions of community citizenship. The overarching sentiments of this model are those of care, compassion, creativity and collectivity, and it is through this lens we are able to imagine and practice otherwise as radical youth and community development workers. Acknowledgements The authors would like to thank Ben Sullivan for their feedback on an early draft of this chapter. Note See www.fdyw.org.uk

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References Armistead, C. (2021) ‘Fantasy isn’t all unicorns and rainbows: It’s a refuge’, The Guardian, 14 February. Available from: www.theg​uard​ian.com/​artan​ ddes​ign/​2021/​feb/​14/​g ray​son-​perry-​phili​ppa-​art-​club-​chan​nel-​4-​interv​ iew?CMP=​Sha​re_​i​OSAp​p_​Ot​her [accessed 17 March 2021]. Baker, P. (2019) Fabulosa! The Story of Polari, Britain’s Secret Gay Language, London: Reaktion. Banks, S. (2010) Ethical Issues in Youth Work, London: Routledge. Batsleer, J. (2013) Youth Working with Girls and Women in Community Settings, Kent: Ashgate. Bell, D. and Binnie, J. (2000) The Sexual Citizen: Queer Politics and Beyond, Cambridge: Polity Press. Brooks, L. (2021) ‘How video games can help LGBTQ+​players feel like themselves’, The Washington Post, 23 March. Available from: www.was​hing​ tonpo ​ st.com/v​ ideo-​games/​2021/​03/​23/​lgbtq-​rep​rese​ntat​ion-​video-​games [accessed 22 April 2021]. Crenshaw, K. (1991) ‘Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color’, Stanford Law Review, 43(6): 12–​41. Dahlberg, L. and Siapera, E. (eds) (2007) Radical Democracy and the Internet, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Davies, B. (2005) ‘Youth work: A manifesto for our times’, Youth & Policy, 88: 5–​27. Epstein, D., O’Flynn, S. and Telford, D. (2003) Silenced Sexualities in Schools and Universities, Stoke on Trent: Trentham. Fine, M. (2021) ‘Beyond acceptance research collective’, Public Science Project. Available from: https://​publi​csci​ence​proje​ ct.org/q​ ueer i​ ng-f​ ami​ ly/​ [accessed 20 April 2021]. 129

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Formby, E. (2017) Exploring LGBT Spaces and Communities: Contrasting Identities, Belongings and Wellbeing, London: Routledge. Freire, P. (1996) Pedagogy of the Oppressed, New York: Penguin. Gabb, J., McDermott, E., Eastham, R. and Hanbury, A. (2019) ‘Paradoxical family practices: LGBTQ+​young people, mental health and wellbeing’, Journal of Sociology, 56(4): 535–​53. Gill, R. and Scharff, C. (2013) New Femininities: Postfeminism, Neoliberalism and Subjectivity, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Giroux, H.A. (2010) ‘Rethinking education as the practice of freedom: Paulo Freire and the promise of critical pedagogy’, Policy Futures in Education, 8(6): 715–​21. Hanbury, A. (2020) ‘LGBT+​inclusion in youth volunteering and social action’, The Proud Trust. Available from: www.thepro​udtr​ust.org/​resour​ ces/​guida​nce-​and-​resea​rch/​resea​rch-​docume​nts-​proud-​trust/​ [accessed 12 March 2021]. Henderson, L. (2013) Love and Money: Queers, Class, and Cultural Production, Oxford: Oxford University Press. McCluney, C.L., Robotham, K., Lee, S., Smith, R. and Myles, M. (2019) ‘The costs of code-​switching’, Harvard Business Review, 15 November. Available from: www.hbr.org/​2019/​11/​the-​costs-​of-​codesw​itch​ing [accessed 22 October 2021]. Richardson, D. (2017) ‘Rethinking sexual citizenship’, Sociology, 51(2): 208–​24. Richardson, D. and Munro, S. (2021) Sexuality, Equality and Diversity, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Sandlin, J.A. and Letts, W. (2019) ‘Getting up to mischief: Disrupting dominant narratives and practices of curriculum and pedagogy’, Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, 16(1): 1–​5. Sapin, K. (2013) Essential Skills for Youth Work Practice, 2nd edn, London: SAGE. Skeggs, B. (2004) ‘Context and background: Pierre Bourdieu’s analysis of class, gender and sexuality’, in L. Adkins and B. Skeggs (eds) Feminism After Bourdieu, Oxford: Blackwell, pp 19–​33. Tett, L. (2010) Community Education, Learning and Development, Edinburgh: Dunedin Press. Vygotsky, L.S. (1978) Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Williams, E., Iyere, E., Lindsay, B., Murray, C. and Ramadhan, Z. (2020) ‘Therapeutic Intervention for Peace (TIP) report: Culturally competent responses to serious youth violence in London’, September. Available from: https://w ​ ww.powerth ​ efig​ ht.org.uk/w ​ p-c​ onte​ nt/u ​ ploa​ ds/2​ 020/0​ 9/​ TIP-​final-​rep​ort.pdf [accessed 1 October 2021].

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Enabling spaces for and with marginalised young people: the case of the Disha peer support and speak out group Sadhana Natu

This chapter foregrounds the ways that a community education approach engages with the challenges that are faced by first-​and second-​generation-​ learners in Indian higher education campuses by sharing the insights gained through the work of Disha (which means ‘direction’), a speak out and peer support group that has been functioning for the last 29 years. The group was established in 1992 by the author Dr Sadhana Natu, a feminist teacher (Natu, 2015; Natu, 2020). This chapter takes the form of a reflective essay concerning one of the key aspects of Disha as a practice of community building, community development and community education, inside and outside the university. A key aspect is the building of friendship and the consequent unlearning of privilege by those who inherit high caste status. Practices of destigmatising and ‘turning the stigma back’ or ‘shaming the shamers’ are considered central to the possibility of cross-​caste community development work. Disha is an attempt to create a safe space for all students and to enable the lives of privileged and non-​privileged students to intersect. It is both a speak out group and a peer support group, run and managed for the last 29 years by the students in Modern College, Ganeshkhind Savitribai Phule Pune University. The intricacies of the caste system are indeed complex, and they need to be unpacked and understood (Deshpande, 2014). Disha plays a dual role of creating a community of care in terms of offering peer support as well as establishing a dialogical platform to discuss, validate and perhaps find closure for several issues that young adults are overwhelmed by, not just in India, but the world over. Some of these concerns include academic pressure, familial conflicts, issues related to sexuality and love, lack of inclusion, discrimination faced by marginalised students and social alienation. Thus, this case study speaks to the experience of many marginalised, as well as privileged, young people elsewhere, even where they are not subject to a caste system but to other forms of oppressive social hierarchies. Disha is a community-​building project based in a psychology department; the chapter 131

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also shows how thinking from critical psychology can inform community education processes, and how community development work can in turn inform a democratic politics of mental health. Data from surveys concerning the mental health of young people in India needs to be considered in relation to data about those who can enter the portals of higher education in India. The National Mental Health Survey of India (National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences, 2016) estimated the prevalence of mental disorders in the age group of 18–​29 years at 7.39 per cent. The Gross Enrolment Ratio (GER) in India is currently 28 per cent (Department of Higher Education, 2020). GER refers to the number of students who have enrolled in higher education courses as a proportion of their age cohort. Among these 28 per cent of young adults, 50 per cent are students from marginalised backgrounds. But the structural inequalities of caste, class and gender discrimination, as well as institutional apathy, make both the process of higher education, as well as survival in it, a nightmare for those students who come from marginalised communities and groups and who are first-​and second-​generation learners. Many of them have come from village backgrounds which lack economic resources, but their families and communities have been supportive of their educational aspirations. Hence when they enter an urban, impersonal, campus setting, they feel –​and are –​socially alienated (Natu, 2015). Since the 1990s young men and women from marginalised communities in India have been entering the portals of higher education, full of ambitions, aspirations and dreams. To see their dreams fulfilled, they need much support, acceptance and empathy from their privileged peers coupled with understanding from institutions and the wider society. The reservation policy (a programme of affirmative action) in higher education in India allows for entry into this hitherto untrodden domain but does not create a level playing field. Higher education institutions (HEIs) follow a mandatory policy of reservation (affirmative action) which ensures 50 per cent of places for students belonging to marginalised castes (called Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, Other Backward Castes, Nomadic and Denotified Tribes or, in brief, SC/​ST). However, a congenial, conducive and progressive ethos on the ground has yet to materialise.

The crisis of higher education in India Unpacking the gaps and lacunae in the system that alienates and further marginalises (already marginalised) students in higher education and delineating the lack of support they receive is essential to making the system more egalitarian. D. Wadekar is a lawyer and advocate who practises in the Supreme Court of India and is also an activist in the anti-​caste movement. In an interview, she provided the following contextualisation concerning the work of Disha: 132

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‘In every HEI (Higher Education Institution) the law mandates that there should be an Anti-​Ragging committee, ICC [International Complaints Committee]/​Saksham Committee, SC ST [Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes] Cell/​Equal Opportunity Cell as per UGC (University Grants Commission) Regulations. An RTI (Freedom of Information Request) filed with UGC about the implementation of SC ST Regulations in higher educational institutions showed that: only 50 per cent [of] HEIs responded to the UGC and out of those who responded only 50 per cent had set up an SC/​ST Cell mechanism. Despite clear notifications and appeals, even Central Universities and Indian Institutes of Technology and Indian Institutes of Management, National Law Schools are not implementing these guidelines. This speaks of complicit behaviour, denial, and lack of acknowledgement of discrimination that exists rampantly in these HEIs. Despite the Thorat Committee Report of 2007 which probed caste discrimination in elite institutions in India and came out with a scathing report bringing out the horrors of caste discrimination faced not just by students but also by SC ST faculty members in these institutions, nothing has been done to implement these recommendations!’ (D. Wadekar, interview, 2021) Ragging is the term used for the so-​called ‘initiation ritual’ practised in HEIs in the Indian subcontinent, including India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. The practice is like hazing in North America, bizutage in France, praxe in Portugal and other similar practices in educational institutions across the world. Ragging involves the abuse, humiliation or harassment of new entrants or junior students by the senior students. It often takes a malignant form wherein the newcomers may be subjected to psychological or physical torture. In 2009, the University Grants Commission of India imposed regulations upon Indian universities to help curb ragging and launched a toll-​free ‘anti-​ragging helpline’. In the extreme, several cases have occurred of ‘death by suicide’ of marginalised students who were not treated with dignity (prominent among them are Rohith Vemula and Dr Payal Tadvi) (Shantha, 2019). These can be positioned as institutional murders as well as caste atrocity cases and have been a focus for learning as well as anger and compassion. According to Wadekar, accountability and responsibility is needed while apathy, impunity and exclusion need to disappear from the social fabric of HEIs. Disha can be seen as a good practice exemplar of a space where this bridging process across differences can begin: “conversations that bridge the barriers of caste, class, gender, sexualities, region, nation happen in ways that are very radical” (D. Wadekar, interview, 2021). Furthermore, through practices familiar in community development, the speak out and peer support 133

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group engages with the actors themselves –​young people who are students, faculty members and the authorities –​to make the HEI ecosystem more humane. Crucial to this work are Wadekar’s observations that it is imperative to not just work on “doing away with the shame and stigma that the so-​called lower caste young people go through, but to shine a light on the casteism practised subtly and overtly by the upper caste students and authorities” (D. Wadekar, interview, 2021). Her call thus turns the traditional discourse (of making the lower castes stigmatised) on its head and places the onus squarely on those who create the hierarchies and hold on to power structures that sustain their position. As in other settings marked by extreme inequality, in Disha sessions when themes around caste, religion, gender, patriarchy and psychosocial distress inevitably emerge, there is frequently (to begin with) a general denial, shame or complete dissociation from questioning one’s own social, cultural and economic capital, as well as inherent, systemic inequalities, by privileged students. But with time, as Wadekar observed, intermixing, interactions, open debates and dissent enables resistance to melt away and a more creative reflection sets in. The personal does become political, once the members realise that what is at stake for each other differs. After many sessions where intense churning occurs, a realisation that mental health is political and not just bio-​psycho-​social sets in. From this point through the work of Disha, alliances among young people form; the personal becomes political and allyship can be seen as flowing in more than one direction. Thus, the high stakes in imagining and creating the possibility of change become a reachable utopia for Disha because to stigmatise caste-​ism by upper castes starts to become a reality. In fact, members from marginalised communities become allies to those from more privileged backgrounds, by enabling conscientisation as well as creating a space which allows them to question and unlearn their privilege. This is the process of social justice to which cross-​caste community development work such as Disha contributes, and which will be explored in more depth in what follows.

The philosophy and model of Disha: critical dialogue, praxis, engaged pedagogy and conscientisation Critical dialogue and critical praxis The approach of Disha is grounded in a long-​standing involvement in the women’s movement in India since my student days. Long-​standing engagement with grassroots organisations, training as a feminist teacher in Psychology and Women’s Studies has brought criticality to how community development is practised in my work. Students come from a rich diversity (socio-​economic, caste, religion and nation) to study at the university, which has anchored Disha in a dialectics that meshes theory, praxis and lived reality. 134

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This has enabled processes which sensitise and conscientise the students who come from a ‘well-​to-​do’ background while providing support for those who come from the margins. There is a wide gap between privileged and marginalised students, meaning that their paths rarely cross; institutions are at best ambivalent and, at worst, apathetic to the students who are struggling at various levels. In the words of Disha’s founding document, this is an attempt at ‘creating communities of students, who have an equal right to fulfill their ambitions and to restore the democratic balance within campuses, in the true sense’. The philosophy of Disha as community development, including and extending the feminist classroom, has been inspired by the path-​breaking work of Paulo Freire (Freire, 1970; Taylor, 1993) and bell hooks (1994). In discussion of ‘engaged pedagogy’ hooks offers the following insight into the work of developing community within and beyond the university: The academy is not paradise. But learning is a place where paradise can be created. The classroom with all its limitations remains a location of possibility. In that field of possibility, we can labour for freedom, to demand of ourselves and our comrades, an openness of mind and heart that allows us to face reality even as we collectively imagine ways to move beyond boundaries, to transgress. This is education as the practice of freedom. (hooks, 1994: 207) Disha is offered as part of the formal curriculum as well as within the context of a community development project and thus bridges and shifts the boundaries of both institutional and non-​institutional processes. The Disha classroom and community development work each practise a bottom-​up, egalitarian philosophy where the students can question the teacher at any and every step. Open-​ended discussions, debates and dissent are encouraged. An integral part of the development process in Disha is the realisation that the classroom is a microcosm of the ‘outside world’ (in terms of caste, class, genders, sexualities, regions and nations) and that this in turn can shift relations among young people in the actual ‘outside world’. Marginalised students are encouraged and mentored to participate in the discussions within the classroom. The larger issues that are tackled in a free-​flowing manner in Disha find a reflection in the classroom and the theoretical and research paradigms discussed in the classroom find a lived reality/​experiential counterpart in Disha community development praxis. Both aim at reflection and catalysing social change. So, the community development work beyond the classroom is understood as a necessary praxis without which the work in the classroom remains limited by the institution of higher education. In Disha, young people from marginalised backgrounds bring criticality, complexity and struggle from their lived experiences to the discussions, 135

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debates and deliberations. A feminist teacher unpacks and teases out theoretical and practical knots related to social stratification and higher education: these include social, cultural, economic capital, access to resources and the right to education. In undertaking such engaged work, Ambedkar’s (2004) clarion call to ‘educate, agitate and organise’ continues to resonate. In what follows, narratives of student coordinators who are frontrunners in creating a community of care have been analysed, offering their experiences in the speak out domain against the larger discourse of youth activism in India, on the ground (IRL: In Real Life), as well as via the internet in online activism. This documents the importance of a peer-​led initiative for bringing about social change and offering support to young people in distress, thereby questioning the top-​down delivery of the dominant models, especially of mental health, which are proving to be particularly ineffective and unjust in an unequal society and an unequal campus. Sharmila Rege puts this in perspective succinctly: I wish to argue that these are ‘new times’ in the university, the suicides, and other forms of ‘routine’ pedagogical violence notwithstanding and suggest that critical teachers should be ‘listening’ rather than bemoaning the loss of better times. Men and women from vulnerable castes and classes are entering Higher Education for the first time and those for long considered ‘unteachable’ are talking/​writing back. This makes it possible to throw back the gaze of the students who have long been ‘invisible’ and ‘nameless’ in the classrooms on to disciplinary and pedagogical practices. Students complain that confidence and certainty of teaching in our areas of expertise makes teachers embedded in certain kinds of arguments so that we foreclose other possible ways of looking and listening. Do we as teachers become used to ferreting out inconsistencies in stories offered to us by students and prematurely discard them as irrelevant? Feminist praxis offers an exercise that is both restitutive and exploratory; in the sense, that I seek to re-​listen, reflect, and assign new value to ‘stories’ and ‘voices’ ignored and discarded earlier as also to present recent experiences from the classroom for exploration. (Rege, 2010: 2–​3) There is a need to make the link between the history of these ‘new times’, and the distress and psychosocial health issues that marginalised students face in HEIs in India. The apathy, prejudice, hatred and othering that privileged students and staff engage in and the overall apathy, injustice and discrimination practised by institutions, also need to be unpacked. Every year there are six coordinators and at least 50 regular members, as well as a floating population of around 80–​100 others. All of them are invited 136

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to participate in all the activities organised by the group. The members are from Pune, other parts of Maharashtra, other states in India as well as those from other countries. The group has first-​and second-​generation learners and alumni/​ae who are now developing their practice beyond the university. It is a truly inclusive group. This aspect is both the challenge and the strength of the group. It aims to be a gender-​just, secular, non-​ discriminating (based on language, religion, caste and class) humane platform (these are the specificities most mainstream psychologists and psychiatrists rarely go into [Vindhya, 2020]) that allows dialogue, debate and dissent. It also creates a space for friendships, bonding and nurture. The commonalities and differences that emerge in the discussions help to embrace ‘multiple realities’, which in turn help to view life, issues and conflicts in a new light. Engaged pedagogy and conscientisation First, peer support: the free-​flowing discussions help young participants and others to realise that they are not alone (others are facing similar problems too) and to validate their experiences. The atmosphere is non-​threatening, especially when we have just the members present, and most of them speak up. It is in this context and from this baseline that Disha develops peer learning. The meaning of the term peer learning in this context is that much learning is gained by listening to the experiences of others (of their own age and their own kind). As expressed by hooks (2000: 8): ‘As a classroom community, our capacity to generate excitement is deeply affected by our interest in one another, in hearing one another’s voices, in recognising one another’s presence.’ The current members learn, both from present members and from alumni/​ ae whose life stories are full of resilience and triumph, developed through experiential learning. These alumni/​ae participants (many of whom come from marginalised backgrounds) become role models and beacons of light for the younger students. For example, one of the alumnae was a feisty coordinator who internalised the principles of Disha and through her own lived reality, challenges that she overcame and storied in several sessions, created a pathway to engage with multiple realities for many others. Higher education had great aspirational value for her, which she both embodied and thereby helped others to reflect about their connection, alienation or disenchantment with it. The Disha model also draws on principles of feminist counselling and empathetic listening. Here, learning in grassroots level organisations and engagement with feminist counselling allows a ‘hands off’ approach: one-​ to-​one counselling is offered only to those who seek it on their own behalf after attending a Disha meeting. This is because counselling is not positioned as the only option, nor is the counsellor/​clinical psychologist seen as a 137

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pre-​ordained healer. The role of Disha facilitator can in fact be far more enjoyable than that of a ‘so called clinical practitioner’ (Natu, 2015). It offers healing which occurs in the context of the peer support group, where skills of facilitation and community development work are practised even though these are rarely professionally recognised. Playing this dual role of clinician and community development facilitator has been both a tightrope walk, as well as a journey of evolving, learning, unlearning and relearning. Facilitating peer support has meant letting go of the halo of the practitioner, practising healing and self-​healing, embracing the spirit of collectivism, and respecting the space of community care. This journey has not been sudden or without hiccups. My participation in supportive practices in the women’s movement have made this dual role possible since women’s groups have provided a kind of parallel process and space for reflection of my work as a community development facilitator. In turn, the community facilitator role has enriched and informed my clinical practice. Disha began with a module within the university programme: the Disha Module, which takes as a starting point critical themes derived from young people’s experience. These include: • ‘Battling with Science’ (a huge cross that those who opt for science carry, since they opt for ‘the smartest stream’ and not because they like it); changing stream (from science to commerce, humanities, arts, social science) and dealing with educational hierarchies as self-​esteem is affected by what stream you are studying in. • Academic pressure, competition, cultural adjustment (students from other countries, states, rural areas, urban poor), dealing with hierarchies –​ parents, teachers, ragging, sexual harassment. • Diversity, inclusion and exclusion (for instance, a discussion on loneliness brought forth lived experiences from multiple realities that extended from urban poverty to upper-​middle-​class alienation to an international student battling with conformity and exclusion of a completely different sort). • Intimate relationship issues –​love, living in, marriage, one-​sided attraction, rejection in love (also how these issues are complicated by caste, class and gender intersections). As well as bringing community development methods to the formal curriculum, young people who are Disha coordinators organise workshops outside the classroom on topics like gender and sexuality, gender sensitisation and stigma of mental disorders. They also organise study visits to community-​ based organisations working on mental health issues and social issues and more long-​term volunteering with community-​based organisations. This young-​person-​led ‘curriculum’ offers both a model of peer support 138

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created with young people initially within the university and a method for community building between the university and the wider neighbourhood. Here ‘neighbourhood’ connotes both the geographical location as well as the one within the college/​institutional community. It also shows the linkages between the students who come from low-​income groups (poor neighbourhoods) and foregrounds their critical concerns, struggles and aspirational journeys in higher education at the Disha table. Those from marginalised communities feel disenfranchised and Disha sessions become the space where they can give voice to their troubles, and question hierarchies both within the university and those in society. This development of themes through dialogue with the young people can be seen as an initial form of conscientisation. In what follows the focus shifts to the micro-​practice of a community development process of engaged learning and importantly unlearning from the perspective of Disha coordinators.

Disha peer-​led sessions: the role of discussion and critical dialogue Every session has a theme. The following extracts from my own reflective recordings after the session in August 2020 shows some of the process of the group which developed following a discussion on the topic of the ‘meanings of freedom’. ‘A student from a rural area said that studying in a college in a city gave her the freedom to dress in a way of her choice, talk to boys, take in the sights in the city and enjoy the entertainment that the city had to offer. She also had the freedom to pursue her academic dreams. All of this was nonexistent while she was studying in a school and junior college in her village. Another student from a neighbouring state said that staying “away from home” he could take advantage of many freedoms! He could make decisions about choices over food and clothes; he could choose friends, entertainment and hobbies. True, his parents monitored him constantly through calls on his smart phone. Nevertheless, he was happy with his “limited freedoms”. The discussion also included their views about gender differences in rationing out freedom. The restrictions, demands and accountability applied more to the female students. The male students had more freedom compared with the female students. During this session one young woman said they felt that Disha was a “safe place” and she felt truly free in this group. Free enough to talk about her sexuality. She said that she was gender fluid and called herself queer. She had no support from her parents and family, but with her 139

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peers in Disha, who discussed their concerns so openly, she wanted to share this part of her life. Another spoke about the caste discrimination she faced, both subtle and direct. She said that all freedoms come with responsibilities, the constitutional responsibility to treat your fellow beings as equals! The group responded with maturity and solidarity towards all the issues raised vis-​à-​vis freedom: caste, sexuality, gender, the rural–​urban divide and more. The wonderful part of the discussion was that the coordinators, while summing up, exhorted the group to analyse and understand the differences and similarities amongst each other as young adults and not to homogenise the group as a way of bonding. This artificial homogenisation takes away the inherent inequalities that exist within the group. A good way ahead was to acknowledge them, accept them, and to work actively towards removing discrimination and bigotry and try to achieve true psychological freedom and security for individuals and groups. The fact that this discussion took place on 14 August, the eve of Indian Independence Day, made it more meaningful and poignant. The session ended with a chorus recital of Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore’s epic poem “Where the Mind is without Fear” from the Geetanjali (1912). Tagore’s poem alludes to many “unfreedoms” and the students also spoke about chains, shackles of geographies (rural/​urban), gender, sexuality, limited choices. The poem illustrates the meaning of “real freedom” and was therefore a perfect end point for the session and food for thought to reflect further on Independence Day.’ Such themes for discussion are decided through consensus by the coordinators after a thorough discussion with the student members. As one of the 2021 co-​coordinators reports: ‘Today’s young people find it difficult to discuss their views with parents and even with peers due to fear of being judged and rejected. The discussions during Disha meetings are different since we do not hesitate in voicing our opinions and views since we are not being judged. The discussion topics are chosen based on the concerns of young people and from current affairs.’ (Divya Pawar, interview with author) Coordinators facilitate and put forward the points for discussions. Faculty members have a brief to intervene only if required; otherwise, they contribute to the discussion like student members. This is quite a tussle for not just faculty members, but also senior students as Disha coordinators, since this 140

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means dismantling their explicit and implicit power that they gain from inherent hierarchies of experience. They have to become enablers, listeners and participate in creating a conducive ethos for others to speak, speak up and speak out. This is indeed a tall order and sometimes they have to stay away to really contribute! Every year there is a training session conducted by staff and alumni/​ae for the Disha coordinators where the focus is on helping members to express and listen and on the values of empathy, mutual respect and inclusion. From then on, the intervention by faculty members during sessions is minimal. Their role is observation and listening. Members meet at least fortnightly, and this ensures that the dialogical engagement (Freire, 1970) continues and deepens, and young people can process what they hear and contest their initial preconceived notions. Disha offers them a reality check with the voices of frequently silenced and usually unheard as well as articulate students and helps in building a humane, feminist, progressive and rational philosophy, perspective and (hopefully) way of life. Disha coordinators are selected by the faculty members and alumni/​ae with a view of having a balanced mix of privileged as well as marginalised students. The following reflections by two Disha coordinators (Seema Patel and Medha Vatsal) encapsulate their journeys over three years and unravel their process of unlearning privilege: ‘The role of privileged backgrounds and socio-​cultural capital that we have goes unnoticed if we are at the privileged end of the spectrum. The activities of the Disha programme highlight the differences in privileges of different groups. When directly confronted with the issue of privilege, many of us experienced discomfort. But it was the kind, which made us contemplate and question things. This is never taught or preached to us in the activities of the Disha programme but is in the form of a dialogue, which initiated an internalising process. The atmosphere of the sessions is open and sensitive, which makes this dialogue more authentic. In Disha, all of us may not have become friends but we formed an understanding between us. It assured us that we can speak, and others will listen.’ (Seema Patel, interview with author) ‘We feel that teachers and students are not usually involved in each other’s lives beyond classes. The Disha programme platform can converge their conversations, giving teachers in-​depth insights into students’ issues and lives and humanises the teachers for the students. It is a place where students can speak unabashedly without adult interference and censorship.’ (Medha Vatsal, interview with author) 141

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The Disha programme is both about listening and about understanding people’s lives. The two Disha coordinators quoted are young 20-​year-​old females from urban, upper-​middle-​class, upper caste backgrounds. Their narrative foregrounds the quality of conversations and exchanges that happen in a Disha session. It also highlights the need for spaces where young people can reflect about social reality and social stratifications and the role that they play in creating opportunities (for some) and hurdles (for others who are marginalised). A lot of myth-​busting takes place while validation is also important as Disha members risk venturing out of self-​ obsession and cliques to understand differences in others. Their narrative underlines their unlearning of privilege and acknowledgement of capital within the current system. The faculty members too gain much insight from these sessions and the coordinators help in creating a bridge between the emotional lives of the students and the faculty members’ perceptions of these lived experiences. The importance of open spaces created in session is also highlighted by members, for example: ‘The inclusive tone and democratic nature encourages everyone to speak. Such discussions helped us in understanding different angles of the topics, hidden prejudices we had, and the ways to overcome them. Respecting an individual’s perspectives and understanding their experiences without being judgmental is what I think was extremely helpful for everyone to understand everyone. Unlearning the bad.’ (Hiren Chandra, interview with author) ‘Experiences of such a diverse group of people then helped in understanding the struggles and challenges of each other which, questioning rigid viewpoints and gaining a larger perspective which eventually leads to demolishing the prejudices and in increasing acceptance of others. The peer support element which means you can discuss your versions of realities and experiences and still feel comfortable and not being judged is very special. It helps in developing a model of respect, positive attitude, and behaviour. It is useful for pushing discussions on taboo topics in our society like sexuality, mental health, and so on.’ (Divya Pawar, interview with author) Another recent coordinator writes perceptively of the way different perspectives link to different social positions: During the discussion on ‘Inclusion of North-​Eastern students: challenges and possibilities’, we met and exchanged stories with participants from North-​East States of India and could understand their views. 142

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This session allowed me to understand diversity and inclusion. The challenges they face in their day to day lives is something that I could not have even imagined. We all now understood the need to address the discrimination against students from North-​East states. (Hema Patel, interview with author) Thus, the presence of many intersections across difference, including caste, are acknowledged within a conscientisation process which opens up new spaces. Such reflections attest to the vibrancy and flavour of Disha sessions: there is a rich diversity of young people ranging from urban and rural poor to international students. For Hiren this is a learning and unlearning process. We can hear resonance with the unlearning which takes place in Disha and which Hiren experiences in the process of unlearning in Binkley’s theoretical perspective concerning ‘unlearning white privilege’. I employ the term ‘unlearning white privilege’ to capture a broad and diffuse manifestation of this imperative, which in subtle ways inflects a range of discussions extending from anti-​racist activist circles to academic conversations to institutional practices centered on diversity and inclusion, to journalism, popular culture, and political blogging. To be accurate, throughout the conversation on unlearning white privilege, and particularly amongst anti-​racist activist groups, there is a powerful injunction against the therapeutic as a self-​serving, narcissistic preoccupation detached from real, practical commitments. There exists a deep-​seated suspicion that, particularly amongst the liberal, middle classes, such efforts serve the ends of a more profound strategy of white cooptation and avoidance of racial responsibility. Yet, it is not at all uncommon, in the United States, to hear even the most politicised white anti-​racists refer to their own anti-​racism therapeutically as a process of self-​unfolding or as a deeply personal work in progress, or to their own intentional reconstruction of their racist psychic inheritance as a daily task, a project conceived around a narrative of transformative self-​work. (Binkley, 2020: 191–​202) Reading Binkley in the context of Disha highlights many commonalities and departure points. Taking a leaf from the book of anti-​caste activists in India, sessions develop on themes such as caste-​based reservation policies (affirmative action) and resistance to them from upper caste persons, intersectionality of caste and gender in gender-​based violence. Many intergenerational, deep-​rooted prejudices, stereotypes and hatred which are harboured in the minds of privileged members come to the fore. Coordinators tackle all 143

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this sensitively so that the group is not split. They use data and statistics, theoretical arguments as well as everyday facts as thinking and talking points which also de-​personalise antagonisms. Most of the participants recognise that such topics are a long haul and willingly engage in this process for three years often with very positive experiences. Over time, privileged coordinators and members change their viewpoints and are ready to acknowledge bigotry, biases and their own privilege and become allies of marginalised students and take on the mantle of pulling in more of ‘their kind’ to learn from the stories of struggle and survival of those who are disadvantaged. This creates bonds of friendships, comradeship and solidarity not just within Disha but also an affinity towards other struggles and wider social movements on the ground. The marginalised students also become the allies of the privileged students and their lives, dreams and sorrows cross and connect, which helps in building a hope for a shared and interconnected future.

Challenges of critical praxis This community education/​community development process aligns with communities of activism outside the campus that are fighting for the rights of young people from minority and marginalised communities in HEIs in India, particularly campaigns for ending caste-​based atrocities on campuses and ending suicides of marginalised students. Inevitably, since themes and issues that are complex and intricate are addressed in Disha sessions, there are also experiences of impasse and breakdown in communication. One issue that emerges when there is a lack of confidence and trust in engaging with sensitive topics is a turn to ‘preachy’ tones and pedagogical or patronising tones by members. In a session on ‘Structural and Gendered Violence: Inequalities and Injustice’ (which took place online on 9 November 2020 during the COVID-​19 crisis) the female students who spoke sounded preachy and exhorted the others to be mindful about caste and gender! Some male members were patronising to the younger male students and took on the mantle of showing how toxic masculinity is a byproduct of ‘inability to reflect on caste and gender’! Paradoxically, far from enabling a reflective session, the discussion began to repeat mantras which closed conversation, and while exhorting reflection, did not make any headway towards actual reflection or listening to diverse voices. One way of breaking free from such an impasse is a turn to the external and to the possibility of making links between the university and community organisations, such as with the work of the Solid Waste Collection and Handling Cooperative Society (SWaCH) discussed in the next section.

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Community development: campus communities and persistent inequalities The following example of working with rag pickers can stand for many other examples of wider community engagement initiated in Disha. Students learn about waste management in Environmental Science and as a result there was a discussion about wet and dry garbage segregation. It is done manually and involves poor persons from lower castes. Members of Disha visited such a site to enable them to gain insights about involvement of marginalised communities in this labour. Disha contacted members of SWaCH, a Pune-​based organisation founded in 2005 and owned by more than 3,500 waste pickers. Before the visit happened there was a briefing session and the Disha members watched a video featuring one of the feisty, firebrand rag pickers on YouTube. Students thus became aware of the challenges, vulnerabilities as well as the resistance and resilience of the rag pickers so that the visit did not turn into a ‘pity party’ or poverty porn. The encounter between the young people and the rag pickers took place where manure is made, and the young students sat near that dung heap for three to four hours (rather than a lifetime). They did not mind the foul smell (they were there for limited time) and empathised with the rag pickers who spent their working life in such surroundings. Interaction with the feisty rag pickers (the real role models) left an indelible impression; the learning was immediate and visceral. Many students said repeatedly that they would ensure that they would not throw hazardous material like glass shards, nails or other such objects in the dry garbage since they had understood that this garbage was sorted manually by the rag pickers. Such actions create awareness and respect for marginalised, toiling, excluded communities. Such visits and even more significantly longer volunteering engagements –​which move away from the university and towards the lowest levels of the community –​are a process of interaction and are not just a mechanical exercise as they enable an exchange between people usually kept apart. Community-​building also occurs on the campus itself. Through the work of Disha as well as other endeavours concerning community mental health, with ancillary staff (such as cooks, security people, secretaries and administrators), Disha participants have tried to create a sense of ‘campus community’ and build solidarities. In fact, the college community mental health programme is called Ummeed, which means ‘hope’. The persistent inequalities in HEIs mimic those in larger society and the hierarchies are also replicated. Disha members conduct group sessions on self-​care with the ancillary staff in local languages. This effort has cemented some positive

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relationships between them, has broken some barriers of class and has addressed some disparities and inequalities between students, academic staff and other members of the workforce. Through these interactions, conversations and mutual learning they are trying to bridge the gap between the ‘haves and have-​nots’ on the campus and create a give and take of compassion, empathy and pro-​social behaviour that is largely missing in mental health initiatives. As highlighted earlier, several cases of ‘death by suicide’ of marginalised students (prominent among them Rohith Vemula and Dr Payal Tadvi) have been a focus for learning. This rampant denial of rights and justice is a socio-​ political issue and not a biomedical issue of ‘death by suicide’. The shocking apathy of institutions and shielding those who meted out discriminatory treatment has led to reinforcing the injustice (Shantha, 2019). Disha and UMMEED have tried to break barriers and provide conditions for hearing the voices of the silenced and unheard on campus. They have tried to create spaces where the privileged students can achieve solidarity with those who are struggling, through an attempt to reflect on their prejudices, biases and change. This work echoes Arundhati Roy’s often stated belief that ‘there is no such thing as the voiceless: there is only the silenced and the persistently unheard’ (Roy, 2017). The Mental Health Act (2017) enacted in India promised mental health as a basic right. The on the ground reality necessitates recognition that its implementation is extremely difficult. According to Murthy (2021), most of the citizens from low-​income communities do not have access to mental health support. In HEIs too it is the same case while access to interventions is low. While the Pune campus runs a counselling unit with trained practitioners, the need to start and strengthen a peer support group led by students seemed urgent. Those with critical mental health issues are referred by student coordinators, staff members and authorities to the counselling unit and some also do self-​referral. However, a significant section of students is experiencing and enduring a great deal of ‘distress’ and this is addressed and often mitigated in Disha sessions. Hence, Disha coordinators become change makers, conducting Mental Health First Aid (they are trained for this) and catalysing social transformation on the campus, challenging the status quo of the professionals and senior faculty members as the ‘sole’ proponents of social change and student community development. In Disha sessions, human rights concerns such as gender rights, gender equality, citizenship, unrest in the country and world over are discussed. Democracy and movements for democratic rights came to a head in India towards the end of 2019 with the Citizenship Amendment Act and National Register for Citizens. Both these were controversial and contentious since there was a denial of rights to several minority and disadvantaged groups. Disha members were aware of, and participated in, these issues alongside 146

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young people across the country to challenge this Act and the Register. The awareness was created through online and offline content while they used Disha sessions to create informed opinions. From political activist Kanhayya Kumar to climate change activist Disha Ravi, many young people have been protesting and amplifying protests and then have been suppressed and their right to question, debate and dissent (the hallmark of democracy) has been curtailed. A paranoia about dissent has permeated the ecosystem (Ghosh, 2021). Members of Disha have expressed a deep concern about this atmosphere of fear and suppression. In the context of India and the global move to authoritarian populism, a local act of citizenship claiming universal human rights and building solidarity is a strong force of community development work opposing these trends.

Conclusion The radical democracy of Disha young people’s peer support and speak out group lies in its inter-​mixing, sharing, having conversations, transgressing caste, class, gender, sexuality barriers and creating a community of care. Disha has consistently played the role of advocate and spoken truth to power in its own way. Disha practises a philosophy of hope embedded in egalitarian feminist principles and belief in collectives. While Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) and bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress (1994) have deeply impacted the practices of Disha, it also borrows from Ambedkarite principles of radical democracy. Ambedkar, who founded the All India Conference of the Depressed Classes in 1930 (now known as Dalit) said that the tyranny of the majority is no democracy. This axiom needs to be revisited. For him democracy was a form and a method of government whereby revolutionary changes in the economic and social life of the people are brought about without bloodshed. Ambedkar argued that the roots of democracy are to be found in the social relationship, in terms of associated life between the people who form a society. It is this associated and connected life as equals that is our hope for the future. References Ambedkar, B.R. (2004) The Essential Writings of B.R. Ambedkar, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Binkley, S. (2020) ‘Unlearning privilege: The therapeutic ethos and the battle within the white self ’ in D. Nehring, O.J. Madsen, E. Cabanas, C. Mills and D. Kerrigan (eds) Routledge International Handbook of Global Therapeutic Culture, London and New York: Routledge, pp 191–​202.

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Department of Higher Education, Government of India (2020) ‘All India Survey on Higher Education’. Available from: highereducation.nagaland. gov.in/all-india-survey-on-higher-education-aishe/ [accessed 7 September 2022]. Deshpande, S. (2014) The Problems of Caste, Hyderabad: Orient Black Swan. Freire, P. (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed, New York: Herder and Herder. Ghosh, S. (2021) ‘From Kanhaiya Kumar to Disha Ravi: The fear of dissent’, Daily O, 18 February. hooks, b. (1994) Teaching to Transgress: Education as a Practice of Freedom, London and New York: Routledge. hooks, b. (2000) Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics, Boston: South End Press. Murthy, R.S. (2021) ‘Lessons from COVID-​19 pandemic and social psychiatry’, World Social Psychiatry, 3: 131–​6. National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences, Bangalore (2016) ‘National Mental Health Survey of India’. Available from: www.indianmhs. nimhans.ac.in [accessed 7 September 2022]. Natu, S. (2015) ‘College mental health: The Disha experience’, MFC Bulletin, March–October: 365–6. Natu, S. (2020) ‘Disha: Building bridges, removing barriers: Where excluded and privileged young adults meet’, in S. Drozdstoy, D. Stoyanov, B. Fulford, G. Stanghellini, W.V. Staden and M. Wong (eds) International Perspectives in Value-​based Mental Health Practice: Case Studies and Commentaries, Basel: Springer International, pp 351–​59. Rege, S. (2010) ‘Education as Trutiya Ratna: Towards Phule Ambedkarite feminist pedagogical practice’, EPW, 45(44): 2–​3. Roy, A. (2017) The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Shantha (2019) ‘Payal Tadvi’s case follows predictable pattern of victim blaming’, The Wire, 6 April. Available from: https://thewire.in/caste/ payal-tadvi-case-caste-violence-atrocity [accessed 7 September 2020]. Tagore, R. (1912) Geetanjali, London: Macmillan and Company Taylor, P. (1993) The Texts of Paulo Freire, Buckingham: Open University Press. Vindhya (2020) ‘Feminist psychologies in India’, Oxford Research Encyclopedias, August. Available from: https://oxfordre.com/psychology/view/10.1093/ acrefore/9780190236557.001.0001/acrefore-9780190236557-e-826 [accessed 7 September 2020].

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Meaningful youth engagement in community programming in Kenya Yvonne Akinyi Ochieng, Su Lyn Corcoran and Kate Pahl

This chapter explores how tokenism often features in community development work with and for young people. We explore how Nzumari Africa focus on youth leadership to create systemic shifts in Kenya. They mobilise young people to challenge the status quo and address the barriers to their wider participation. We focus on Yvonne Ochieng’s personal journey from high school graduate to programme manager, to position the very real barriers to youth participation that she and her peers have experienced and how they have pushed forward their agenda to be heard as a community. As we discuss Nzumari Africa’s approach to radical democracy, we reflect on shared practice, drawing parallels with Su Lyn Corcoran and Kate Pahl’s research experience with young people in the United Kingdom, Kenya, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Almost three-​quarters of the population of Kenya is under the age of 30 (World Population Review, nd). Across the country, 46 per cent of the urban population live in informal settlements (World Bank, 2018) and this number is greater when only considering Nairobi where over 60 per cent of the population reside informally on 6 per cent of the city’s available land (Onyango and Tostensen, 2015). Congested standards of living, and associated problems facing young people in informal settlements, result in complex and challenging socio-​cultural and economic environments. Such conditions are further exacerbated for those also experiencing forced displacement, migration, unstable families, violence and mental health problems. Inequities, including those linked to poverty and gender, shape all aspects of adolescent health and wellbeing (World Health Organization, nd). Despite young people making up a majority of the population, they predominantly remain on the periphery of Kenya’s social, economic and political affairs. There is competition for a limited number of state-​ maintained school places (for example, Dixon and Tooley, 2012) and young people who are disadvantaged by being out of school are also relatively disadvantaged in socio-​economic outcomes and lack sufficient economic empowerment (Ministry of Public Service, Kenya, 2018). Given predicted levels of population growth and associated urbanisation, there is an increasing 149

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need for social services related to education and other social amenities that improve skills generation, employment and health-​related outcomes (Mahabir et al, 2016). This chapter explores how tokenism often features in work with and for young people in Kenya and how Nzumari Africa, which is itself staffed by young people, both works to mobilise young people to challenge the status quo as well as addressing the barriers to their wider participation. The authors of this chapter have been working together to develop research partnerships between Nzumari Africa and Manchester Metropolitan University –​building on Nzumari Africa’s progressive approach and Su Lyn Corcoran’s work with street-​connected and forcibly displaced young people in East Africa. As part of our collaborations, we prioritise more equal partnerships, ensuring that young people are able to have a say and shape the projects we develop. However, managing these partnerships and advocating for change in how young people are able to participate in civic spaces involves negotiation and navigating a complex process of social change. Nzumari Africa places young people at the centre of change, connecting them to systems that impact their mental health and wellbeing and driving multi-​directional transformation –​ developing systems of peer support and providing gathering spaces that teach hope and resilience. Their methodology and model connect young people to systems –​such as schools, colleges, criminal justice, health, housing –​as well as institutions and organisations that work with young people, mental health professionals, media and technology, and research. To explore the evolution of Nzumari Africa from community group to registered organisation, we focus on Yvonne Ochieng’s personal journey from high school graduate to programme manager, to understand the need for formal structures of both governance and support for this community of young people. Her first-​person narrative begins each of the following sections. In reflecting on her narrative vignettes together, we identify and position the very real barriers to youth participation that exist in Kenya, and on the international development stage, and how Yvonne, her peers and colleagues, and the organisation as a whole, have pushed forward their agenda to be heard as a community. As we reflect upon Nzumari Africa’s approach to radical democracy, we draw parallels with our shared practice, which forms the basis for the work we do together, introducing aspects of Kate Pahl and Su Lyn Corcoran’s research in Rotherham, Nairobi, Kampala and Bukavu.

Finding identity and belonging in a supportive community of peers When I (Yvonne) finished high school, I was unable to move on to university. I lost my mother when I was very young, and I was not financially able to 150

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continue my education. I found out about a group in my area who arranged music and dance activities. It sounded like it would be a good opportunity to fill my time and learn new things. I joined at a time when they were organising training focused on reproductive health. Our area of the country is known to have high rates of HIV infection. The arts provided the group with a vehicle for broader programmes of education. In joining the group, I had to learn how to dance and do puppetry, and not just do it for the sake of entertainment, but in a way that engages young people, promotes learning, and supports the delivery of specific messages. I was very young, but I was ambitious. I wanted to use my experience of the group to forward my own professional career. I began to volunteer myself for administrative roles, such as taking notes and working with group leaders to learn about what they were doing. I started taking more responsibility for activities and, as the group leaders moved on to other jobs, I took their place. A few of us started to think about how the role of this small arts group, which started in 2000, could evolve to a registered community organisation, ensuring that all the young people participating could take ownership and be part of decision-​making processes. We started reaching out to partners to see who would be interested in working with us. We helped during the 2013 election, monitoring the situation and reporting to the National Council of Churches who would pass this information onto the relevant bodies. In previous years (Muhoma and Nyairo, 2011; Kahora, 2015), the post-​election violence has broken out among communities such as ours, so our monitoring was important for combating and addressing potential violence. We also worked on a UNHCR project focused on the displaced members of our community. As different projects started to come our way, we were given opportunities to get involved and develop administrative skills and know-​ how needed to approach partners, funders, community and religious leaders. I had to learn by asking for help, trial and error, and developing the language of negotiation. I was also lucky because we managed to develop a collaborative partnership with the organisation Youth Initiatives Kenya who help youth-​ led groups in the area. They provided mentorship focused on developing our financial documents, approaches to writing reports, and helping us to collaborate with and learn from other more established groups to understand how they do their work. I learnt a great deal. I was very young, and I didn’t feel like I had the capacity, but I still had to steer the group. Those of us elected to the board needed to make sure that we developed, learned together, collaborated and moved forward together. Nzumari Africa began as a project conducted by the National Council of Churches in Kenya to address problems facing young people in the Huruma and Mathare areas of Nairobi (Nzumari Africa, 2019). In tackling issues such as HIV/​AIDS, poor mental health, poor sanitation, 151

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intertribal conflict and low literacy standards, the project aimed to deliver education through the arts –​chosen as a way of engaging young people who were interested in music, dance and puppetry. Dealing with taboo topics through such creative platforms draws people from the community together but also helps young people to talk about these issues. If their neighbour is watching, for example, they may not want to speak. Puppets can give voice and protection when young people are scared –​as well as providing the education. The use of arts-​based methods in this way is well-​documented (for example Hall et al, 2015), as well as the potential of creative platforms to bring young people from different communities together to work collaboratively, cross divides and instil a sense of belonging (see also Morrisey, 2015; Thompson, 2015). Such creative platforms of engagement are especially relevant in the areas in which Nzumari Africa works. Informal settlements are home to diverse populations from multiple ethnic backgrounds. Communities who have lived there for generations reside alongside newly displaced communities and economic migrants, who all compete for resources. Post-​election violence, which has accompanied many of Kenya’s elections since the emergence of multi-​party politics, often plays out along ethnic lines (Anderson and Lochery, 2008; Kanyinga, 2009; Muhoma and Nyairo, 2011; Jenkins, 2012) as a result of historical injustice, corruption, inequality and political wrangling between elites who exploit their power (for example, Kahora, 2015). An ongoing challenge for young people in Kenya is the scale of underemployment and working poverty that they face, especially those who are graduating, failing or excluded from an education system which has been heavily criticised for rote/​didactic teaching and learning that provides little preparation in terms of employment-​based skills (Carr-​Hill et al, 2019). Consequently, directly engaging communities affected by marginalisation, problematic governance, interethnic conflict, resource competition, intercommunity rifts, and violence, with music and drama can address such inequalities –​as well as the increasing radicalisation and recruitment of young people into extremism. The young people who registered Nzumari Africa as a community-​based organisation in 2012 felt that they would like to change the dynamic of the group, to be able to decide the education that was delivered and the organisation of activities, to provide meaningful engagement and impact for all the young people supported. Providing young people with these leadership opportunities enabled the organisation to evolve into something that they could take control of and shape to their needs. Nzumari Africa’s heuristic approach and pedagogies of practice developed in relation to the specific needs of the young people who engaged and interacted with their original programmes and the potential employment-​ focused, trauma, physical, reproductive and mental health issues, as well 152

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as the strengths and agency, that each of these stakeholders brought with them. Becoming self-​organised, finding solutions to problems within their experiences, and reaching out on their terms, required structures and supportive frameworks in which future trajectories of working could be visualised. As Yvonne comments at the beginning of this section, collaboration was key to this process of learning as the young people of Nzumari Africa were able to observe other organisations in action and develop their own processes through the small projects they were recruited to complete. The umbrella organisation Youth Initiatives Kenya provided key support in this through its coaching and mentoring practices. However, within a culture that prioritises elder wisdom, there are structural barriers, which prevent young people from pushing their own agendas forward –​and this is not confined to a Kenyan context. There is space for innovative and collaborative ways of enabling young people to be heard in many countries and contexts. Working with a group of young people on a housing estate in Rotherham, UK to consider the ways in which they felt listened to, Kate collaborated with a youth worker and an artist to facilitate the use of shadow puppets as a starting point for sharing experiences. The young people decided to script a play about the experience of being at knife point and the police not coming because they were not listened to. The girls, who drew on dancing as a mode of belonging, decided to film a performance of ‘Stamp on the Ground’ by the Italo brothers (Pahl, 2019). Within this work, situated modes of engagement were drawn on to create messages that resisted tropes of young people as disengaged and enabled them to send messages to the government that were powerful and angry. However, these are small steps towards active participation in decision-​making processes at policy levels.

Being taken seriously as an individual and an organisation Developing as a leader with the support of my peers impacted my life. I (Yvonne) felt that I was progressing but I quicky realised that I needed to go back to school. Even though I was gaining quite a lot from practical experience it was really important that I developed formal skills and know-​how. As much as someone is able to gain useful experience from the community, to be a better manager and a better leader, I felt that there were technical aspects I needed and formal qualifications to give me credibility. There were a number of instances where I was not taken seriously at meetings by others attending because I did not have the formal university-​level qualifications they expected. Despite my experience and track record of working with the community and making change, we were not seen as capable and that was a challenge. When people realised we were a youth-​led group, they assumed that we did not have the experience of responsibility or the other structures and frameworks that 153

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should be in place. This has become an issue when youth-​led means that we should not be given the level of funding that other organisations run by much older people receive. We were always given lower amounts of funding, despite our size and structure. I decided to go to university. And, through the networks I was developing, I spent three months with the Norwegian Peace Corps and I was invited to participate in a three-​day collaborative workshop on youth employment at the University of Cambridge. These opportunities not only gave me experience of what else is out there, but also changed how I was being positioned in the communities I interact with at home. As a leader at Nzumari Africa and a graduate I have become a role model for other young people in my community, particularly young women, who want to push themselves forward to find opportunities. As I walk around, I hear how I am referred to as ‘the lady who has been able to travel’. I have greater credibility in terms of my position but also in how people see me as a leader. This positioning is problematic at the same time as opening doors to further opportunities. As Yvonne’s experiences highlight, being a young person, or perceived to be young, in a number of African contexts, refers less to a notion of age than to a particular stage in life where they are considered to have little to no power or authority (Jørgensen, 2017). As such, there are relational and contextual aspects (both affordances and constraints) inherent to youth agency and how it is situated within fluctuating and evolving social relations and societal processes determined by political, economics and other factors (Jørgensen, 2017). The African Youth Charter holds that young people –​aged 18–​35 –​ should be considered as ‘partners, assets and prerequisites for sustainable development’ (African Union, 2006). However, as Yvonne’s university and travel experience suggest, it is young people who are most able to assert themselves that gain access to higher positions within social structures (Bjarnesen, 2017). Age is equated with wisdom and intelligence so even though young people are often able to speak, they are not necessarily listened to. Education, as a formal pathway to learning how to speak the language, provides access to higher employment opportunities or elite networks, and more importantly, to being taken seriously in decision-​making fora. Decentralisation has influenced structures meant to promote equitable participation from local to national levels (for example, Masuku and Macheka, 2021). However, political will is required to ensure that local government and communities are able to employ self-​determination to community planning processes and, as Yvonne’s narrative suggests, it is questionable whether the frameworks and institutions required to facilitate full participation of young people in policy-​making and governance processes have been developed (see also Masuku and Macheka, 2021). Adults in gerontocratic societies can be 154

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reluctant to recognise youth input and unwilling to regard young people as equals (for example, Campbell et al, 2009). This implies a lack of support for meaningful participation and the failure of projects to provide meaningful incentives to encourage youth involvement. In low-​income contexts, there can also be a lack of coordination of service delivery, which makes it difficult to take a holistic approach to addressing youth exclusion. Frameworks for youth inclusion in decision-​making are not always developed effectively in countries such as the UK either. In both contexts there needs to be a shift in ways of knowing and doing things. In the UK-​based ‘Imagine’ project that Kate was involved with (Campbell et al, 2018), a team of researchers, artists and youth workers worked with young people using the concept of hope to reimagine better communities and make them happen. In practice, this involved working with young women from British Asian and Roma backgrounds in the context of a small-​town (Rotherham), using poetry and art to reimagine their futures. Much of this future imagining involved worlds that were free of racism and without many of the things that the young people were living through. At the time of the project, street racism was endemic in the town the young people lived in, and arts created spaces of possibility in which young people could develop new messages and hopeful futures.

Mobilising youth to challenge the status quo Being given a seat at the table does not always mean that young people are able to participate. For example, we (Nzumari Africa) have had young people asked to speak at conferences, but their draft speech is changed to fit the organisers’ agendas. Or a politician or donor invites a young person to a meeting, but they are not given a platform to speak, they are there for public relations and/​or a photo shoot. I (Yvonne) was once in a meeting where they kept referring to me with ‘look we have a young person’, but I had not been involved in their work with the HIV programme they were promoting, and I wasn’t brought in again after the meeting. Therefore, why was I there? In consultation and collaboration processes with adults, a young person can feel intimidated if they are the only one in the room. They can be overwhelmed and think that they do not know enough next to all these people, but also the adults in the room don’t take them seriously and they are often talked down to or over by the adults in the room. When they do get a chance to speak, they are often told what they have to say and not necessarily what they want to say. There have been instances when young people are expected to speak, but they are often invited last minute and not given any background information. Therefore, when they are asked to be part of a co-​creation or co-​design process they are easily overruled as the team may be past that stage in the thinking process. If they are not prepared effectively then young people are not able to 155

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contribute. If they choose not to go because there is no time to prepare, they are accused of not wanting to take part. Young people’s voices and words are often manipulated and used to support a cause that is already predesigned. For example, their words are used to reframe programmes as the ‘young people asked for it’, so the young people do not enjoy any responsibility and have no role in setting it up. So, when a young person comes to give their opinion, it doesn’t work for them. Another challenge I experienced arose from also being a woman. Because of some of our cultural norms, people assume that as a woman you are not as good a leader as a man would be. There is a need within any team to earn respect, but a woman has to try doubly hard to prove her position. In many contexts in Kenya, our leaders are not women, so being a woman in my position creates issues. I have experienced the attitude of people saying: ‘so she is a lady, why should I listen to her’ and related comments. I have to constantly tell myself that I am up to the task, and this is especially difficult when you are in meetings with predominantly male community members. Because the social circles and communities that I interact with through work, I end up working more with male members of the community and therefore this changes how community members view you: ‘This one is not even a woman.’ ‘Well, you’re not really a woman, you’re not submissive the way you carry yourself.’ ‘Women should be quiet.’ I am the opposite of what a culturally acceptable woman should be, so I am sometimes positioned as being more male than female. It is a challenge to prove my character. I can carry out the tasks that I have been assigned or have set out to achieve myself, but there is always the need to prove myself despite, or because of, the fact that I am a woman. Being part of the organisation really helps my self-​esteem. When I was young, I was shy. This was a lot to do with losing my mother and the depression I experienced in the aftermath of losing her. I internalised quite a lot of my experiences. In the community where I was brought up, people expect perfection. For example, if you are not top of the class you have already failed in life so coming to the organisation and meeting other young people who were also experiencing the issues that I was experiencing, helped lift my self-​esteem. I became more confident in myself through the arts, through dancing, through expressing myself and being challenged to speak in front of people. This last one was quite hard for me and something that many of us do not get to do as standard within our education system. I began to open-​up more and to develop as an individual, which was not something I had really appreciated before. As an organisation therefore, Nzumari Africa has been developed to provide the same for other young people, and to build on this development. 156

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In international development literature, the importance of public participation in decision-​making processes that affect them is widely discussed (for example, Hickey and Mohan, 2005) and critiqued as not leading to transformative practice and/​or empowerment that general discourse suggests (Cooke and Kothari, 2001; Ferguson, 2020). In community planning in particular, there is often a reluctance on the part of planners to provide citizens with real influence, preferring to restrict their involvement to information-​sharing platforms and rapid consultation processes, or they support participation as long as it does not oppose or obstruct political decisions (Monno and Khakee, 2012). Similarly, critiques of youth participation are often associated with instrumental strategies of engaging with youth voices and how participation processes are used as a way to govern young people, particularly within schools and other institutionalised settings (Charteris and Smardon, 2019). The mechanisms for facilitating meaningful participation for young people in Kenya, and addressing the realities of the patriarchal influence of political parties and ethnic backgrounds, affect the process of democratising participative structures. Inclusive approaches are not adult-​centric or male-​ dominated and provide spaces for young people to feel free to express their views and shared decision-​making (Berten and Leisering, 2017). In our shared work we have found that adults do not find it easy to listen to young people. For any meaningful change to occur we need to support adults to listen to young people as well as empowering or mobilising young people to speak (Batsleer, 2011; Rowley, 2019). Creative forms of engagement can provide young people with a language more suitable to their chosen modes of communication (Pahl, 2019). Su has been working with organisations in East Africa to understand young people’s experiences, particularly of education (Corcoran et al, 2020), and with Kate, she coordinated the Belonging and Learning project that focused on the use of arts-​based methods to promote dialogue between displaced young people and policy-​makers in Kenya, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo (Corcoran et al, 2021; Ferguson, 2020). A key feature of this project was the ways in which we could bring young people together with policy/​decision-​makers to co-​ create –​through dance, visual art and poetry –​and in so doing to develop an understanding of each other’s points of view. Young people need to have the support to speak without being judged, and their words need to be recognised. It is important that structures are in place to ensure that young people understand what they are being invited to participate in, and that they are able to prepare contributions that they feel are appropriate to the context (for example, Ferguson, 2020). Nzumari Africa try as much as possible to ensure that before a young person is asked to contribute, they are given a detailed brief; and that they are supported 157

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to ensure their ability to critically assess the ways in which they are invited to participate and how they can adapt and subvert perceived tokensim to realistic participation (see also Kara, 2007). In a very real sense, therefore, the organisation must negotiate and hustle to be heard. Hustling has been used to describe the ways in which young people navigate and negotiate political practices, social arrangements (such as gendered and generational hierarchies), community relations and power hierarchies (Jørgensen, 2017). There is a suggestion of improvised political practice: of being constantly alert for opportunities and openings created by situations of social change. For example, Jørgensen (2017) emphasises how young paralegals in her case study of gathering and selling sand in Northern Kenya were able to bring knowledge of global youth participation practices –​learned during their higher education courses –​into the space of negotiation with community elders. Corcoran (2016) describes how street-​connected young people’s ownership of the term hustling positioned them firmly within the local informal labour market and the wider society that developed around these market forces. Although Nzumari Africa work within more established, corporatised systems inherent to a capital city, there is a need to similarly negotiate and adapt to the situations within which young people are provided with a voice –​especially if they are to have more autonomy and move beyond tokenistic participation. Thus, as Yvonne’s experiences suggest, knowledge from formal education and global travel/​participation opened up spaces of participation for her and the organisation but a key step for the organisation was the removal of micro-​management and bureaucracy. This provides young people with a greater voice and responsibility within the organisation to grow skills and development. Just as Yvonne was able to make decisions as a young person and learn about project management, she and her team try as much as possible to lobby partners to provide this opportunity to others. Yvonne’s own knowledge, which has developed both through experience and then through access to formal educational opportunities, enables her to lead her team, hustling to create spaces for others. This extends to ensuring that everyone within the diverse community of young people supported are given opportunities –​and therefore, modelling quality inclusive programming in practice. Nzumari Africa’s projects are relevant to young people and their wider community, so there is a responsibility to ensure ownership, sustainability and, above all, freedom of choice. Therefore, potential partners and donors are informed about how the organisation works: as Yvonne states, “we make it clear that this is how we work, and it may not work for you”. Collaboration must involve a meaningful consultation from the start, so that the young person understands the context and is provided with everything they need to ensure meaningful involvement. In research for example, being clear on 158

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the goal and making the information less technical so it can be understood is a must if young people are to be able to effectively give their feedback and views (see also Ferguson, 2020). Even with donors, Nzumari Africa petition for young people to be involved from the beginning to co-​design projects. Within implementation stages, Nzumari Africa carve out a clear role for themselves with partners, especially in the evaluation and feedback stages. In radical or insurgent models of community participation, agonistic democracy and social mobilisation have inspired advocacy for the empowerment of marginalised groups, such as young people, to create participatory restructures that are able to deal with conflict in productive ways (Aylett, 2010). Nzumari Africa’s approach to mental health projects and programming is an example of how this has been done in a stepwise process to challenge inherent bias and prejudice in the system. Starting with the precept that when young people are involved in such programmes, the choices of the young people should be integrated into the curriculum of the workshop or meeting plan, so they are not just used as a public relations stunt. They built their involvement in the sector, ensuring a context-​appropriate approach that involved local understandings of wellbeing, which resulted in Nzumari Africa being on the organising committee for the World Mental Health Day event in Nairobi in 2020, with the Red Cross and the Ministry of Health. It was a unique opportunity for public endorsement as they worked with three other youth-​led organisations to set the agenda and decide on speakers. This meant both that the Ministry of Health had an opportunity to learn, if they wished, from local youth-​based struggles for wellbeing and that the work of Nzumari Africa was increasingly safeguarded through such public recognition.

Reflecting on Nzumari Africa’s approach to radical democracy and shared practices Young people are experts in their own lives. As such, they are uniquely positioned to provide solutions to their challenges. However, despite the opportunities inherent to a country’s large youth population, they can often be excluded in community programming. Even when they are included, their role is often tokenised and this limits their potential, especially with regards to actively participating in and belonging in society. The power dynamics of participation depend on the degree to which ambivalence towards young people’s democratic projects is culturally embedded. The issue of particular leaders emerging who become separated from their peers and are subject to elite capture is widespread in the UK as much as in Kenya or Uganda or France. For example, using a performance analogy for the pedagogic practices of youth work, youth centres and municipal infrastructures such as council 159

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offices or town halls, highlights how even physical spaces can determine the forms of democracy that are negotiated and performed (Batsleer et al, 2020; Ferguson, 2020). To enable young people to design, implement and evaluate their own community programmes, requires a shift in thinking at various levels of community and local government, in Kenya and elsewhere (Refugee Youth, nd; Johnson and West, 2018). The subtlety of practice in building networks which might enable a shift in such dynamics is an important consideration continually for Nzumari Africa. There are movements to enable meaningful participation of young people in such evaluation work (for example, Rouncefield et al, 2015). Nzumari Africa focus on youth leadership to create such a systemic paradigm shift. For example, their programmes support young people’s mental health and wellbeing: creating awareness of mental health, mobilising young people to be youth leaders, addressing large-​scale stigma, and preventing mental health challenges before they become chronic or disabling. Thinking about the experiences of all three authors of this chapter, all of our projects and work experience have taught us that young people need to have the support to speak without being judged, and their words need to be recognised, whether they are in film form or the more accepted civil service formats of the report or the slide pack. Because this is challenging in societies in which young people’s perspective is routinely disregarded, the hustling practices of young graduate leaders are essential to creating new forms of community. They enable the creation of channels of communication between national government structures and disenfranchised young people who have been thus far excluded from the education system. As such, they support and draw on the resources and understandings of young people, rather than excluding them. When such leaders do not lose touch with their own experience as they have themselves developed through their early involvement in community advocacy projects –​such as Yvonne’s involvement from the beginning in puppetry and dance as vehicles for communication –​the democratic and transformational potential of a majority youth population finds expression. In this chapter, we have concentrated on the ways in which it is possible to listen to young people and to shift how they are listened to. These words align with how Nzumari Africa empowers and meaningfully engages young people to increase their agency as we try to shift attitudes on how they are viewed in community development but also on how young people can build communities they are in when they have opportunities to exercise their agency. As Thompson (2015: 190) claims, ‘we need to listen and observe more intently’ to communities and local level expertise; in order to derive meaning and interpretation from ‘social organisations and social relations, paying close attention to specific cultural and local contexts’ and to the communities of young people that reside within our wider communities.

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References African Union (2006) ‘African youth charter’, African Union. Available from: https://​au.int/​sites/​defa​ult/​files/​treat​ies/​7789-​tre​aty-​0033_​-​_​afri​ can_​yout​h_​ch​arte​r_​e.pdf [accessed 21 September 2021]. Anderson, D. and Lochery, E. (2008) ‘Violence and exodus in Kenya’s Rift Valley, 2008: Predictable and preventable?’, Journal of Eastern African Studies, 2(2): 328–​43. Aylett, A. (2010) ‘Participatory planning, justice, and climate change in Durban, South Africa’, Environment and Planning A, 42(1): 99–​115. Batsleer, J. (2011) ‘Voices from an edge: Unsettling the practices of youth voice and participation: Arts-​based practice in The Blue Room, Manchester’, Pedagogy, Culture and Society, 19(3): 419–​34. Batsleer, J., Thomas, N. and Pohl, A. (2020) ‘Who knows? Youth work and the mise-​en-​scene: Reframing pedagogies of youth participation’, Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 28(2): 205–​21. Berten, J. and Leisering, L. (2017) ‘Social policy by numbers: How international organisations construct global policy proposals’, International Journal of Social Welfare, 26(2): 151–​67. Bjarnesen, J. (2017) ‘The politics of inclusion and exclusion in urban Burkina Faso’, in E. Oinas, H. Onodera and L. Suurpää (eds) What Politics? Youth and Political Engagement in Africa, Leiden: Brill, pp 123–​40. Campbell, C., Gibbs, A., Maimane, S., Nair, Y. and Sibiya, Z. (2009) ‘Youth participation in the fight against AIDS in South Africa: From policy to practice’, Journal of Youth Studies, 12(1): 93–​109. Campbell, E., Pahl, K., Pente, E. and Rasool, Z. (2018) Re-​Imagining Contested Communities: Connecting Rotherham through Research, Bristol: Policy Press. Carr-​Hill, R., Mbwika, J. and Peart, E. (2019) ‘Education systems, examination and failure: A case study of Kenyan teenagers in four schools’, Intercultural Education, 30(2): 214–​36. Charteris, J. and Smardon, D. (2019) ‘Student voice in learning: Instrumentalism and tokenism or opportunity for altering the status and positioning of students?’, Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 27(2): 305–​23. Cooke, B. and Kothari, U. (2001) Participation: The New Tyranny, London: Zed Books. Corcoran, S. (2016) ‘Leaving the street? Exploring transition experiences of street-​connected children and youth in Kenya’, Doctoral thesis, University of Manchester. Corcoran, S., Awimbo L., Mugwanga, K., Aluoch, I. (2020). ‘Street-​ connectedness and education in Kenya: experiences of formal schooling as rationale for inclusive pedagogies of practice’, Prospects, 49: 265–​80.

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Corcoran, S., Atukunda, C., Ferguson, V., D’Aquin, R., Mituga,T., Amuri Mufano, L. et al (2021) ‘Creation and communication: reflecting on the role of arts methods to enable dialogue between young people and policy makers in Kenya, Uganda and the DRC’, in Cin, M and Mkwananzi F. (eds) Post-​ conflict Participatory Arts: Socially Engaged Development, London: Routledge, pp 190–​208. Dixon, P. and Tooley, J. (2012) ‘A case study of private schools in Kibera: An update’, Educational Management Administration & Leadership, 40(6): 690–​706. Ferguson, V. (2020) External Evaluation of the GCRF/​AHRC-​funded Project –​Belonging and Learning: Using Co-​produced Arts Methodologies to Explore Youth Participation in Contexts of Conflict in Kenya, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Manchester Metropolitan University. Available from: https://​www.mmu.ac.uk/​sites/​defa​ult/​files/​2021-​01/​ Belong​ing%20and%20L​earn​ing%20Eva​luat​ion%20Rep​ort.pdf [accessed 10 September 2021]. Hall, M., Pahl, K. and Pool, S. (2015) ‘Visual digital methodologies with children and young people: perspectives from the field’, in E. Stirling and D. Yamada-​Rice (eds) Visual Methods with Children and Young People: Academics and Visual industries in Dialogue, Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, pp 164–​85. Hickey, S. and Mohan, G. (2005) ‘Relocating participation within a radical politics of development’, Development and Change, 36(2): 237–​62. Jenkins, S. (2012) ‘Ethnicity, violence, and the immigrant-​guest metaphor in Kenya’, African Affairs, 111(445): 576–​96. Johnson, V. and West, A. (2018) Children’s Participation in Global Contexts: Going Beyond Voice, London: Routledge. Jørgensen, N.J. (2017) ‘Hustling for rights: Political engagements with sand in northern Kenya’, in E. Oinas, H. Onodera and L. Suurpää (eds) What Politics? Youth and Political Engagement in Africa, Leiden: Brill, pp 141–​57. Kahora, B. (2015) ‘Editorial’, in Kwani? 8: Uchaguzi ’13, Kenya: Kwani Trust, pp 7–​10. Kanyinga, K. (2009) ‘The legacy of the white highlands: Land rights, ethnicity and the post-​2007 election violence in Kenya’, Journal of Contemporary African Studies, 27(3): 325–​44. Kara, N. (2007) ‘Beyond tokenism: Participatory evaluation processes and meaningful youth involvement in decision-​making’, Children, Youth and Environments, 17(2): 563–​80. Mahabir, R., Crooks, A., Croitoru A. and Agouris, P. (2016) ‘The study of slums as social and physical constructs: Challenges and emerging research opportunities’, Regional Studies, Regional Science, 3(1): 399–​419.

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Masuku, S., Macheka, T. and Tong, K. (2021) ‘Policy making and governance structures in Zimbabwe: Examining their efficacy as a conduit to equitable participation (inclusion) and social justice for rural youths’, Cogent Social Sciences, 7(1): 1855742. Ministry of Public Service, Kenya (2018) ‘Kenya youth development policy’. Available from: http://p​ syg.go.ke/d​ ocs/K ​ enya%20N​atio​nal%20Yo​uth%20 Pol​icy.pdf [accessed 20 August 2021]. Monno, V. and Khakee, A. (2012) ‘Tokenism or political activism? Some reflections on participatory planning’, International Planning Studies, 17(1): 85–​101. Morrisey, F. (2015) ‘Pens and swords: Exploring the role of poetry and creative writing in post-​conflict and displacement settings’, in D. Rellstab and C. Schlote (eds) Representations of War, Migration, and Refugeehood Interdisciplinary Perspectives, London: Routledge, pp 233–​48. Muhoma, C. and Nyairo, J. (2011) ‘Inscribing memory, healing a nation: Post-​election violence and the search for truth and justice in Kenya Burning’, Journal of East African Studies, 5(3): 411–​26. Nzumari Africa (2019) Strategy Plan 2019–​2024, Nairobi: Nzumari Africa. Onyango, P. and Tostensen, A. (2015) ‘The situation of youth and children in Kibera’. Available from: https://​www.cmi.no/​publi​cati​ons/​file/​5527-​ the-s​ ituati​ on-o ​ f-​youth-​and-​child​ren-​in-​kib​era.pdf [accessed 12 June 2021]. Pahl, K. (2019) ‘Recognising young people’s civic engagement practices: Rethinking literacy ontologies through co-​production’, Politics of Literacies, 13(1): 20–​39. Refugee Youth (nd) ‘Current projects’. Available from: http://​www.refug​ eeyo​uth.org/​curr​ent-​proje​cts [accessed 12 June 2021]. Rouncefield, C., Maynard, L. and Stuart, K. (2015) Evaluation Practice for Projects with Young People: A Guide to Creative Research, London: SAGE. Rowley, H. (2019) ‘Lost and found: Ethnographic researcher and arts practitioners getting lost and coming home’, in L. Ferro and D. Poveda (eds) Learning, Arts and Ethnography, London: Tufnell Press, pp 142–​55. Thompson, J. (2015) ‘Questions on performances: In place of war’, in D. Rellstab and C. Schlote (eds) Representations of War, Migration, and Refugeehood, Abingdon: Routledge, pp 183–​90. World Bank (2018) ‘Population living in slums, Kenya’. Available from: https://​ data.worldb​ank.org/​indica​tor/​EN.POP.SLUM.UR.ZS?locati​ons=​KE [accessed 23 June 2021]. World Health Organization (nd) ‘Helping adolescents thrive’. Available from: https://​ w ww.who.int/​ m ental​ _ ​ h ea ​ l th/ ​ m ater ​ n al- ​ c hild/ ​ g uideli​ nes_​prom​otiv​e_​in​terv​enti​ons/​en/​ [accessed 23 June 2021]. World Population Review (nd) ‘Kenya population 2020 (live)’. Available from: https://​worldp​opul​atio​nrev​iew.com/​countr​ies/​kenya-​pop​ulat​ion/​ [accessed 23 June 2021]. 163

PART IV

Black lives still matter

10

Conceptualising community development through a pedagogy of convivência: youth, race and territory in Brazil Fernando Lannes Fernandes and Andrea Rodriguez

Introduction This chapter reflects upon the territorialised and racialised distinctions of rights experienced by young people living in Brazilian urban peripheries. It draws from direct work experience and research conducted in Brazil with young people whose lives are crossed by the overlaps between territorial stigma, racism, poverty, social insecurity, involvement in illicit activities, contact with criminal justice and diverse experiences of violence and violation of human rights. This includes a range of initiatives in which the authors were directly involved, such as: research on the dynamics of involvement of children and young people in the networks of drug trafficking and other illicit activities in Brazil (Silva and Urani, 2002; Observatório de Favelas, 2006; Silva et al, 2008, 2009; Fernandes, 2009, 2012, 2013a, 2013b, 2014); and development of approaches and methodologies of prevention and creation of alternatives for children and young people involved in drug trafficking and other illicit networks (Fernandes and Rodriguez, 2009, 2015; Fernandes et al, 2009; Rodriguez, 2013). The chapter benefits from the experience of both authors who have worked between UK (mostly Scotland) and Brazil over the past decade. It provided us a unique opportunity to reflect upon issues affecting marginalised young people in both countries. It also enabled us to engage in a critical reflection on possibilities and limits of cultural translations, diverse socio-​ historical realities and contrasting policy-​practice environments. Throughout the chapter we will try to make some bridges with our experiences in the UK to make sense of some ideas and critical issues affecting young people in the two countries, which we expect can also be used to reflect more widely about marginalised young people elsewhere. In this chapter we wanted to reflect on some concepts and approaches for community development through the lenses of a pedagogy of convivência/​ 167

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coexistence (Fernandes et al, 2018a). We used our experience of work in Brazil as a starting point but expect these ideas to be a source of dialogue and conversation internationally. Our experiences over the past decade in promoting dialogues between Brazil and Scotland/​wider UK has proved to be challenging for the elaboration of certain concepts and we noted a great risk to be converted by hegemonic epistemologies at the expense of ‘cultural translation’ and ‘language translation’. To address that, we opted to adopt a bilingual approach to some concepts as it is the case for convivência/​ coexistence and potência/​potency. The words coexistence and potency do not fully translate the original ideas in Brazilian Portuguese; this demands an effort that does not always make the conversations fluid. The risk of conversion comes when in the attempt to explain ideas we end up simplifying them too much and, therefore, miss context and depth. As we suggest in this chapter, there is a need to decolonise community development, by rethinking its concepts, terminologies and practices as well as by enabling the necessary dialogue to overcome abyssal lines (Santos, 2007) still present in this professional and academic field. There is a clear difference in the reality of young people from Brazilian peripheries from that of those living in the UK peripheries, yet both face challenges that, in the context of their societies, are similar in some ways. For example, the role of negative social representations (Fernandes, 2013a; Rodriguez, 2013), social abjection (Tyler, 2013) and disposability (Giroux, 2012) is something that is present in the life of marginalised youth in both countries and elsewhere. The role of such representations for practitioner attitudes and institutional practices is also evident and perceived in research that we conducted in the two countries (Rodriguez et al, 2020). Therefore, there are potential lines of dialogue and conversation with community development academics and practitioners that we expect can be taken forward from the ideas explored here. The chapter ultimately aims to highlight relevant principles that we wish to share as reminders for practice, advocacy, policy impact and, more widely, political incidence (incidência política), that is, the ability of social agents to exert influence on political processes and policy agendas.

Socio-​political context The defence of human rights in Brazil is an enormous challenge due to narratives of disposability and indifference towards people living in urban peripheral communities largely founded in prejudicial stances and ignorance (Fernandes, 2005). Conservative media and politicians also play a role by reinforcing narratives of hate and abjection. Furthermore, there is a hostile socio-​political environment in which systematic criminalisation of human rights organisations occurs as part of a narrative that accuse them of defending 168

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‘criminals’ (Cavalcanti and Ferreira, 2020). To make it worse, the politics of hate has gained force over the past years with the rise of far-​r ight movements and the election of President Jair Bolsonaro in 2018 (Gallego, 2018). As a result, we can observe a systematic dismantling of advances in a human rights agenda; advances that were only possible due to the pressure and engagement of progressive political forces that are now under threat (Chade, 2020). This wider context is relevant to understanding the societal challenges to community-​based work with young people in Brazilian urban peripheral communities. Such young people are among the most vulnerable in society, and at same time, the ones regarded with the least esteem due to stigma and negative social representations underpinned by racism and territorial/​ neighbourhood stigma. We acknowledge that race, alongside other relevant intersectional layers such as social class, gender and neighbourhood/​territory, play a crucial role in the right to live and coexist in Brazil. Young Black males1 are the ones most subject to homicides as well as mass incarceration. Therefore, we reflect on the challenges involved in working with young people directly affected by structural racism and institutional violence, whose lives are devalued to the point that their right to live and conviver/​coexist is at extreme risk. Understanding the limits imposed by territorialised and racialised distinctions of rights that impact on young people’s everyday life is critical to such work. For example, limitations on the right to free movement arise in our experience, in the places they go and do not go for fear of being discriminated against or harassed by state agents or by private security, as well because of the stigmatising labelling of belonging to a community/​ neighbourhood dominated by an armed illicit group. The opportunities they access are far from equal with those offered to others: it is practically impossible for them to experience themselves as subjects of rights rather than as objects of state interventions that are, in the context of their lived experiences, mostly limited to their social control as well as physical containment and elimination/​expulsion from spaces. Such a symbolic disenfranchisement can be conceptualised because of the systematic ‘monsterisation’ of young people in Brazil.

Monsterisation of Black youth from urban peripheral communities in Brazil [P]‌unishment and fear have replaced compassion and social responsibility as the most important modalities mediating the relationship of the youth to the large social order. Youth within the last four decades are increasingly represented in the media as a source of trouble rather than as a resource for investing in the future and are increasingly either treated as a disposable population and cannon fodder for barbaric wars 169

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abroad or defined as the source of most society’s problems. (Giroux, 2012: xv) The problematic youth, or ‘disposable youth’ to whom Giroux (2012) refers, have social class, race and other social characterises that distinguish them from a generic idea of ‘youth’. They usually live in a neighbourhood/​community labelled in stigmatised and negative ways. We have referred to these young people elsewhere (Fernandes, 2013a, 2014) as ‘the lost generation’ to convey a widespread idea of social disposability of those whose value in life is practically null. Social representation has been crucial in reinforcing ideas around the fear of young people from urban peripheral communities. In Brazil such a fear is reflected in the image of a young male behaving and dressing in a way that resembles the socially constructed image of the drug dealer, such as the movie character Zé Pequeno, from City of God (Fernandes, 2014). But there is an intimate connection between representation and embodiment. Here the concept of corporal/​bodily hexis (hexis corporeal) explored by Bourdieu (1977) is relevant to understanding the role of embodied socialisation and the way such traits are used to produce social abjection and fear in the social construction of the monster, the enemy: Everyone living in a community, who wear a boardshort, a t-​shirt, a back-​to-​front cap, is seen as a bandit. … You go to a shopping centre … you are there, wearing a cap, a t-​shirt … there is always a bloody security guard to watch you. I mean, it’s like you go there to make something, a robbery … unfortunately this is it.2 (Young Black male, interviewed by Fernandes, 2009: 401–​2) It is fair to say young people living in urban peripheral communities across Brazil face a common challenge: their lives are crossed by a wide range of forms of violence that reproduce and reinforce historical inequalities, the key driver of which is structural racism resulting from over 350 years of Black slavery3 in which social, cultural and moral notions about Black people were formed and ingrained in Brazilian society. Slavery was determinant in the way Black people were perceived and treated, being bodies subject to physical domination, symbolic violation and life devaluation. For example, the idea that Black people were inferior and subject to harsher forms of punishment (Chazkel, 2009) persists. Not surprisingly the most visible forms of violence are those performed by the police forces. Police forces in Brazil are violent and represent a central role in institutional violence and racism (Sinhoretto and Morais, 2018; Anunciação et al, 2020; Legrumber et al, 2020a, 2020b). Police forces perform several forms of violence and abuse, including physical punishment, psychological violence as well as public humiliation of Black people (Ramos and Musumeci, 2005; 170

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Fernandes, 2009, 2013a; Willadino et al, 2011; 2019; Amnesty International, 2015). The most notable form of violence performed by the police is homicide. For example, in the year of 2019 alone Brazilian police forces killed 6,357 people, which represented 13.3 per cent of the total number of violent deaths in that year. Of these deaths, 99.2 per cent were male, 79.1 per cent Black and 74.3 per cent young people aged 10–​29 years old (Bueno and Lima, 2020). Homicides of young Black males are not a new phenomenon. They arise in the intersections between historical structural racism, necropolitics (Mbembe, 2019) and the state of exception (Agamben, 2005) performed by the Brazilian state. Young people between 15 and 29 years old represent 53.3 per cent of all homicides in the country, of which 75.7 per cent are Black. Historical statistics show that homicide rates for Black people increased by 11.5 per cent in the past decade (Cerqueira et al, 2020). The persistent and systematic deaths of young Black males has been considered a genocide by social movements (for example the campaign ‘Parem de nos matar’ [Stop killing us]) as well as by a parliamentary report produced by the Brazilian Federal Chamber of Deputies (Câmara dos Deputados, 2015). It is a fact that a substantial percentage of these deaths are either a direct result of state intervention (deaths caused by the police) or a result of the failure of the state in providing security in the neighbourhoods where young people live. Indeed, the presence of armed criminal groups in urban peripheral communities has been observed since the early 1980s but the state has failed to stop these groups. This was a result of the combination of the militarisation of public security (encapsulated in the ‘war on drugs’), endemic corruption within the police and wider criminal justice and political systems and, not least important, a police force still driven by principles and values inherited from military dictatorship in which the use of violence is naturalised in everyday practice (Cano, 2006; Silva, 2011; Soares, 2019).

Pedagogies of monsterisation and practitioner attitudes towards young people Although violence against young Black people is more visible through police actions, there are also other forms of violence not so visible but underpinned by the same principles of discrimination and dehumanisation. We agree with Silva (2016) that monsterisation of the ‘others’, the ‘different’, forms the basis for the naturalisation and banalisation of the death of young people in Brazil. Monsterisation is a process of dehumanisation and objectification that is a result of systematic stigmatisation and symbolic depreciation (Wacquant, 2010) and social abjection (Tyler, 2013). Such a process has been conceptualised as a ‘pedagogy of monsterisation’ (Fernandes et al, 2018a). The pedagogies of monsterisation are part of a range of inculcation processes that ingrain and 171

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normalise values, cultural and aesthetical references that underpin social boundaries. The monsterisation process comes when such boundaries are set by stigma, negative labelling, social disgust, indifference, hate and social fear that are translated into the dehumanisation of persons, social groups, ethnicities. These are used to justify dehumanised attitudes (and actions) towards monsterised groups. It fundamentally legitimises the reproduction of inequalities and injustices because it produces in some people a sense of justice and vengeance (‘they deserve it’) (Fernandes et al, 2018a). The pedagogies of monsterisation are perverse because they may not only result in explicit and visible forms of violence, discrimination and dehumanisation –​and its associated indifference. They can also be found in well-​intentioned professional practices as a result of symbolic violence (Bourdieu, 1989) and ‘creaming’ (Lipsky, 2010) in which professional judgement (Fernandes et al, 2018b) and a repellent role for institutions (Fernandes, 2019) are reproduced. ‘Creaming’ as conceptualised by Lipsky (2010: 107) is when ‘street-​level bureaucrats’ choose (or skim off the top) those who seem most likely to succeed in terms of bureaucratic success criteria. That means, in other words, the prioritisation of cases which are less complex and demanding and, as result, pushing away people who are the ones who most need support from services. There are several factors pressurising for creaming, such as limited time and resources. But other factors such as prejudice and professional judgement can be crucial in shaping practitioners’ discretionary power and decision-​making. This creates barriers that make some institutions themselves ‘hard to reach’ and, in consequence, push away those they seem intended to serve, who become intentionally ‘easy to ignore’. In this wider context, symbolic violence (Bourdieu, 1977, 1989) is a conceptualisation of a form of violence that is not seen but internalised as ‘the way things are’. It can become embedded in everyday practices that ignore the underlying drivers in which the social order becomes naturalised and accepted. Symbolic violence can be reproduced even when actions are well-​intentioned (Fernandes et al, 2018b; Fernandes, 2019). Through the subtleties of language, (class) culture, behavioural expectations, body language and dress codes, the scene is set for ‘clashes’ between those providing services or elaborating policies and those for whom services, and policies, are designed. Goodwill itself is not enough to overcome monsterisation which demands a more systematic approach to institutional practices and professional attitudes. In fact, institutions can perform a repellent role which prevents citizens accessing their rights (Fernandes, 2019). Such repellent role can be perceived in a series of practices and attitudes that are based on socio-​ cultural expectations that usually divide practitioner habitus from ‘user’ habitus when accessing services. Therefore, the preconceived ideas and social representations held by practitioners concerning certain social groups may 172

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function as barriers for them to access rights. In conceptual terms, symbolic violence operates as a lens that not only prevents people for seeing others from a different angle but promotes understanding of such difference as deviance. Inculcated preconceptions related to race and class can be crucial drivers for professional judgement. In our experience, we noticed that the worst, not the best, is what is expected from young Black people in terms of social behaviours and personal attitudes. They carry in their habitus the corporal/​bodily hexis (Bourdieu, 1977; Bourdieu and Saint-​Martin, 1998) that make them aberrant, disgusting and monsterised. The corporal/​bodily hexis for Bourdieu is the externalisation of class position by circumscribing socio-​cultural practices in the body. Speech, body language, apparel: all contribute to externalise distinctive traits which form part of the experience of young people in their relationship with ‘street-​level bureaucrats’. In this context, symbolic violence is a relevant concept to understand the dynamics of prejudicial distinctions in rights that operate at the level of what Lipsky (2010) called ‘street level bureaucracy’, which encapsulates the professions working in direct contact with the citizens, for example, police officers, social workers, teachers, healthcare practitioners and community workers. Lipsky argues in his work that such professionals face dilemmas when delivering policies in real-​life situations. In our view, these dilemmas occur at a crucial moment in which a combination of personal value and worldviews clash with policy agendas and when the role of micro-​decision-​ making and discretionary power is influenced by what we called ‘professional judgment’ (Fernandes et al, 2018b). ‘Professional judgment’ was an attempt to elaborate further on Bourdieu and Saint-​Martin’s (1998) idea of ‘professorial judgment’ when analysing the role of symbolic power performed by teachers at schools. Symbolic power refers to socio-​symbolic hierarchies in which dominant habitus sets distinctive marks in society. Habitus is an important concept because it encapsulates social position in combination with cultural codes that produce social distinctions, such as cultural taste, education level, behaviours, dress codes, accent, body language. One close example can be young people having to adopt a different body language to gain ‘respect’ from adults (family, community) and professionals (teachers, social workers, etc) –​having to adjust behaviour in a way that disconnects from what they really are and, therefore, producing some sort of dysphoria and anxiety when having to ‘perform’ in contexts that make them feel uncomfortable. Body language (as well as dress and speech) can be seen at an extreme in terms of monsterisation and result in stigmatising attitudes towards young people. It can happen in moments where ‘socio-​symbolical clashes’ happen –​such as when they need to relate to others and usually do not master the dominant socio-​relational skills (those which are widely accepted in society as the polite, the ‘right’ way to relate to others). Practitioners need to be alert to such a crucial moment of encounter. In fact, a professional/​ethical moment 173

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of dilemma is the point at which community development workers working with young people make a shift away from a pedagogy of monsterisation towards a pedagogy of convivência/​coexistence.

Towards a pedagogy of convivência/​coexistence Racism and racialised social relations are rooted in history and strongly connected with the legacy of colonisation and slavery. We argue that this is reinforced by abyssal lines (Santos, 2007) created by colonised thinking, and reproduced through privileged positions of symbolic power in which skin colour, level of education, dress codes, socio-​relational skills (what, for example, defines being ‘polite’, ‘civilised’) and other distinctive marks are found present in the dominant forms of socialisation. These, in our view, are incorporated to everyday practices performed by ‘street level bureaucrats’. These abyssal lines, however, are not always visible, and in many situations take the form of an abyssal doxa, in which divisions and hierarchies are accepted as the way things are. Racialised social relations are a clear example in which Black people tend to be portrayed as culturally inferior, less intellectually capable, bad-​mannered, physically stronger (and frequently associated with violent behaviour) (Almeida, 2018). Overcoming abyssal lines, as Santos suggests, is necessary to achieve social justice and human dignity. That demands not the negation of dominant culture and epistemologies, but the creation of lines of dialogue that can promote a conversation (Santos in Phipps, 2007) towards ecologies of knowledge in which dominant Westernised cultural and epistemological systems can be open to acknowledge their limits and embrace diversified views that can be, in principle, conflictive and opposite. Conversational lines of dialogue are central for cognitive justice –​a first and necessary step to achieve human dignity (Santos, 2014). In our view, a pedagogy of convivência/​coexistence can be the guiding principle to bridge abyssal lines and help overcome challenges imposed by dominant epistemologies and socio-​political and cultural systems in which racism is rooted. Silva (2016) and Fernandes et al (2018a) argue that ensuring the right to conviver/​coexist is key to overcoming the brutal principles of monsterisation and its consequences for life in society. Tackling divisive and dehumanising narratives present in the pedagogies of monsterisation demands a pedagogical process in which convivência/​coexistence can be pursued. In our view convivência/​coexistence is a key concept to which differences are acknowledged as part of responses and solutions needed to achieve the right to conviver/​coexist. Therefore, the pedagogies of convivência/​coexistence propose a shift in paradigm where different degrees of monsterisation are challenged: it starts from addressing prejudicial attitudes existing in everyday life and, from that, building systems that can ensure wider political, institutional and societal changes. 174

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Enabling pedagogies of convivência/​coexistence demands in the first place the acknowledgement of peripheral epistemologies or, in other words, acknowledging the potência/​potency of peripheries (Fernandes et al, 2018a). To exercise their right to live and exist, young people need first and foremost to have their potency and inventive power recognised. Young people, as well as those working alongside them, need conceptual tools to guide and support their agency. Potência/​potency refers to the combination of forces emerging from peripheral practices that put in question established forms of producing meaning and agency in the world. It challenges mainstream ideas of ‘resistance’, ‘resilience’, ‘capacity/​ capability’, ‘power/​empowerment’ by taking peripheral agency to the centre. It is necessary to consider such forms of agency in terms of being, thinking, acting and expressing feelings and emotions from a different (not necessarily confrontational) perspective. Potência/​potency is not a simple response to oppression –​as a principle it is an alternative to oppressive practices that sits in a new philosophical and epistemological perspective (Fernandes et al, 2018a). This is central to recognise the voices, practices and knowledge produced by peripheral groups as part of dialogues towards their right to live and conviver/​coexist. In that sense, we understand that what is generally referred to as ‘dialogue’ should be framed in terms of a conversation where the role of people engaging with young persons should be informed by empathy, engagement, compassion and humanity (Fernandes and Rodriguez, 2015). It is crucial, however, that such conversations enable lines of dialogue that go beyond the spoken words and incorporate the principles of convivência/​coexistence. Therefore, community development workers practising the pedagogies of convivência/​coexistence need to challenge forms of dialogue that, because of not being genuinely horizontal, can result in what Santos (in Phipps, 2007) called ‘conversion’. In Chapter 11 of this collection, we elaborate further on these potencies by exploring experiences of work with marginalised young people.

Towards a citizenship paradigm The realisation of a pedagogy of convivência/​coexistence requires a necessary shift in the way youth is portrayed and treated in policy and practice. This requires a critical move into what we call a ‘paradigm of citizenship’ to resonate with the historical struggle of young people and social movements in Brazil where the political agenda for ‘citizenship’ and ‘rights’ is crucial to address historical injustices affecting marginalised young people. It demands an epistemological shift to decolonise language, thinking and principles underpinning policy and practice. We acknowledge many existing practices are shaped by principles that prevent the realisation of a true citizenship 175

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agenda, which key issue is underlined by the interweaving between symbolic violence and neoliberal governance in which spheres for participation are under threat. In our experience young people living under racialised distinction of rights are among the one most susceptible to another form of violence, which entails degrees of suppression of their political participation. Over the past decades in Brazil civil society organisations as well as more politically progressive governments worked towards the political formation of young people from peripheries, creating better conditions for their political engagement with critical issues affecting their lives (Gohn, 2011; Gomes et al, 2020). This was part of an effort to create space within organisations to combine support services that were at the same time a platform for political formation. In other cases, some organisations work specifically with political formation and offer tailored training for young people with the intention to maximise their presence in strategic political landscapes such as media production, arts, social policy, higher education. This is part of a broad socio-​political landscape of the ‘citizenship paradigm’. To enable the ‘citizenship paradigm’ it is necessary to challenge the ‘service provision/​service user’ paradigm. The approach to ‘service users’ in a citizenship paradigm means the recognition of people as subjects (of policy, rights, responsibilities) rather than objects (or ‘receipts’ of service provision, policy intervention, benefits, blaming). Services should be an opportunity to promote ‘civic encounters’ to encourage people to have a more active (and organised) voice in relation to policy and services. This means, in other words, the exercise of ‘civic literacy’ (Giroux, 2011) as a component of service provision. In Brazil, the combination of an emerging democratic state in the 1980s with the advance of neoliberal policies in the 1990s created a space for a dual process in which non-​governmental organisations (NGOs) had a crucial role in pushing democracy forward, at same time as occupying spaces that were being left behind by the state as part of its neoliberal agenda. As result, while some organisations in Brazil perform service provision, usually related to localised community organisations, there is also an active politicised sector, usually identified with progressive political views, which has had a relevant role for the defence of democracy and human rights over the past decades. NGOs in Brazil have had a crucial role in mediating state and civil society by creating initiatives that focused on social activism and political formation of ‘organic intellectuals’ that have had a strategic role in advancing the democratic process over the past decades (Paula, 1998; Coutinho, 2012; Galvão and Araújo, 2018). The experience from Brazilian organisations working towards the defence of democracy and promotion of a citizenship paradigm can be related to the specific challenges faced in the country. However, it can 176

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also inspire reflection on the increased neoliberalisation of the community development sector in the UK which is at the heart of Ledwith’s critique of the decline of the ‘radical agenda’ in community development (Ledwith, 2005). Indeed, in the UK being vocal and taking certain political stances and positions, as for counterparts in Brazil, may become too risky in a funding and political landscape that is driven by an apparent democracy that is varnished in neoliberal ideas of ‘partnership’ (Davies, 2002; Judd and Smith, 2002) and ‘co-​production’. These come together with changes in public management and the way policy-​making is conceptualised, by incorporating elements of corporate governance in state agencies (Jansson et al, 2016).

Decolonising community development: challenging dominant epistemologies to enable a citizenship paradigm One of the key principles of community development practice refers to the need to recognise the role of community knowledge in the design of projects and initiatives to tackle problems affecting communities. The problem is that local knowledge can be under pressure from approaches and methodologies that usually are alien to the local context. It is the role of community development workers to find ways to negotiate the best strategies by acknowledging the role of local responses to their own problems. In reality, however, many community development workers face challenges imposed by policy and institutional structures and mindsets (timing, resources, methods, expectations) that do not always enable genuine dialogue and conversation, but instead, a conversion of the community towards the agenda of external organisations. In the work with young people affected by racialised distinctions of rights it can be even more problematic by adding the element of their monsterisation, the prevalence of social control and criminal justice narratives, and contrasting perspectives in terms of age, cultural taste and social attitudes that may push community workers to uncomfortable borderlines in relation to their own values systems as well as personal and professional habitus. The authors of this chapter faced this situation on several occasions when, for example, the agenda of international agencies implicated them in timeframes and methodological constraints that at times proved to be inflexible (see Chapter 11 in this collection). Such inflexibility on most occasions was part of a cascade effect produced by the need funders and agencies have to be accountable and demonstrate the impact and effectiveness of their work in ways that do not necessarily translate into the community views. Quantified monitoring and assessment measures, for example, can become problematic by not incorporating non-​quantifiable parameters or, worse, by trying to quantify what is ‘unquantifiable’. 177

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Here we face a situation in which one of the most contentious issues related to community development practice is the need to challenge dominant forms of knowledge and practice in recognition of community-​based solutions. For that it is necessary, in the first place, to overcome the abyssal lines (Santos, 2007) that were inherited from centuries of colonisation. Such abyssal lines created some divides between ‘metropolis’/​coloniser and ‘colonies’/​colonised that are still present in contemporary society. Such abyssal lines are not a sort of clear divide between one side and another, and not exclusive to coloniser/​colonised relations. They are present in several forms and scales. These lines exist within the ‘South’ and the ‘North’ and are a result of systems of thought that are epistemologically limited in their ability to dialogue with other forms of thinking and conceptualising the world. It is not surprising that Western/​capitalist/​European countries became a reference standard for the idea of ‘development’ which underpin parameters to measure and compare countries, communities, practices. Santos argues, however, that the existing crisis in society was a result of dominant forms of socio-​economic and political organisation deriving from Western/​capitalist/​European systems, and that solutions should come from outside these systems. He argues that colonial lines are so ingrained that they imply a sort of arrogance in which what is outside that system is seen as inferior or inadequate. The key implication is that dominant cognitive colonised systems are still prevalent in the way countries and communities pursue ‘development’. Therefore, solutions, strategies, methodologies are still strongly rooted in the dominant epistemological system. That is when Santos suggests that counter-​hegemonic processes need to take place to produce ‘alternative thinking of alternatives’ that are only possibly in terms of ‘ecologies of knowledges’ (Santos, 2007) and the return to some sort of ‘ignorance’, in which ‘ignorance is not necessarily the original state or starting point. It may be a point of arrival. It may be the result of the forgetting or unlearning implicit in the reciprocal learning process’ (Santos, 2007: 13). Forgetting and unlearning should be a starting point to ‘reset’ the tendency for conversion and enable genuine opportunities to promote democracy. For that, it is also necessary to overcome the socio-​symbolic barriers that prevents convivência/​coexistence of people who are historically disenfranchised and symbolically devaluated, as is the case of marginalised young people. Therefore, it is necessary to consider the ecology of knowledges and challenge dominant/​established forms of work and perceptions about groups. ‘Undressing’ dominant epistemologies is not an easy task and demands permanent vigilance and active engagement with alternative approaches and the capacity to question the way simple things are perceived and incorporated in everyday practices such as timing, dress codes, space/​setting, social positions, language and agendas. 178

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Beyond the ‘post-​it paradigm’: enabling dialogue through convivência/​coexistence It is consensual among community development workers that horizontal and dialogical engagement is central in any attempt to build relationships and work with communities (Ledwith, 2005). In our view dialogue –​or conversation, as Santos suggests (in Phipps, 2007) –​demands attention to avoid conversion. Conversion can be something very subtle, yet very powerful in diverting core principles of community development work and preventing genuine democratic processes. Political and institutional agendas can jeopardise the facilitator role community educators are expected to perform, which can be easily overriden by language, timing and priorities that are not aligned or negotiated with communities. Over the past decades the idea of ‘co-​production’ (as well as ‘co-​creation’ and ‘co-​design’) became popular in the public sector with an attempt to create more spaces for ‘service users’ to engage with the design and directions of services they access (Boyle and Harris, nd; Gazley, 2021). As an approach, ‘co-​production’ has similarities with the traditional idea of participation, but with a focus on the way services are shaped. Co-​production can be a valuable resource for dialogue and decision-​making where the involvement of people accessing services and service providers, for example, is needed. It can adopt creative approaches to facilitate dialogue and can be a relevant tool to increase the involvement of people accessing a service (the so-​called ‘service users’). Critical attention is needed in co-​production approaches to avoid tokenism, which is a risk when power imbalance is at play. The issue of symbolic power discussed earlier in this chapter is a clear example of where such attention is needed. Factors such as language, cultural background and preconceptions can become barriers for genuine engagement and participation. This is relevant because co-​production narratives seem to become a recurrent practice in community-​based approaches due to requirements from funders and organisations and therefore become strongly influenced by managerial mindsets. Since co-​production tends to involve multi-​sector partnerships where there is a strong presence of service-​based organisations, two critical issues need to be observed. First, due to its service-​oriented nature it may divert citizen participation from wider spheres of decision-​making, restricting them to the point of policy delivery. In fact, services at ‘street-​level’ are the most frequent sphere in which citizens relate to policy at the point of its delivery (Lipsky, 2010). However, when co-​production is just used at the point of policy delivery it may have implications by reinforcing the idea of ‘service user’ over citizen and by circumscribing citizens to specific and localised spheres of participation where they may feel ‘empowered’ to have voice and reshape the way services 179

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are delivered, but not in a position to shape the policy and institutional frameworks in which services are situated. Second, ‘co-​production’ positively intends to listen to people but may operate to convert (Santos in Phipps, 2007). ‘Co-​production’ approaches are well-​intentioned, but may imply in power dynamics that are driven by results/​outcomes (management-​led, task-​oriented dialogue, pre-​empting agendas, ‘consensual talking’, business-​like/​post-​it style dynamics/​‘design thinking’, fast-​timing). Indeed, the use of post-​it in group activities seems to be the most iconic example of this model, the reason why we call it the ‘post-i​ t paradigm’. To overcome the managerial elements of ‘co-​production’, it is necessary to think beyond the ‘post-​it paradigm’ through participatory approaches driven by the emphasis on the process as an outcome itself (organic engagement, fluid conversations, political conscientisation, civic literacy, ample debate, learning democracy, slow-​timing). Here it is critical to consider basic, tough, very critical issues such as: negotiated agendas, format, timing, language codes, embodied languages, space/​setting. Our critique does not ignore the importance of co-​production as such but suggests a critical perspective on it. ‘Co-​production’ has its positives and strengths, and as any community-​based approach, it needs to be critically scrutinised to avoid tokenism. It can be, on many occasions, what is available to practitioners at the scale of ‘what is possible, tangible and achievable’ and we cannot ignore the fact that for most practitioners, given the institutional pressures and constraints they face in their everyday practice, ‘co-​production’ may be the most accessible way to connect with people and communities. For that very reason, we urge the importance of never taking ideas for granted, and of having critical reflectiveness as a starting point for practice. This may sound an unnecessary reminder for many, but still relevant because everyday community development work is surrounded by managerial agendas which easily result in overlooking the principles and concepts guiding critical practice. In the following list we suggest some basic reflective questions to have in mind when organising participatory activities guided by the principles of convivência/​coexistence: • • • • •

What is/​are the agenda/​s at play? Who is/​are proposing the agenda/​s? Is the power balance favourable to horizontal dialogue? Is timing, language, cultural code, space favourable for conversation? What are the r isks for conversion in the proposed for mat of engagement activities? • What needs to be ‘unlearned’ to overcome barriers for conversation and mutual learning? • What can be the enablers for conversation in the format of engagement activities? 180

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The key message behind these questions is to help in identifying where the abyssal lines are and how these can be addressed. It is necessary to promote democracy and think engagement and participation beyond what we can call the ‘post-​it paradigm’ –​the well-​intentioned practices that look good on the surface, but that can create a false impression of democracy and contribute to reinforce dominant forms of decision-​making as an expression of symbolic violence.

Conclusion In this chapter we argued that working with young people exposed to territorialised and racialised distinctions of rights as well as other marginalised groups cannot be disconnected from political commitment to human dignity and democracy. Such a commitment is crucial to overcome problematic approaches that may reduce young people to recipients of services and youth/​community development workers as well-​ intentioned providers. We acknowledge the relevance of youth/​community organisations in providing crucial support for young people/​marginalised people in their life journeys. However, when work with young people/​ marginalised people is restricted to the model of ‘service provision/​service user’, organisations may not be doing more than just ‘drying the ice’ and, indirectly, contributing to the reproduction of a system in which addressing individual needs becomes so central that structural drivers may become overlooked. One of the keys to overcoming that problem is by paying more attention to concepts underpinning community development work practices including institutional principles, which, as we argue, should be guided by a pedagogy of convivência/​coexistence. Many organisations and workers are at times forced to operate in ‘automatic mode’, driven by everyday experience, informed by practice, and in many ways, directed by policies and funding arrangements, as well as managerial drivers, that tend to constrain the work they do. In many cases this also reflects a sort of ‘survival mode’ in which many organisations and workers operate as a result of the challenges imposed in the quest for financial sustainability. That leaves little room for critical reflective practice and, in consequence, little scope for organisations and workers to be more vocal and engaged in agendas that go beyond everyday practice, ‘service provision’ and individualised/​fragmented responses to complex issues. We argue that a paradigm shift is necessary to address issues of rights, citizenship, human rights and human dignity, and the promotion of democracy. Our intention in this chapter has been to provide elements for critical reflection on some dominant and established practices and concepts that may reproduce inequalities and discrimination by not creating the enabling conditions for genuine participation of groups who are symbolically disenfranchised. For 181

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living at the margins of symbolic recognition they are subject to symbolic violence performed in well-​intentioned practices. We hope the principles explored in this chapter can help community development workers, organisations and policy-​makers to better engage with marginalised groups in their everyday struggles. Notes For the purpose of this chapter, we circumscribe ‘young people’ in a broad spectrum from adolescents to young adults. It can also, as illustrated by many tragic examples, include children as young as nine years old. Our key point is to highlight the systematic criminalisation of Black people in Brazilian society, with a focus on the younger ones. 2 Free translation from original in Brazilian Portuguese: ‘Todo mundo que mora numa comunidade, que veste uma bermuda, uma camiseta, um boné pra trás, já é visto como bandido. … Você vai num shopping, tá ali de boné, de camiseta … tem sempre um infeliz de um segurança pra te seguir. Quer dizer, você vai fazer uma coisa, vai fazer um assalto … infelizmente falando, é dessa forma’ (Fernandes, 2009: 401–​2). 3 The first Black slaves captured in Africa arrived in Brazil circa 1539. That was the beginning of Black slavery, which was only abolished in 1888, making Brazil the last country in the world to end slavery (Alencastro, 2000). 1

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Fernandes, F.L. and Rodriguez, A. (2009) Escape Routes: Lessons Learned From the Development of Prevention Methodologies and the Creation of Alternatives for Adolescents and Youngsters Involved in Drug Trafficking, available from: https:// discovery.dundee.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/68508253/Fernandes_and_ Rodriguez_2009_en.pdf [accessed 15 March 2020]. Fernandes, F.L. and Rodriguez, A. (2015) ‘The “lost generation” and the challenges in working with marginalised groups: Learnt lessons from Brazilian favelas’, Radical Community Work Journal, 1(1). Fernandes, F.L., Edmundo, K. and Dacach, S. (2009) Sistematização de experiências de prevenção à violência contra jovens de espaços populares, Rio de Janeiro: Observatório de Favelas. Fernandes, F.L., Silva, J.S. and Barbosa, J.L. (2018a) ‘The paradigm of potency and the pedagogy of coexistence’, Periferias. Available from: https://​revist​ aper ​ifer ​ias.org/​en/​mate​r ia/​the-​parad​igm-​of-​power-​and-​the-​pedag​ogy-​ of-​coex​iste​nce/​ [accessed 15 March 2021]. Fernandes, F.L., Swinney, A., McMillan, S., MacLeay, D., McGhee, J., and Graham, W. et al (2018b) ‘Rehabilitation doxa and practitioner judgment: An analysis of symbolic violence on health care provision in the Scottish prison system’, Ciência and Saúde Coletiva, 23(9): 2869–​77. Gallego, E.S. (2018) O ódio com política. A reinvenção das direitas no Brasil, São Paulo: Boitempo. Galvão, P. and Araújo, C.M.M. (2018) ‘ONGs no Brasil: contextualização histórica do cenário para atuação em psicologia escolar’, Psicologia em Revista, 24(1): 101–​23. Gazley, B. (2021) ‘Co-​production from a third-​sector perspective’, in E. Loeffler and T. Bovaird (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Co-​Production of Public Services and Outcomes, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp 229–​46. Giroux, H. (2011) On Critical Pedagogy, New York: Continuum. Giroux, H. (2012) The Disposable Youth: Racialized Memories, and the Culture of Cruelty, London: Routledge. Gohn, M.G. (2011) ‘Movimentos sociais na contemporaneidade’, Revista Brasileira de Educação, 16(47): 333–​61. Gomes, S., Moura, J. and Alves, J. (2020) ‘O movimento social negro na formação da agenda governamental: um estudo de caso do Plano Juventude Viva’, Caderno do CHR, 32(87): 623–​40. Jansson, A., Larsson-​Olaison, U., Veldman, J. and Beverungen, A. (2016) ‘The political economy of corporate governance’, Ephemera, 16(1): 1–​17. Judd, D.R. and Smith, J.M. (2002) ‘The new ecology of urban governance: Special-​purpose authorities and urban development’, in R. Hambleton and J. Gross (eds) Governing Cities in a Global Era: Urban Innovation, Competition, and Democratic Reform, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp 151–​60.

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Ledwith, M. (2005) Community Development: A Critical Approach, Bristol: Policy Press. Legrumber, J., Ramos, S. and Musumeci, B. (2020a) ‘A cor da violência policial a bala não erra o alvo’, Rede de Observatórios de Segurança, CESeC. Available from: https://cesecseguranca.com.br/publicacoes/ [accessed 7 September 2022]. Legrumber, J., Ramos, S. and Musumeci, B. (2020b) ‘Racismo, motor da violência’, Rede de Observatórios de Segurança, CESeC. Available from: https://cesecseguranca.com.br/publicacoes/ [accessed 7 September 2022]. Lipsky, M. (2010) Street-​Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Services, updated edn, New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Mbembe, A. (2019) Necropolitics, Durham: Duke University Press. Observatório de Favelas (2006) Trajetória de crianças, adolescentes e jovens na rede to tráfico de drogas no varejo do Rio de Janeiro: 2004-​2006, Rio de Janeiro: Observatório de Favelas. Paula, A.P.P. (1998) ‘Reinventando a democracia: ONGs e movimentos sociais na construção de uma nova gestão pública’, Masters dissertation, Rio de Janeiro, FGV/​EAESP. Phipps, A. (2007) ‘Other worlds are possible: an interview with Boaventura de Sousa Santos’, Language and Intercultural Communication, 7(1): 91–​101. Ramos, S. and Musumeci, B. (2005) Elemento Suspeito. Abordagem policial e discriminação na cidade do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira. Rodriguez, A. (2013) Labirintos do Tráfico. Labirintos do Tráfico: vidas, práticas e intervenções. Em busca de saídas possíveis, Rio de Janeiro: Sete Letras. Rodriguez, A., Dalcin, C.B., Fernandes, F.L., Freeman, R. and Humphris, G. (2020) Helping Young People Feel at Home in Scotland: Building Collaborative and Integrated Services for Youth Homeless: A Reflexive Mapping Approach for Health and Social Care Integration, Dundee: University of Dundee. Santos, B.S. (2007) ‘Beyond abyssal thinking: From global lines to ecologies of knowledge’, Review, 30(1): 45–​89. Santos, B.S. (2014). Epistemologies of the South: Justice against Epistemicide, New York: Routledge. Silva, J.S. (2016) ‘O direito a convivência ou a barbárie’, Nexo, 10 April. Available from: https://​www.nex​ojor​nal.com.br/​ens​aio/​2016/​O-​dire​ito-​ %C3%A0-​con​viv%C3%AAn​cia-​p%C3%BAbl​ica-​ou-​a-​barb%C3%A1rie [accessed 15 March 2020]. Silva, J.S. and Urani, A. (2002) Brazil: Children and Drug Trafficking: A Rapid Assessment, Brasília and Geneva: International Labour Organization. Silva, J.S., Fernandes, F.L. and Willadino, R. (2008) ‘Armed criminal groups with territory domain: Reflections on crime territoriality in Rio de Janeiro metropolitan region’, in J. Global (ed) Safety, Traffic and Militia in Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro: Heinrich Böll Foundation, pp 16–​24.

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Silva, J.S. Willadino, R., Nascimento, R., Rodriguez, F. and Fernandes, F.L. (2009) Escape Routes: A Study on Adolescents and Youths Involved in Drug Trafficking in Rio de Janeiro, Observatório de Favelas, Brasília and Geneva: International Labour Organization. Silva, L.A.M. (2011) ‘Polícia e violência urbana em uma cidade brasileira’, Etnográfica, 15(1): 67–​82. Sinhoretto, J. and Morais, D.S. (2018) ‘Violência e racismo: novas faces de uma afinidade reiterada’, Revista de Estudios Sociales, 64: 15–​26. Soares, L.E. (2019) Desmilitarizar: segurança pública e direitos humanos, Rio de Janeiro: Boitempo. Tyler, I. (2013) Revolting Subjects: Social Abjection and Resistance in Neoliberal Britain, London: Zed Books. Wacquant, L. (2010) ‘Crafting the neoliberal state: Workfare, prisonfare and social insecurity’, Sociological Forum, 25(2): 197–​220. Willadino, R., Sento-​Sé, J.T., Dias, C.G. and Gomes, F. (2011) Prevenção à violência e redução de homicídios de adolescentes e jovens no Brasil, Rio de Janeiro: Observatório de Favelas. Willadino, R., Nascimento, A.M., Brito, J.F.P., Gomes, T. and Barbosa, E. (2019) Tecendo memórias: homicídios de adolescentes e jovens no estado do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro: Observatório de Favelas.

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“I did not want the project to end. For me, it should last forever”: exploring a community development framework based on learned lessons from marginalised youth voices in Brazil Andrea Rodriguez and Fernando Lannes Fernandes

Introduction In this chapter, we acknowledge how structural racism and discrimination against poor youth is a big challenge to the design and implementation of policies and practices in peripheral urban territories. We believe it is necessary to establish alternative parameters to deal with urban violence that not only rethink the role and response of public security forces with respect to human rights, but also practitioner approaches to these contexts. There is a need to consider the role of community development and participatory methodologies to create a bridge to a humanised practice which includes prevention of violence, creation of alternatives and health promotion with marginalised groups. One of the key elements of that is the recognition of peripheral territories and their young residents not as ‘objects’ of intervention, but as agents (or ‘facilitators’) of their own future. Principles of community development in Paulo Freire’s formulation have been at the heart of the core values underpinning the work developed by the Escape Routes project in Brazil. The project was created to produce a better understanding of the involvement of young people in the drug trade, and new methodologies of work to support these young people when making their way out of criminal networks. We conducted participant observation, a series of interviews and focus groups with former project participants (both young people and the project team) to create a retrospective view on the project’s achievements, challenges and legacies. The analysis in this chapter focuses specifically on the voices of young people. During the 1980s and 1990s the city and wider metropolitan region of Rio de Janeiro experienced the expansion of criminal groups that gained control of some territories located in urban peripheral communities (such as 187

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favelas and informal settlements). Armed criminal groups became a ‘parallel power’ (Leeds, 1998) by imposing their own norms and regulations on the social life of these communities. Their power and control were enabled by a historical lack of state investment and regulation, which left the door open to illicit groups who took advantage of that (Silva et al, 2008). Controversially, armed criminal groups also became a source of opportunity and attraction for those young people surrounded by structural racism, institutional violence, lack of work opportunities and recognition in society (Rodriguez, 2013). The processes of young people’s entrance into drug trafficking (Zaluar, 1994; Cruz Neto et al, 2001; Dowdney, 2003; Observatório de Favelas, 2006) revealed the drug trade to be a powerful criminal network that operates in multiple ways and at various scales, as well as largely responsible for the increase of urban violence in Brazil. These activities have been widely identified as one of the main factors leading to the high levels of mortality of those aged between 15 and 24 (Silva and Urani, 2002; Zaluar, 2004) living in favelas. These young people usually approach people already working in this criminal activity, carrying out some small tasks for them and getting to know the work dynamics and rules until they win the trust of the group and are invited to join in a formal way. This includes payment for the service in the form of money, but also in drugs, alcohol, food and shelter. The most visible version of this criminal activity tends to be linked with poor, Black, male, young people from urban peripheral communities, who sit at the bottom of the hierarchy of the drug trade (Zaccone, 2007). More exposed to police violence, these ‘barefoot (or flip flop) bandits’ (Fernandes, 2014) are the ones who mostly end up in prison or are killed. They became key figures in what Baierl (2004) called the image of ‘social fear’ and Glassner (2003) the ‘culture of fear’, which is the ideological construction of a fear that stigmatises the image of certain groups as ‘agents of evil’ (Zaluar, 2004). These young people are the main target of police actions to combat drug trafficking and the one of the most socially rejected groups in Brazilian society (Fernandes, 2014).

The Escape Routes project Escape Routes was conceptualised at the Observatory of Favelas (Observatório de Favelas, 2006; Fernandes and Rodriguez, 2009) in a period marked by the emergence of several initiatives to address the issue of young people in the drug trade in Rio. The project was funded by the International Labour Organization (ILO), UNICEF and a Dutch organisation, the Interchurch Organisation for Development and Cooperation (ICCO). Partnership working involved a wide network of institutions such as universities, non-​ governmental organisations (NGOs), community-​based organisations, health and social care agencies, the justice system, schools and government. 188

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The project focused on youngsters involved in drug gangs and aimed to create alternatives for them. The project adopted the concept of ‘worst forms of child labour’ in line with Article Three of ILO Convention No. 182, which Brazil adopted in 2000. The Convention was a relevant and helpful mechanism for conceptualising policy since it understood youngsters not primarily as ‘offenders’ but as youngsters working under the exploitation of the drug trade. Therefore, it created the opportunity to look at children involved in drug trafficking and other illicit activities from a different angle, creating space to incorporate non-​ criminalising activities with them –​based on principles of human rights and community education which in some ways helped reinforce principles already present in the Brazilian Statute for Children and Adolescents 1990 (Estatuto da Criança e do Adolescente. Lei 8069, 1990). As a pilot project, the Escape Routes project systematised this methodology and disseminated it across two cities in Brazil (Fernandes, 2009; Fernandes et al, 2009). The project was structured around four articulated stages as follows: 1. A research stage that aimed to understand the dynamics of drug trafficking with special attention to the involvement of young people in the drug trade to inform the development of prevention strategies and the creation of sustainable alternatives for them. 2. A sensitisation strategy to raise awareness about criminalisation and monsterisation (as presented in Chapter 10 of this book). The core element was to produce new narratives in favour of non-​violent approaches based on the pedagogies of convivência/​coexistence to interact with young people and peripheral urban communities. 3. A prevention project aimed at vulnerable families with children who were not attending school and were susceptible to becoming involved with illicit activities. 4. A project to create sustainable life alternatives for children, teenagers and young people working in illicit activities. In this chapter we focus specifically on stage four –​the pilot project that was created to explore alternative approaches to prevent entrance into illicit activities and to support those who wanted to escape them. This was underpinned by new understandings of young people’s contextual agency that led to the construction of an alternative form of community, where all members could develop their participation and feel more welcomed and integrated.

Principles, values and key concepts underpinning the Escape Routes project Escape Routes followed certain core principles that will further inform the analyses presented next. As Paulo Freire’s key concepts are perceived as 189

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foundational to any practice that has a social justice intention (Ledwith, 2016), they will be the central tenet of the argument developed throughout the chapter. The right to the city The right to the city is directly connected with the concept of the pedagogy of convivência/​coexistence as discussed in Chapter 10. Division and hierarchies among groups in society are reproduced by dominant socio-​political and cultural systems where racism is reinforced. Favelas in Brazil have historically been characterised by negative representations in terms of what, seemingly, they lack in material and/​or cultural terms. Discourses based on the ‘lack of ’ and ‘absence of ’ remain exaggeratedly strengthened. The Observatory of Favelas works to produce new views and perspectives on these spaces to overcome the stereotypes built around the favelas and the idea of the favela opposing the city. As such, favelas should be recognised, above all, as part of the city/​urbe, rather than as a separate entity, usually perceived as a problem or a sort of ‘cancer’ that needs to be extracted from urban tissue. Expansion of individual/​collective horizons: challenging the presentification and particularisation of existence Presentification and particularisation of existence (Silva, 2003) is related to a life experience limited in time (a sense of eternal present) and space (a sense of localism) where the right to the city cannot be achieved in its fullness. For many people living in favelas social life is often restricted to their local territory, without broader parameters of insertion in other areas of the city. These residents often do not recognise themselves as part of the city, which makes it difficult to build a full dimension and experience of citizenship. Their contact with other social groups from across the city is rare and consequently there is an increased sense of intolerance, feelings of insecurity and the narrowing of social possibilities for residents of favelas, particularly young people. Therefore, it is necessary to overcome that by expanding individual and collective horizons through the expansion of their existing social and cultural capitals.1 The aim is not to devalue existing capital, but to reposition it in the systems of capital recognition in the city by creating opportunities for young people from favelas to access new spaces, and putting them in dialogue with other groups, languages and narratives. Creation of alternatives: action for change The expansion of young people’s horizons along with the creation of a new understanding of specific terms commonly used in projects’ interventions 190

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led to the use of the term ‘creation of alternatives’ for those involved in drug trafficking rather than terms such as ‘rescue’ from trafficking. This is because we understand that the adolescent/​young person who enters into drug trafficking is an individual with a certain degree of autonomy over their decisions and choices. They are not someone totally manipulated, coerced or co-​opted (Rodriguez, 2013). The investigation of this context revealed that the idea of ‘rescuing’ or ‘removing’ young people from drug trafficking is misleading, although still present in the work of some organisations. Direct experience and research (Rodriguez, 2013) show that young people need to be acknowledged as the authors of their own movement to leave drug trafficking, rather than mere objects of actions aimed at ‘rescuing’ or ‘saving’ them from their situation. There is a process of collective construction of a critical consciousness of their realities, where participants can question structures of power in society towards action for change. Humanising the gaze In our work with young people, we followed the principles of popular education as defined by Paulo Freire (1992, 1996, 2003). Young participants were perceived as agents of social change and experts by experience. The project valued their previous knowledge and experiences of being young and living in favelas and encouraged capacity building for social participation. More than that, we used a pedagogical approach that enabled critical consciousness and critical dialogue around issues affecting their lives, health and self-​image. A positive view of their strategies to exist and overcome challenges was acknowledged alongside a strong belief in young people’s capacity to change their realities. We were aware that many of them had had experiences of violence (both suffering and performing violent acts) and our starting point was their humanity and not the acts they performed (Freire, 1992). This was central to building trust and directing the project’s actions towards the recognition and valorisation of their process of questioning power relations and human rights violations. We also followed the principles of the theory of social representation (Moscovici, 1988; 2003), which comprises the systems of values that guide us to act in everyday life. Therefore, it was important to recognise the role of hegemonic representations in generalising views about certain groups, such as youngsters being perceived uniquely as violent. Group composition and activities The Escape Route project lasted four years (from 2004 to 2008) with a total of 160 participants. The staff team was composed of one coordinator 191

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and seven full-​time community practitioners with diverse backgrounds (psychology, social work, education and sociology). From the second year the project worked with a closed group of 30 young people aged between 13 and 25 years, with direct and indirect involvement in drug trafficking. The project offered one-​to-​one support, service referrals, reflective groups, workshops in photography, art craft, graffiti, video and human rights. In addition, we had cultural tours across the city as a way of expanding their cultural and educational horizons outside their communities and the restricted world of drug trafficking. Escape Routes had a research team of six people with lived experience in drug trafficking who had abandoned this life and moved onto work to help others to do the same. They acted as peer researchers in the first stage of the project and were essential to recruiting participants to attend the project in stage four. As we are talking about groups that are not readily available to participate in research processes and community projects, the deep involvement of people living in the community and with lived experience in the issues we wanted to address was considered a key methodological strategy from the early stages of the work. In line with community development values and Freire’s perspective, the work recognised the principles of community empowerment, and the capacity of people and communities to take control over their lives. A more detailed account of all project activities and results can be found in Silva et al (2009) and Fernandes and Rodriguez (2009). A previous framework addressed to practitioners working with young people involved in illegal activities was produced based on the Escape Routes project (Fernandes and Rodriguez, 2015).

Methodological approach Three years after the termination of the project, two focus groups were undertaken by the authors with six former participants (four male and two females, aged 19–​27). The focus groups explored their views on the experience of attending the Escape Routes project and its impact on their lives. The focus groups were carried out in two community organisations which secured the confidentiality of focus groups. Each focus group lasted two hours. The fact researchers were known by participants was a facilitator for establishing trust and enabled a relaxed and conversational approach during focus groups. Since both authors worked in the project for its life duration, a retrospective participant observation was incorporated in support of data analysis to make sense of memories and narratives from participants. With the consent of participants, the focus groups were voice recorded and then professionally transcribed. A content analysis was performed (Bardin, 2003) and five key themes were identified. The research was approved by 192

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the University of Dundee Research Ethics Committee. Participation was voluntary. Written and verbal consent were obtained from participants after a full explanation of the research and its purposes. There were no major ethical issues during the research.

Participants’ engagement and views on the project The following five key themes came up from the focus group analysis: 1. The right to the city: critical consciousness towards community empowerment and participation. 2. The expanding of individual horizons and awareness of human rights: questioning structures of domination and oppression. 3. Building trust and meaningful relationships: respecting and having mutual awareness of each other’s worldview. 4. Practitioners’ engagement: humanised and empathic approach. 5. Impact on their sense of wellbeing and responsibility to change. The right to the city Freire’s theoretical approach to an empowering education can be a vehicle to create a more equal city where those historically disadvantaged and voiceless groups and communities can experience a critical participation in the world. The right to the city is connected with a pedagogy of coexistence and was mentioned by the participants through an increased critical consciousness of their realities and potentialities to change, which added to a new sense of belonging to the city. The workshops on human rights and the external activities offered by the project played an important role in this. Due to the nature of young people’s territorialised life experience in favelas, these activities represented more than an opportunity to critically reflect and expand their educational and cultural experiences. For some it was their very first time visiting other areas of the city beyond their own neighbourhood surroundings and, also, an opportunity to recognise themselves as real citizens when experiencing the use of these spaces. These visits were essential to increasing their worldviews and strengthening their sense of belonging to the city and, by extension, their idea of citizenship: “The most remarkable moment to me was the trip to the Municipal Theatre in the City Centre because I had never been outside my community before. This was my first time and that marked my life. I loved it” (female participant, focus group). Project participants experienced a very confined life and were widely perceived as second-​class citizens. The fact they were from favelas dominated by drug trafficking gangs (some being gangsters themselves) was a very strong element that restricted their life experience in the wider city. Gang territoriality 193

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and rivalry instilled in them a sense of confinement and social distance from the rest of the city. The trust and sense of safety shared within the group and with the team members was essential to making those activities happen. If project participants did not trust the team, they would probably refuse to go beyond their socio-​symbolic boundaries. Such boundaries were not solely gang related. There was a strong element of socio-​symbolic depreciation of themselves in the eyes of the wider society, combined with a narrow view of the world. When they discussed life inside their communities and the limits imposed by armed groups, a new dimension seemed to appear. This is aligned with Freire’s emphasis on the importance of critical consciousness to the exercise of freedom (Freire, 1992) within stigmatised groups in society. ‘[A]‌h … I do not know how to explain the impact on me … it meant a lot to me [the external visits], a lot … so many new experiences the project could give to us, as a group, and as a person too, everybody together, going out, knowing other places … it was like. … I do not have words to describe. … I learnt a lot, this I can say, but I cannot explain with words, I really do not know, it is difficult. It opened my mind to understand how big is the world [getting emotional].’ (Female participant, focus group) The expanding of individual horizons and awareness of human rights The expanding of individual horizons and awareness is found in the participants’ feelings of being confident to raise their voices in issues regarding the violation of rights. This resulted in changes in their attitudes towards the police: ‘As we live in favelas, where there are just poor people, with no knowledge of their rights, then we suffer abuse of power from police officers. This happens a lot, but I have learnt during the project how to express myself when I am approached with violence. I can now show that I know my rights and when the police officer saw me speaking in the way I spoke, he got surprised … he thinks that Black people in favelas only speaks slang, then when I speak well and say: “I have my rights, stop it, this is not the correct way to approach” … they immediately stop.’ (Male participant, focus group) This quote shows how the critical consciousness of their own rights as citizens had practical results in changing a culture of interaction they had with other social groups, especially with the police: “The Escape Routes opened my mind to the world and made me more interested in always learning more. … I was always curious to know about things, especially human rights and citizenship” 194

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(male participant, focus group). The new knowledge and experiences enabled marginalised young people to intervene in their communities when exposed to violence and abuse of power from police officers and those working in health and social care services. Participants could navigate their encounters with these agents more confidently by challenging their exclusionary practices and attitudes, or, in conceptual terms, practitioner judgement. Building trust and meaningful relationships: respecting and having mutual awareness of each other’s worldview The process of building trust relationships between young people and staff members played an important role in terms of reflecting on this awareness of each other’s worldview by participants, and a consequent and engaged action towards it. For Freire (1979) there is no critical thinking without a sensitive and emotional mobilisation wherein the educator meets the ‘other’ in their historical condition. This fondness in Freire materialises in affection for, as well as commitment to, the other. In this commitment, love and respect, experienced in acceptance of differences, are key elements. Participants highlighted their lack of trust and engagement with other services due to previous traumatic experiences: ‘Everything was different in other places [services] that I have attended. I never felt trust for people, or that anyone would really help me. This project was a totally different experience. Staff members were friendly, respectful, and treated us as equal. In other projects practitioners did not care, no eye contact, seemed they were suspicious all the time … they did not want to help in fact.’ (Female participant, focus group) These attitudes impacted on young people’s motivation to engage in critical dialogues with practitioners. When participants felt trusted, they opened up and shared their experiences without being judged. The perception of a genuine interest and empathy coming from the staff members was essential to regain their trust in people and agencies: ‘I saw how you used to talk with us [young participants], how you let us be comfortable, you are patient … many participants returned to school because of your constant encouragement and support and thus, I was also wanting to go to the project, because you were helping people close to me, and I used to observe all the changes in my friends. … I used to see you looking for them in the streets, going to their houses, speaking with their family, carrying books, activities, making referrals, you were really interested in us.’ (Male participant, focus group) 195

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The approach adopted by the team made the relationship special for the youngsters. Some started to trust in the team in a way they had never experienced before in their lives. This personal and emotional attachment was important to help them to create new opportunities and to believe in themselves and in a different future: ‘Before the project I was using drugs and stealing. When you are like this, people do not trust in you because they see you as a robber … you do not trust in yourself either, but if you want to change your life, you need someone who trusts you above all, someone who believes in you, in your capacity for change, this is the only way to take you out of that situation … my family gave up on me because of so many mistakes, but you did not, and wow! … When you receive this vote of trust, it was like playing in the lottery and winning the prize! I gained more responsibility and started to think more about my future.’ (Male participant, focus group) The relationship of trust with the project team was the base for their actions and change. We perceived the interaction with team members and the community, and the type of relations built from this, as spaces of love and hope. For Freire (1979) an educational practice for freedom is always an act of love. Through an education permeated by affection, dialogue and the value of feelings, the courage to change can be generated. Because participants so valued the strong connection with the project and staff members, they did not want to disappoint the team. Thus, they avoided several situations that would have led them to return to crime or the use of drugs, based on their desire to prove to the team project members that they were committed to change: ‘During and after the project I used to think I should not do anything wrong. Because what would happen if myself and my boyfriend [both attended the project] got arrested? What about the project? What about you seeing that … this would upset me because you gave us care, attention. … You would not like us doing wrong things. … You used to give us advice, always available for us, listening to us, and then we make a mistake? No! There was no way for it to happen!’ (Female participant, focus group) Practitioner engagement: a humanised and empathic approach Project participants highlighted their experiences with other professionals where they felt a different approach and way of interacting. The young people

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reported that the project team made a difference because they adopted a loving and caring, welcoming and non-​judgemental attitude. This was the great difference. Other professionals they had interacted with before had not shown the same level of involvement and engagement as they observed in the Escape Routes team. The project team’s passion, respect and dedication as highlighted by many participants is linked to our discussion in Chapter 10 concerning a project for the city that promotes a pedagogy of coexistence. For this to happen, practitioners must believe in young people’s potency and inventive power to transform their lives: ‘We see professions like doctors, teachers, and even people working in community projects that seem to be there because they “have to” be there. Not because they want to.’ (Male participant, focus group) ‘There are professionals that do not interact in the way you did, actually they do not want our change, but you interacted with respect, patience, we saw you really wanting our change. You guys were there giving yourselves body and soul. Really interested in our stories. … I saw the team very united around the project, each one with a special skill and it was very good.’ (Male participant, focus group) A non-​judgemental attitude from team members offered a safe environment for participants to share their experiences and to improve their communications skills in different settings of their lives: ‘Sometimes we have a family, but we cannot communicate with them. … Sometimes we prefer to open our lives to other people that will better understand us because there are families that only criticise, and I used to be very criticised. But when I went to the project this did not happen. This is why a lot of people saw the organisation as a second home, sometimes even better … everybody was nice, I was calm, I started to talk to people, express myself, but when at home it was very stressful.’ (Male participant, focus group) Violence, for many of them, was not only an act but a language through which they could interpret the world around them. The humanised approach adopted by the project is linked to a pedagogy of hope (Freire, 1992) which works to change their rooted notions and self-​perceptions and allow a reframing of their interpretations of their world and circumstances. Indeed, we were attempting to deconstruct ideas strongly attributed to young people by mass media and everyday narratives in order to challenge their monsterisation and promote pedagogies of convivência/​coexistence (Fernandes et al, 2018): 197

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‘At first, we were all embarrassed to say things, not knowing how to start, but we ended up talking, and when we did, we just found understanding. We talked about a lot of things. It was good. And now … I don’t know, I feel different, I believe in myself. I was ashamed of my life before, but now I’m not ashamed of anything, I say what I want, what I think, I say it, I don’t have to hide anything from anyone.’ (Female participant, focus group) There was a common agreement about the professional effort to support young people, even when they showed resistance to attending the project and following the advice of the project team. Participants realised the practitioners’ persistence in ‘never giving up on them’ was essential to encouraging them towards change. Due to the territorial stigma that these young people in favelas feel from society, there were common narratives around situations where they did not feel accepted or treated with respect by health and education services. So, when their treatment was different, this was something remarkable: “I remember the people who did treat me well (in the project), I miss them the most (the project team), I remember everything, and I will remember forever, as long as I’m alive I’ll remember” (male participant, focus group). Impact on their sense of wellbeing and responsibility to change Participants offered their views on improvements to their own self-​care and sense of wellbeing during and after the project. The empathetic attitude and humanised approach of the project team members triggered feelings of wellbeing associated with a sense of responsibility: ‘After the project activities I was very excited, motivated, when I arrived at home I was in high spirits, feeling really great.’ (Male participant, focus group) ‘Sometimes when I got upset and I went to the project I distracted my mind and I calmed down. Everybody so nice to me, with a calm voice.’ (Female participant, focus group) Such changes in participants’ moods acted as resources for the adoption of new attitudes towards key areas of their lives such as health improvement and return to education. There was more willingness to try the referrals made by the team. Young people gradually became less impatient with daily difficulties and the challenges around change as they came to understand that life changing takes time and requires constant investment through concrete actions: “I realised my life would not change without me doing nothing 198

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to change. I had to take responsibility for my change” (male participant, focus group). Another important learning experience was the experience of sharing feelings and emotions in group activities and the positive impact coming from this: ‘We felt safe and comfortable to vent to the group, each one told his story, each one was sharing tough moments, talking about life events. I liked it very much because I opened up, for the first time, as I never did before even with my family. I let it all out, I let everything go out and I got better.’ (Female participant, focus group) This occurred once a week during the reflexive workshops when professionals discussed with participants topics of their choice related to current challenges and future projects they would like to achieve. Individual and collective aspects of their trajectories were elaborated within the group and ended up with the creation of strategies to leave criminal activity and sustain this decision. The importance given by the young participants to this type of activity revealed the lack of other opportunities in their communities to discuss sensitive issues and adequate space for many adolescents and young people to feel comfortable and safe to do it: “We had not much idea of how to express ourselves, how to have a debate on something” (male participant, focus group). As we mention in Chapter 10 the promotion of a citizenship paradigm in which people are encouraged to have a more active voice is necessary to challenge service providers to explore political engagement and critical dialogue. This is based on Freire’s formulation on action for change. The feeling of wellbeing and serenity achieved from conversations with practitioners during the project impacted on participants’ ability to have control of their emotions. This new skill became quite useful and necessary to the transition processes between life inside and outside of drug trafficking. With a greater ability to talk about themselves in different situations, it was easier for example to engage in searching for jobs, returning to school, booking health appointments or managing conflicts with peers using non-​ violent communication. During the project and even when the activities were finished, the young people revealed how the identification with the project team members was so strong that it made them go to where the organisation was based, even when there was no activity, in an attempt to find one of the professionals and spend more time in their company: ‘There were times when I stopped staying at home to go there [organisation]. There were days when there was nothing to do, and 199

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I would run there to try to do something or even to find the team. … Because here on the streets, in the community, there are not many things to do and being there [community organisation] it was a way of living a little distance away from the world we used to live in.’ (Male participant, focus group) The end of the project after four years was frustrating and seen as negative by the participants: ‘When I knew the project was coming to an end, I got very frustrated, disappointed. Today I pass in front of [the organisation], there are other activities running out, but I look inside, my gosh, where are the people I knew [team project members]? I do not even go in because I see different people there, I go back and I don’t come back anymore because I know that people who used to work there, from the old time, everyone left, so, what am I going to do there?’ (Female participant, focus group) This statement is powerful as it reveals how practitioners, more than the institution itself, became a point of reference for young participants living in favelas. Attending social projects and the strong desire for the project to last forever implied an attempt to maintain the meaningful interaction that was established: “I did not want to leave. For me the project should last forever” (female participant, focus group).

Conclusion The project increased young people’s ways of understanding their realities, moving gradually from the individual sphere towards a collective understanding of self. It greatly acknowledged and recognised the production of knowledge that comes from the common experience of people in their daily lives and practices, especially from those that have been marginalised and feel voiceless in our society. The project believed in the potential of individuals and their ability to change their realities, starting with reflection and critical consciousness of the world around them and followed by a determined effort to take action and bring change. Participants expressed themselves and their needs in different ways and raised their voices in spaces that could inform policy and practice. The opportunity to analyse the personal, social and civic components of their experiences within the community uncovered structures of domination and oppression that led them to create more effective forms of resistance and agency in the world.

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The situations of young people with previous involvement in drug trafficking were understood as part of a historical problem, not as an eternal given with no possibility of change. Participants’ engagement, in line with Freire’s work, represented an ethical and political commitment to the exercise of freedom. As critical consciousness integrates people into society and creates more opportunities for participation, we perceived young people’s increased capacity for making their own choices towards social justice. A process of deconstruction and reconstruction of new identities and forms of existence was possible. Based on this, it is necessary to acknowledge the potência/​potency of favelas and their residents in contrast with the paradigm of absence (Fernandes et al, 2018). The social practices, solutions and creativity produced in these spaces act as an alternative epistemology in response to their day-​to-​day problems. On the other hand, special attention should be given to the challenges related to what happens when social projects come to an end. Although participation in projects like this does not guarantee the complete exit from the drug trade or other illicit activities, it does initiate a series of other interactions, bonds and critical awareness that contribute to strengthening young people’s decisions to pursue different life trajectories. Young people who are in the process of moving away from drug trafficking and feel safe in specific environments with a strong identification with the activities offered, experience a great disappointment when these activities are discontinued. This seems partly to happen because there are few other opportunities for them to still be part of spaces which value their commitment to the process of critical consciousness that has begun. This reinforces the importance of thinking about structured interventions in a more extensive way through more transformative forms of community development, to ensure the incorporation of multiple urban spaces within a sustainable professional and institutional support for change. It is essential that projects include this transitional phase in their planning, including a solid dialogue with other sectors and initiatives linked to government programmes. Just as for Freire, hope is the core element for transforming oppression and reclaiming power, so we reaffirm that there can only be one city and one citizen based on a new appropriation of urban spaces that puts locations and residents at the centre of a political agenda aimed at overcoming social inequities. Note Here we adopt Bourdieu’s theory of social capital (Bourdieu, 1986). Bourdieu conceptualises capital beyond a Marxist economic dimension, exploring forms of social exchange that are not defined solely by monetary forms but beyond, around other economies in which social relations are shaped. As such, Bourdieu explores forms of capital defined by cultural assets (cultural goods, education, cultural taste and practices, and so on), which he conceptualised as cultural capital, and social networks (social circles

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Young People and Radical Democracy one belongs to and has access to), which he conceptualised as social capital. All of them relate to the concept of habitus which is the result of socialisation in diverse fields in combination with acquired capitals. For a more in-​depth account of Bourdieu’s theory and concepts we suggest reading Grenfell (2014).

References Baierl, L.F. (2004) Medo Social: da violência visível ao invisível da violência, São Paulo: Cortez Editora. Bardin, L. (2003) ‘L’analyse de contenu et de la forme des communications’, in S. Moscovici and F. Buschini (eds) Les méthodes des sciences humaines, Paris: PUF, pp 243–​70. Bourdieu, P. (1986) ‘The forms of capital’, in J. Richardson (ed) Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, New York: Greenwood, pp 241–​58. Available from: https://​home.iitk.ac.in/​~amman/​soc​748/​bourdi​ eu_​f​orms​_​of_​capi​tal.pdf [accessed 24 October 2021]. Cruz Neto, O., Moreira, M. and Sucena, L. (2001) Nem Soldados nem inocentes: juventude e tráfico de drogas no Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro: Fiocruz. Dowdney, L. (2003) Crianças do Tráfico: Um estudo de caso de crianças em violência armada organizada no Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro: 7 Letras. Fernandes, F.L. (ed) (2009) Redes de Valorização da Vida. Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro: Observatório de Favelas. Fernandes, F.L. (2014) ‘The construction of socio-​political and symbolical marginalisation in Brazil: Reflecting the relation between socio-​spatial stigma and responses to violence in Rio de Janeiro’, International Journal of Humanities and Social Science, 4(2): 53–​67. Fernandes, F.L. and Rodriguez, A. (2009) Escape Routes: Lessons Learned from the Development of Prevention Methodologies and the Creation of Alternatives for Adolescents and Youngsters Involved in Drug Trafficking, bilingual edition (Portuguese/​English), Brasília and Geneva: Observatório de Favelas/​ International Labour Organization. Fernandes, F.L. and Rodriguez, A. (2015) ‘The “lost generation” and the challenges in working with marginalised groups: Learnt lessons from Brazilian favelas’, Radical Community Work Journal, 1(1). Available from: https://d​ iscov​ery.dun​dee.ac.uk/​en/​publi​cati​ons/​the-​lost-​gen​erat​ion-​ and-t​ he-c​ hal​ len​ges-​of-​work​ing-​with-​mar​gina​lis [accessed 2 March 2022]. Fernandes, F.L., Ferraz, A.F. and Senna, A.C. (eds) (2009) Redes de Valorização da Vida. Recife, Rio de Janeiro : Observatório de Favelas. Fernandes, F.L., Silva, J.S. and Barbosa, J.L. (2018) ‘The paradigm of potency and the pedagogy of coexistence’, Periferias, 1(1). Available from: http://​ revist​aper ​ifer ​ias.org/​en/​mate​r ia/​the-​parad​igm-​of-​power-​and-​the-​pedag​ ogy-​of-​coex​iste​nce/​ [accessed 24 October 2021]. Freire, P. (1979) Educação e Mudança, 12th edn, Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra.

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Freire, P. (1992) Pedagogy of Hope: Reliving Pedagogy of the Oppressed, London and New York: Bloomsbury. Freire, P. (1996) Pedagogia da autonomia: saberes necessários à prática educativa, Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra. Freire, P. (2003) Pedagogia do oprimido, Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra. Glassner, B.R. (2003) Cultura do medo, São Paulo: Francis. Grenfell, M. (ed) (2014) Pierre Bourdieu: Key Concepts, London: Routledge. Ledwith, M. (2016) Community Development in Action: Putting Freire into Practice, Bristol: Policy Press. Leeds, E. (1998) ‘Cocaína e poderes paralelos na periferia urbana brasileira’, in A. Zaluar and M. Alvito (eds) Um século de favela, Rio de Janeiro: Editora Fundação Getúlio Vargas, pp 233 –​76. Moscovici, S. (1988) ‘Notes towards a description of social representations’, European Journal of Social Psychology, 18: 211–​50. Moscovici, S. (2003) Representações Sociais: investigações em psicologia social, Petrópolis: Vozes. Observatório de Favelas (2006) Trajetória de crianças, adolescentes e jovens na rede to tráfico de drogas no varejo do Rio de Janeiro: 2004-​2006, Rio de Janeiro: Observatório de Favelas. Rodriguez, A. (2013) Labyrinth of Trafficking: Lives, Practices and Interventions, Rio de Janeiro: 7 Letras. Silva, J.S. (2003) Por que uns e não outros? Caminhada de jovens pobres para a universidade, Rio de Janeiro, 7 Letras. Silva, J.S. and Urani, A. (2002) Crianças no Narcotráfico: um diagnóstico rápido, Brasília: Organização Internacional do Trabalho; Ministério do Trabalho e Emprego. Silva, J.S., Fernandes, F.L. and Willadino, R. (2008) ‘Armed criminal groups with territory domain: Reflections on crime territoriality in Rio de Janeiro metropolitan region’, in J. Global (ed) Safety, Traffic and Militia in Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro: Heinrich Böll Foundation, pp 16–​24. Silva, J.S., Willadino, R., Nascimento, R., Rodriguez, F. and Fernandes, F.L. (2009) Escape Routes: A Study on Adolescents and Youths Involved in Drug Trafficking in Rio de Janeiro, Brasília and Geneva: Observatório de Favelas; International Labour Organization. Zaccone, O. (2007) Os acionistas do nada: quem são os traficantes de drogas?, Rio de Janeiro: Revan. Zaluar, A. (1994) Condomínio do Diabo, Rio de Janeiro: Revan. Zaluar, A. (2004) Integração perversa: Pobreza e tráfico de drogas, Rio de Janeiro: Editora FGV.

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Burning Work: field map Christxpher Oliver

In March 2021 I was invited by Windrush Defenders Legal C.I.C.’s co-​ director Anthony Brown to document the funeral of Elouise ‘Mama’ Edwards.1 Born in Guyana, Mama Edwards travelled to England in 1961 to join her husband Beresford Edwards, and is widely celebrated for her community work in Greater Manchester. Held by the drums of the Abasindi Cooperative, multi-​faith minister Reverend Malaika led a socially distanced service within Manchester Central Cathedral. I had never met Mama Edwards however I grew to learn about her through the stories her family and friends told at the pulpit; the patterns on her dress worn in photographs; and driving to her burial site past people waving outside homes, community centres and businesses across the city. In the programme notes, I noticed a reference to her archive collection within the Ahmed Iqbal Ullah (AIU) RACE Centre at Manchester Central Library [GB3552.5]2 dating from 1969 to 1999. Five large boxes of materials mark events of social joy and damage, from newspaper cuttings of the Moss Side riots3 against state racism in 1981 –​to a statement in a pamphlet where Mama Edwards expresses her intentions for co-​founding the Nia Cultural Centre for Black Arts in 1991. Between the intimate rituals of the funeral ceremony, and the material of her archive collection, Mama Edwards inspired reflections on my own practice and, in her words, the importance of “recording our impact in Britain”. In December 2019 I had recorded a dialogue with Anthony Brown who arrived in England from Jamaica in 1967 aged six as a Citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies (CUKC). He had made the journey with his mother, two brothers and two sisters, to join his father who had been recruited as a civil engineer. This recording now forms part of an emerging Burning Work archive collection. At the Windrush Millennium Centre in Moss Side, Manchester, I listened to Anthony describe how despite the fact successive Home Secretaries have claimed he is British ‘in all but legal status’, he had been threatened with deportation from the United Kingdom in 1983. The materials of Mama Edwards’ archive, and her use of language within pamphlets, depict her legacy of resistance against the discriminatory laws and associated policies that are today recognised by the state to have caused ‘serious harm’. This ‘serious harm’ is evident in her collection –​now surfacing through testimonies in legal surgeries, intergenerational forums, 204

Burning Work 1 Figure 12.1: Elouise ‘Mama’ Edwards’ funeral, Manchester Central Cathedral

2 Archival extract of Mama Edwards’ Statement as Chair of the Nia Cultural Centre (1991) Elouise ‘Mama’ Edwards Archive Collection, [GB3552.5], 1969–​99, Ahmed Iqbal Ullah RACE Centre, Manchester Central Library. 3 C. Oliver (2021) Fire!, Emancipation Day, Windrush Square, Brixton, audio recording, 1 August 2021. Available from: https://​curr​ent-​edit.com/​Fire!_​Ema​ncip​atio​n_​Da​y_​1_​8_​ 20​21_​.mp3 [accessed 1 September 2021].

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race disparity statistics and multiple reports years later, including the Windrush Lessons Learned Review (WLLR) published in March 2020. Anthony and I converted this original dialogue into an article for openDemocracy in January 2020 titled ‘Race and Citizenship’, which later triggered a feature by Amelia Gentleman of the Guardian newspaper in May 2021.4 These articles depict Anthony Brown’s personal testimony, signalling our community’s wider intentions to contest the design of justice for what is known as the ‘Windrush Scandal’. Through incremental changes to immigration and nationality rules, British citizens from former colonies, disproportionately African Caribbean, who had lived in the United Kingdom (UK) for 50 years or more, found themselves being told they had no legal status in the UK. They were sacked from their jobs, denied access to public funds, National Health Service treatment, put in detention, with many individuals experiencing the terrifying ordeal of deportation. This injustice continues with members of our community being forced to jump through hoops to ‘naturalise’ as British –​a process normally reserved for foreign nationals and restricted by ‘good character’ requirements. Mama Edwards was a founding member of Arawak Walton Housing Association, and it is within this building in Ardwick, Manchester, where we have programmed several forums with civil servants to review policies that have been designed to ‘right the wrongs’ in relation to various measures including the European Convention on Human Rights. In the wake of the Windrush Scandal, these bespoke policies claimed to rectify citizenship status and issue compensation payments for those harmed. However, the enforcement of British policy repeatedly produces disproportionately negative outcomes for African Caribbean communities. The injustice of what Mama Edwards warned as the “almost planned erasure of Black contributions to this society”5 haunts the 2020 publication of the WLLR and the Home Affairs Committee (HAC) 2021 Report into the Windrush Compensation Scheme. The WLLR claims African Caribbean communities were ‘institutionally forgotten’ in the making of Home Office policy, and despite repeated criticisms by community representatives regarding the design of the Compensation Scheme four years later this HAC report has evidenced that rather than performing a remedial function, this policy has ‘compounded the injustice’.6

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Burning Work 4 C. Oliver and A. Brown (2020) ‘Race and citizenship’, openDemocracy. Available from: https://w ​ ww.opende​mocr​acy.net/​en/​open​just​ice/r​ ace-a​ nd-c​ itiz​ ensh ​ ip-b​ rita​ in-o ​ ne-​ mans-s​ tory/;​ A. Gentleman (2021) ‘Anthony Brown: The man who resisted deportation –​ then fought tirelessly for Windrush survivors’, The Guardian. Available from: https://​ www.thegu ​ ardi​ an.com/u ​ k-n ​ ews/2​ 021/m ​ ay/1​ 2/​ guardian-​200-​anthony-​brown-​resisted-​ deportation-​fought-​for-​win​drush-​survivors [both accessed 16 March 2022]. 5 Archival extract of Mama Edwards’ Statement as Chair of the Nia Cultural Centre (1991) Elouise ‘Mama’ Edwards Archive Collection, [GB3552.5], 1969–99, Ahmed Iqbal Ullah RACE Centre, Manchester Central Library. 6 House of Commons Home Affairs Committee (2021) 5th Report of Session 2021 - 2022 on The Windrush Compensation Scheme. Available from: https://committees.parliament.uk/ committee/83/home-affairs-committee/news/159118/compensation-scheme-failureshave-compounded-injustices-faced-by-windrush-generation-committee-finds/ [accessed 30 November 2021]. Also see the following quote from the report: As of the end of September, only 20% of the initially estimated 15,000 eligible claimants had applied to the scheme and only 5% had received compensation. Twenty three individuals have died before they received any compensation for the hardship they endured at the hands of the Home Office. The Committee found a litany of flaws in the design and operation of the scheme including an excessive burden on claimants to provide documentary evidence of losses, long delays in processing, poor communication and inadequate staffing. The report concludes that it is a damning indictment of the Home Office that the design and operation of the Compensation Scheme contain many of the same bureaucratic insensitivities that led to the Windrush Scandal in the first place.

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Mama Edwards recognised the support structures diasporic communities need when establishing home within ‘post-​colonial’ Britain –​calling for the “pooling of desires, plans, resources, and capabilities.”7 In this spirit, Burning Work forums such as the September 2021 gathering at the AIU RACE Centre in Manchester platform intergenerational community representatives, creative practitioners and researchers, who together form a critical perspective on the legal geographies that continue to affect multiple areas of life for African heritage communities. ‘Burning Work: field map’ explores techniques for navigating and contesting the a r c

of coloniality that blurs this intergenerational experience within Britain. This writing technique cuts across and connects insights from organising with Windrush Defenders Legal C.I.C. and Channels Research Group; creating space to gather with colleagues, family and community elders; interviewing civil servants; analysing data; participating in libations; drumming; collaborative writing; constituting counter archives; co-​designing forums;8 seeking judicial reviews;9 and linking footnotes through the multiple electronic languages (data, code, motion, visual, audio, text and graphic) of digital documentation –​this poetic constellation of media and words maps the field through which memory survives –​establishing lines of sight –​ towards scripting dreamt formulations of reparative futures.

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Burning Work 7 Archival extract of Mama Edwards’ Statement as Chair of the Nia Cultural Centre, 1991. From Elouise ‘Mama’ Edwards Archive Collection, [GB3552.5], 1969–99, Ahmed Iqbal Ullah RACE Centre, Manchester Central Library. 8 Windrush Defenders Legal C.I.C. and Channels Research Group (2020) Burning Work Report, edited by C. Oliver, S.L. Burke, J. Bond, G. Brown, V. Belinga, L. Brown, L. Downer and A. Brown. Available from: https://​curr​ent-​edit.com/​Bur​ning​Work​_​Rep​ ort.pdf [accessed 2 December 2021]. 9 Figure 12.2: Scan of Anthony Brown’s permission bundle, ‘in the matter of an application for judicial review, Anthony Brown v The Secretary of State for the Home Department, at the Royal Court of Justice, regarding the design of the Windrush Scheme and Compensation Scheme’, February 2022

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what is Burning Work? tongue to tongue mapping, collecting traces modalities10 of skin, hair through which bodies are positioned and lived –​

attuning to soulful frequencies12 ah rebellion, groove13 a r c14 h

i

p e l a g i

legal geographies c

ah ‘bad [mon] characters’ imperial time ah motherlands11 holding worlds in relation

echos inna voice –​ climatic conditions shaping weathered15 thought an feeling

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Burning Work 10 S. Hall (1978) Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order, London: Macmillan. 11  Figure 12.3: At Convoys Wharf, 2019, formerly called the King’s Yard, and the site of Deptford Dockyard, the first of the Royal Dockyards, built by the River Thames in London, England

Note: ‘A structural crack is a good example of an element that is both a sensor and an agent. Although such cracks may be seen as indicators of a structural problem external to themselves, they should not be understood simply as symptoms, but rather as material events that emerge as a result of evolving force contradictions around and within them.’ – F.E. Weizman (2014) ‘Introduction’, in C. Sturdy (ed) Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth, London: Sternberg Press, pp 9–34.

12 ‘It’s not about getting into sound, it’s about getting into the sensory body, to our sensory embodiment and sound is a good way of thinking through our bodies and thinking through our senses’ (Professor Julian Henriques, 2019, discussion with C. Oliver and V. Belinga). 13 d’bi.young anitafrika, M. Rowe, M. Dexter and C. Oliver (2019) current-​edit. com. Available from: http://​curr​ent-​edit.com/​This_​i​s_​a_​warn​ing.mp3 [Accessed 4 December 2021]. 14 ‘The stone had skidded arc’d and bloomed into islands: Cuba and San Domingo Jamaica and Puerto Rico Grenada Guadeloupe Bonaire’  (K. Brathwaite [1973] The Arrivants, Oxford: Oxford University Press). 15 C. Sharpe (2016) In the Wake, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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wah happened? ‘a lack of institutional memory’16 activates di border -​ evidencing home20 searching the

documenting di rights ah mothers an fathers

a r c 17 h i v e

scanned markings18 of social joy       damage –​

cataloguing, indexing African Caribbean presence as deposition

sounding haunted memories19

bodily and oral information surfaces -​

wah if me nah waan tu bi archived?

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Burning Work 16 The Archive Component of Burning Work responds to the assertion within the Windrush Lessons Learned Review of a ‘lack of institutional memory’ within public institutions regarding the history of African Caribbean people within Britain. The Archive Component builds on intergenerational heritage frameworks established between this absence of institutional memory, and the presence of ‘serious harm’ documented in testimonies within contemporary legal surgeries, forums and reports. Therefore, Burning Work sets out to create forms of analysis, and consensual research techniques for collecting testimonies and evidence, as a way of communicating and revealing the past, and presencing reparative futures. (Written by the author in response to the publication of Windrush Lessons Learned Review 2020 – W. Williams (2020) The Report of the Windrush Lessons Learned Independent Review, published 19 July 2018, last updated, 31 March 2020, London: Home Office. Available from: https://www.gov.uk/government/ publications/windrush-lessons-learned-review [accessed 31 March 2020].) 17 J. Derrida (1996) Archive Fever, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 18 ‘The Nia Centre opening marked a huge event in our community. We had watched the building for decades as my primary school was right at the back of it. In those days it was the BBC building and we went there with school when I was small to watch something. Then it was the Hippodrome Bingo hall but it was always an imposing building. Unused for some time, until Mama Edwards, Marenga Bombata and Alti Daniels among others wrote the bid and the plans to regenerate the audacious building. I amongst many others worked there and the building was lovingly renovated. Doing community development, making sure local people knew it was for them and suggesting the types of performances that would take to the grand stage. We saw people like Nina Simone, Nicodemus and Plyers, many plays and comedy shows it was an amazing and successful performance space. Until the City Council served plans to build houses nearby which looked much further away than where they were actually built. There was much dispute and when the houses were built across the way, the many complaints of noise nuisance soon led to reduced hours and then the closing of the centre. The community have always believed it was a deliberate attempt by the city council to close a successful African Caribbean venue as this had been a regular strategy of the City Council which people believe still happens today’ (email from Lorna Downer, co-​founder of Windrush Defenders Legal C.I.C., 7 March 2022, reflecting on How Memory Survives through an archival extract of Mama Edwards’ Statement as Chair of the Nia Cultural Centre, 1991, Elouise ‘Mama’ Edwards Archive Collection, [GB3552.5], 1969–​99, Ahmed Iqbal Ullah RACE Centre, Manchester Central Library). 19 B. Youth (1973) ‘Screaming target –​Big Youth speaks: Life is not an easy road’, Youtube. com. Available from: https://​www.yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​9X9R​VfCU​Le4 [accessed 2 December 2021]. 20 The Windrush Scheme, 2018 –​ application process for citizenship if you’re a Commonwealth citizen who settled in the UK before 1 January 1973, or you’re the child of someone who did.

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writing inna dark technical21 inhales and exhales direct the bodies breath assigning notes to feelings –​

non-​reactive non-​linear a r

from whose perspective? Olaudah Equiano? Paulette Wilson? Samuel Sharpe? Claudia Jones? Mama Edwards? Anthony Brown?

c 22 h i tectural lines towards futures fixing

[burning] work inna fields24

scripting dreamt23 formulations of ‘justice’ measured fi di ledge ah Africa25  

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Burning Work 21 L. Chude-​Sokei (2019) ‘Dr Satan’s echo chamber’, current-​edit.com. Available from: http://​ c urr​ e nt-​ e dit.com/​ L ouis%20Ch ​ u de%20So ​ kei.mp3 [accessed 6 December 2021]. 22 D. Adeyemo and C. Oliver (2020) The Cosmogony of (Racial) Capitalism [Trailer]. Available from: https://r​ ecur​sive​colo​nial​ism.com/​opere/​cosmog​ony/​ [accessed 4 December 2021]. 23 Julian Henriques: “The beauty of sound is you can actually create space with it. And we think of space being a visual thing. And that’s if you like the colonisation of the mind, the colonisation of ocular centrism to thinking through images and text. But there are other ways to create space, and the sound system is in many ways a kind of local street technology system. Generating spaces through sound, is precisely to generate a space which is not under the control of the authorities. So in one sense, the negative spaces, space outside of space is temporary space, which is pushed into the spaces of car parks in the outdoor shopping malls in Kingston, Jamaica. So it’s a nomadic space. Which changes our idea about space because we think space represents precisely the opposite of a permanence and continuity and a kind of literally a concreteness” (discussion with C. Oliver and V. Belinga, 2018). 24 Figure 12.4: Rhetorical studio

25 E. Kamau Brathwaite (1984) The History of the Voice, London: New Beacon Books.

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Inna movement and restraint

black archives metamorphosise

forum26 as intergenerational spatial practice –​

a r c 29 haelogical

taking root pon contested ground between ruins27

gathering enflamed28 points of view/​touch blurred positions ah fugitivity

listening inna di surgery  church  shabeen   theatre

di soun wo/​mxn speaks tru tender drum beats –​

ceremonial30 grieving and healing

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Burning Work 26 Figure 12.5: Manchester Central Library



Source: George Brown, 2021

27 T.H. Gabriel (1993) ‘Ruin and The Other: Towards a Language Of Memory’, in H. Naficy and T.H. Gabriel (eds) Otherness and the Media: The Ethnography of the Imagined and the Imaged, London: Routledge, pp 211–21. 28 d’bi young anitafrika: “Much of what I witnessed was about being a part of those who gathered –​in gathering, you gather at the dancehall, you know, with a big speaker boxes somebody has speaker boxes in a community. You gather to dance and to talk, to talk about other people, you know, and there’s a ritual that’s happening. You gather in the kitchen pon Sunday with everybody and Granny cook and then you gather to eat the food or you gather to run about, run about is when you and your friends on a summer holiday or what kind of holiday, or maybe you didn’t go to school that day –​cook up pon fire stove, somebody buy rice, somebody buy chicken or chicken back, because we could afford that –​literally the back of the chicken was cheaper than the other parts of the chicken. And you come together and you cook it together and you all eat or you buy flour and make dumplings and you gather. So gathering the ritual of gathering is an inheritance from these enslaved African people who were brought over and through gathering after the slave master them gone di dem bed, gathering to talk, to strategise to dance and to fuck –​gathering is what we do in order to survive” (discussion, with C. Oliver, 2019). 29 Lee Scratch Perry, ‘Studio Black Ark’. Available from: https://​www.yout​ube.com/​ watch?v=​y651​C7aN​XRc [accessed 2 December 2021]. 30 S. Wynter (2015) ‘The ceremony found: Towards the autopoetic turn/​overturn, its autonomy of human agency and extraterritoriality of (self-​)cognition’, in J.R. Ambroise and S. Broeck (eds) Black Knowledges/​Black Struggles, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, pp 184–252.

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PART V

Practising hope

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They are not your warriors: intergenerational tensions and practices of hope in young people’s environmental activism Dena Arya

To set the context for the Afterword, this in-​the-​moment analysis of the Fridays For Future (FFF) presence at COP26 in Glasgow typifies many of the central themes of this book. It describes the atmosphere and dynamics of the youth activism that took place during COP26 which formed the backdrop of this book coming into existence. Intergenerational solidarity and alliances with indigenous community members, members of the Global South and minority groups become key markers, showing how activist spaces have the potential to become, and prefigure, what more equitable forms of collectivity (consisting of multiple agendas and ideologies) could look and feel like in coexistence. It ends with a warning for adults to resist positioning young people on generational terms as their heroes for a better future but ask themselves what knowledge they can share to support young people to reimagine the status quo. FFF, a global and youth-​led environmental movement that uses strike tactics to take action on issues of ecological and social justice, put out a call to action to ‘#UprootTheSystem’ on Friday 5 November 2021 during the United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26) in Scotland. An estimated 30,000 people (Davies, 2021) attended this strike on the streets of Glasgow, while ‘more lobbyists for big polluters than any national delegation’ took their seats inside the COP26 halls (Global Witness, 2021). This FFF strike was one of the most ethnically, politically and generationally diverse I had attended in the two-​and-​a-​half years I have been following them across the UK. This is not of great surprise considering the high-​profile nature of this strike. Starkly observable were contending and conflicting political and apolitical messages and agendas among groups and individuals. Although there were no visible right-​wing messages on placards, from far left to the apolitical, solutions ranged from ‘socialist change to end climate change’ to demands for social justice like ‘where 221

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are the Global South voices?’. Policy change initiatives like calling for the Green New Deal and individual behaviour changes such as ‘eat less meat’ and ‘don’t forget to line dry your clothes!’ also featured across the skyline. As flags waved for nations across the globe, people simultaneously chanted “No nations! No borders!”. The diversity came not only among the young strikers themselves, who I saw carrying placards that embodied numerous causes and ideologies, reminding us that within young people’s environmental activism there is a great deal of nuance, despite young people often being treated as a homogeneous group (Henn and Foard, 2014). This political diversity also played out between young people and adults. In the time that I have been following the youth climate strikes, I have witnessed young people organising across the borderlines, bringing adult-​led groups together with young people towards a goal of ecological and social justice. From 2019, Youth Strike For Climate (YSFC) chapters across the UK have allied with trade unions. One example being the welcoming of University College Union (UCU) members across academic institutions to build solidarity in joining FFF strikes (UCU, 2019). These acts of solidarity and community building with adult groups reflected in the range of banners of organisations at the FFF climate strike in Glasgow, such as the Industrial World Workers (IWW) to the GMB Union. In the time the UK FFF movement has been building, there have been various ways in which young people have involved adult allies in organising and collaboration. Whether inviting them to join their meetings, facilitate consultations within FFF, chaperone young people to strikes, or simply borrow sound equipment for strikes, young people have often recognised the positive role that adults can play in the movement (Walker, 2020). We encourage adults supporting young people to recognise the importance of youth-​led political spaces and ensure that they effectively get out of the way so that young people are front and centre in leading decision-​making in a space they created (Elsen and Ord, 2021). The way in which adults and young people converged at the COP26 strike is of particular interest when reflecting on the wider aims of this book to develop understandings of the role of radical democracy in community development. Through bringing together an array of groups and individuals, young people involved in FFF have engaged with the practice of solidarity as a means of organising to bring voices together in collective political action for social change. The solidarity enacted in this strike was simultaneously its own ends. Young people were enacting future imaginaries of social and ecological justice in standing in solidarity with the Global South and minorities. This for me was most vivid at the front line of the COP26 strike, which was the first climate strike at which I had seen indigenous community members, members of the Global South 222

Intergenerational tensions and hope

and minority groups leading the procession. Although symbolic, this highlights young peoples’ awareness of the inequalities that are present in the movement and how solidarity can build hope through these uncertain times towards social and ecological justice by making activist spaces more equitable spaces. Placards at the strike often served as a reminder of the anger at some adults for the inequal footing young people have as a marginalised group in the environmental crisis. Messages like ‘Don’t mess with my future’ and ‘You will die of old age we will die of climate change’ typify this sentiment. Mirowski, writing about neoliberalism and protest, says that neoliberals have come up with a ‘relatively novel way to co-​opt protest movements through a combination of top-​down hierarchical takeover plus a bottom-​up commercialisation and privatisation of protest activities and recruitment’ (2014: 357). Alongside witnessing the intergenerational solidarity at the strike came a number of occasions where I saw adults capitalising on the protest, from selling whistles and Scottish flags to left-​wing groups selling newspapers and countless journalists grabbing soundbites and photo opportunities. Prior to this climate strike, I had become accustomed to seeing adults at the peripheries of the strike, often in the form of journalists, Extinction Rebellion Grandparents (sometimes handing out chocolate brownies) and small socialist stalls, typically the Socialist Workers Party. At the COP26 climate strike, I instead saw these periphery groups join in and become part of the procession rather than teetering on the side lines. While this could be perceived as adult agendas piggybacking on the climate strike, there was also a sense that there was no hierarchy in this shared space, where multiple agendas and ideologies could coexist without exemption. The greatest tensions that did exist between young people and older generations involved those adults who were not present at the strike. While young people are building networks of solidarity with adults within the movement, they also recognise that they are ‘generationally positioned’ as they have to demand of adults to respond to the crisis. This is either in the form of politicians or corporations and other such adult powerholders (Walker, 2020). Adults play a significant part in the prefigurative practice that young people are involved in. The greatest responsibility of adult allies in community development with young people can be equipping young people with the tools they need to reimagine the status quo. As young peoples’ environmental activism reminds us that ‘another world is possible’ it is important that adults do not weave a heroic narrative that young people are here to be our warriors for a better future. Instead, adults might ask themselves what knowledge they can share to support young peoples’ self-​determination in the face of crisis. 223

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References Davies, R. (2021) ‘COP26: How many protests will there be in Glasgow for COP26? COP26 Protest dates, locations and what to expect’, The Scotsman, 5 November. Available from: https://​www.scots​man.com/​ news/​envi​ronme​ nt/c​ op26-h ​ ow-m ​ any-p​ rote​sts-​will-​there-​be-​in-​glas​gow-​ for-​cop26-​cop26-​prot​est-​dates-​locati​ons-​and-​what-​to-​exp​ect-​3436​341 [accessed 30 December 2021]. Elsen, F. and Ord, J. (2021) ‘The role of adults in “youth led” climate groups: Enabling empowerment’, Frontiers in Political Science, 3: 641154. Global Witness (2021) ‘Hundreds of fossil fuel lobbyists flooding COP26 climate talks’, Global Witness, 8 November. Available from: https://​www. global​witn​ess.org/​en/​press-​relea​ses/​hundr​eds-​fos​sil-​fuel-​lobbyi​sts-​flood​ ing-​cop26-​clim​ate-​talks/​ [accessed 30 December 2021]. Henn, M. and Foard, N. (2014) ‘Social differentiation in young people’s political participation: The impact of social and educational factors on youth political engagement in Britain’, Journal of Youth Studies, 17(3): 360–​80. Mirowski, P. (2014) Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown, London: Verso. UCU (2019) ‘Youth strike for climate, 21 June’, University and College Union, 14 June. Available from: https://​www.ucu.org.uk/​arti​cle/​10159/​Youth-​Str​ ike-​for-​Clim​ate-​21-​June?list=​7340 [accessed 30 December 2021]. Walker, C. (2020) ‘Uneven solidarity: The school strikes for climate in global and intergenerational perspective’, Sustain Earth, 3(5): 1–​13.

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Afterword: Community as prefigurative practice –​practices of hope Janet Batsleer, Harriet Rowley and Demet Lüküslü

There is a way of seeing the social movements, led by young people, and the associated community development practices in which young people’s perspectives are to the fore, as moments and movements of hope. As other books in the ‘Rethinking Community Development’ series note, these moments of hope are important in that they each offer elements in counter-​ narratives to the neoliberal hegemony of capitalist realism which insists that there is no alternative to a continuation of things as they are. A ‘prefigurative practice of hope’ which affirms that there are indeed alternatives to the current system has been understood as a necessary contribution to radical democracy (Amsler, 2015). We consider hope as a practice of imagination of something radically new and better (Amsler, 2015). Much as other editors in this series, we position hope as collective action which has the capacity to emerge out of and in spite of other emotions such as anger and fear which are all too present as we face climate catastrophe and the continued fallout from COVID-​19. In this afterword, we consider how the contents of this book show complete and partial refusals, which, rather than resulting in tyranny, enable us to open up new spaces of hope and friendship where the (im)possibility of common ground can flourish. Extending Ernst Bloch’s (1986 [1958]) writing on hope, we consider on what kind of front such hopeful prefigurative practices might emerge, and in particular, in the case of this book, how we see young people at the forefront of radical democratic practice. A prefigurative practice has been thought to be one that begins in consequence of a consideration of a shared predicament and inaugurates in the here and now a way of being-​in-​ relationship, which begins a new set of relations, which moves towards more equal and more just, freer and more caring relationships. Sheila Rowbotham (1979) classically described women’s centres and help lines and other practices of self-​help and mutual aid as prefigurative. More than just a new form or technique, they arise from a new consciousness of shared conditions of life, and through self-​help/​mutual aid, they begin to enact a change in gendered relationships. Throughout this book, chapters have given an account of how consciousness of shared conditions and differential experience of them 225

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becomes the basis for shared though differing courageous acts of citizenship by and with young people. Such acts of citizenship hospitably invite older citizens to move with processes in which consciousness is changing, thus in turn influencing intergenerational social dynamics. In many ways, this is the classic process of social change as embraced by community development. In the preceding chapters, we have learned –​on more than one occasion –​of common tables and shared kitchens creating new relations between insiders and outsiders, producers and consumers. Speaking out and speaking with, in relations of respectful coexistence, form the principles of a second set of practices which prefigure an extension of democracy to those whose lives are currently rendered disposable (de Souza, 2021). And new forms demand new languages and registers, new onto-​epistemologies which seek to change the relation between the human and the non-​human, often best finding expression in bodily practices, rendered here in the accounts of dance, of sonic gatherings, and of queer playfulness in the digital world. Such prefigurative practice is the concrete form of faith in the capacity of humans to do better by one another and by other living beings and the world, and creates the possibility of hope, usually in interstitial spaces at the edge of or even beyond the capitalist system (Gibson-​Graham, 2018). Hope as a principle of organising was explored in the work of two very significant mid-​20th-​century thinkers: Ernst Bloch and Paulo Freire. While community development theorising has its roots significantly in Freire’s work, with its emphasis on critical thinking and dialogue as a ground for pedagogies of hope (Freire, 1992), the utopian thinking of Ernst Bloch (1986 [1958]) is less well known. Like his contemporary Walter Benjamin, he found inspiration for his thinking in the Jewish Messianic prophetic traditions, which calls up an end time of justice, compassion and peace. Fragments of this ‘messianic time’ are continually to be found living in the time of history, the time of the now. In a secularised understanding of this historical process, Bloch proposed that acting in imagination and anticipation of this end-​time of justice, compassion and peace propels this utopian moment into the present. This is, in the words of the title of his magnum opus, ‘The Principle of Hope’ (Bloch, 1986 [1958]). He developed the concept of ‘educated hope’ to reject banal optimism and to encourage participation in the exploration of potentialities in individual and collective life. Bloch wrote that such hope ‘requires people who throw themselves actively into what is becoming, to which they themselves belong’ (Bloch, 1986 [1958]: 3). Hope is closely related to imagination but this active character of hope takes it beyond sheer daydreaming and idle imagination. ‘Instead, it grasps the New as something which is mediated in what exists and is in motion’ (Bloch, 1986 [1958]: 3). Such educated hope does not deny the truth concerning cruelty, oppression, injustice and despair. In the words of the British playwright 226

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Howard Barker: ‘Tragedy equips us against lies. After the musical we’re anybody’s fool.’ And no one wants to be taken for a fool. Educated hope is produced collectively. It is inevitably entangled with power relations and governance. Individuals learn from and within their material, cultural, social and political experiences and they amalgamate these with hope for a better world. For example, they form or join in with groups or initiatives with an aim to achieve certain goals and desires collaboratively. They also follow joyful imagination and creative practice where it takes them. Hope empowers both individuals and social groups as they follow hopeful counter-​practices to those proposed by neoliberal platforms which proclaim incessantly ‘You can do whatever you want’. Hope arises too (alongside and with despair) from the embeddedness of human histories and stories in the natural world, which places the limit of death even on the most cruel tyrants, and enables regeneration even in the face of extinctions. New materialist feminists, too, such as Rosi Braidotti (2020), have developed praxis which enables affirmative action even in the face of systemic violence and planetary crises. Writing about the COVID-​19 crisis, Braidotti says: The underlying mood during this pandemic is affective. It involves complex and internally contradictory alternation of emotions—​that mark what I have called the posthuman convergence (Braidotti 2013, 2019). An intense sense of suffering alternating with hope, fear unfolding alongside resilience, boredom merging into vulnerability. Excitement and exhilaration in view of the advanced technologies that drive the Fourth Industrial Age, flip into anxiety and fear at the thought of the huge costs and damages inflicted by the Sixth great Extinction, on both the human and non-​human inhabitants of this planet. Although climate change has come to represent this danger in an almost emblematic manner, and the nuclear threat is far from abated, in the current state of emergency, the centre of all concerns is the COVID-​ 19 pandemic. … This is not a time for grandiose theorizing but for collective mourning, affective resistance, and regeneration. We need to mourn the dead, humans and non-​humans and not build theories on their dead bodies—​that would be a shameless abuse of intellectual power. But over and above all else, we also need to develop different ways of caring, a more transversal, relational ethics that encompasses the non-​humans. (Braidotti, 2020: 465) The insights of another philosopher powerfully influenced by the Jewish tradition, Jacques Derrida (2001), add a further twist to this short account of hope. Despair after all would be an equally understandable response to the current situation of the planet and of the poorest populations on it. Derrida, 227

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in ‘On Cosmopolitanism’, presents ‘community’ as a site of struggle between a movement towards more boundaries and a movement towards more hospitality and generosity (2001). As a philosopher of language Derrida’s work always points to moments of undecidability and paradox in language, which he terms ‘aporias’. These ‘aporias’ are the (im)possible places of hope. Rethinking community development from such a perspective requires a radical openness concerning the ‘democracy to come’ which nevertheless inspires practice in the here and now. Despair deferred can be thought of as the starting point for the emergence of this (im)possible practice of hope, specifically more generous and plural practices of hospitality. This practice of hope based in radical democracy is, as we have said, in opposition to capitalist realism and neoliberal forms of community development which declare that ‘there is no alternative’ to working within the system as it currently exists. There is an absolute denial of hope for a different way of being in the world in neoliberal community development practices, a foreclosure of discussion in the name of pragmatism and a recognition of the inevitable victory (already achieved) of global capitalism over all comers. To begin the process of rethinking community development means a refusal to engage with the systems which state ‘There is no alternative’. That is why social movements literature very often uses ‘hope’ as a keyword and elaborates on it (Harvey, 2000; Castells, 2015).

Refusals: complete and partial There are particular threats to community development in the practices of right-​wing populism in that it claims to speak in the voice of ‘the people’ against all elites and experts, precisely to build up the power and authority of ‘strong man’ leaders, whose image of community is built on the power of strength rather than the power of democracy and frequently on nostalgic images of the past which appeal to simplistic constructions of then and now, as well as us and them (Mudde, 2004; Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser, 2012). The projections of ‘community’ by such authoritarian leaders require the building up of borders and of military controls over dissidence, and the projection of hatred against racialised ‘others’, against foreigners and also against sexual minorities and against dissidents, whose perceived weakness is seen as a threat to the unity of the ‘national community’. At the same time the economic systems of neoliberal capitalism are supported and presented to ‘the people’ as inevitable as the changing of the seasons or the turning of night to day and as impossible to change, even as the patterns of climate and the seasons change as we live. However, we cannot either see ‘liberation’ as the inevitable outcome of a process of community development in which a struggle between power and oppression comes to an appointed and inevitable emancipatory end and 228

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‘liberation’ may appear an insufficient goal for the current times. Practices of hope in community development seek to open up a space beyond a sense of inevitability, and therefore create a sense of openness beyond the binary of power and oppression on the one hand and resistance on the other. While not denying the reality of these life/​death struggles and their overwhelmingness in all too many contexts in which community development is practised, we want to argue that in opening up new spaces we can create spaces of hope ‘beyond binaries’ where exploration of friendship and the (im)possibility of common ground can flourish (Nancy, 1991). In an earlier moment community development positioned itself as ‘in and against the state’. This in the end meant that community development often found itself in a position of both reforming and yet at the same time reinforcing the present system of social and political relationships. Hopeful radical democratic practice begins instead from certain refusals: of authoritarian populism and of neoliberal capitalist realism –​in order to practice an ‘interruption’ of established practices and the inauguration of alternative, freer and more egalitarian forms. These practices of hope and openness proceed towards a refusal of despair; towards a changed sense of space/​time which is many layered, away from the one which frames neoliberal progress as the increasingly rapid repetition of the self-​same ever more lethal events and sees here/​there as being simultaneous positions in a market of commodities; instead practices of hope move towards the creation of links between immediacy/​the now and that changed multi-​layered sense of space/​time in which archives are an essential resource of the now. Such work –​described in a variety of ways in this collection –​includes an awareness of the arc of time which creates a new experience of planetary connectedness both in space and in histories and new forms of world-​and community-​making beyond those of globalisation. In terms of community development practice, we therefore especially recognise grassroots experiments which link the local and the global in new ways; place-​based extensions of democracy; and the creation of new platforms for authentic deliberation. The chapters of this book have given accounts of practices which seek to build paths and bridges into the future; spaces and infrastructures which support learning radical democracy. These practices work with cracks and fissures to open up new spaces; with the flow of water and of digital communications; with the voices and also the bodily movements and connections which inspire educated hope for better times. The authors of the chapters in this book are seeking to give more nuanced, more complex –​even while more transitory and fragile –​ accounts of the ways such practices emerge and develop to enable the life of hopeful communities. Hope, which sets about criticising and transforming the present, does so from an anticipatory openness towards a better future. In Ernst Bloch’s words: ‘The being that conditions consciousness, and the consciousness that 229

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processes being, is understood ultimately only out of that and in that from which and towards which it tends. Essential being is not Been-​ness; on the contrary: the essential being of the world lies itself on the Front’ (Bloch, 1986 [1958]: 18). What kind of Front is this? And finally, what does it mean to see young people, as we do in this book, as at the forefront of movements of radical democratic practice creating communities of change? This ‘Front’ of change, where young people are to be found in all the examples and case studies in this book, needs to be understood in new ways too. In the period in which Bloch was writing, the term ‘Front’ had first of all a reference to warfare and military formations. Young men had been killed in their millions on the Fronts of the First World War, when Bloch started his writing. In the mid-​20th century in Europe, communist, socialist and social democratic parties attempted to form a Popular Front on which to fight against fascism and national socialism in Europe. They explored counter-​hegemonic strategies and tactics, wars of position and wars of manoeuvre and these metaphors continue to have strength. Some writers on community development see that it has a contribution to make to a ‘left populism’ (Mouffe, 2018; Mayo, 2020, 2021). For others, a more pluralist left is the way to open up counter-​hegemonic strategies and narratives. But what if this metaphor of the Front enabled us to think about radical democracy away from metaphors of politics as warfare and to see what is emerging from young-​people-​led practices in new ways? Being at the Front could be to be at a weather front: a transition zone between two different air masses at the Earth’s surface. Each air mass has unique temperature and humidity characteristics. For example, one air mass might be cold and dry, the other warm and moist. Often there is turbulence at a front which is a borderline where two different air masses, with contrasting properties, come together. The turbulence can cause storm and clouds. Often a band of rain occurs. And sometimes rainbows form –​a sign of hope in many cultures, a bridge to the heavens and a path for celestial messengers bringing news of a better time to come. Being at a Front could also be imagined as the Sea Front, the part of a coastal town next to the beach, often with a line of houses and shops along it facing the sea. The Sea Front marks the edge between the settled place of the town, the liminality of the beach, and the wildness of the sea. The Front can also be the focal point of pleasure, entertainment and fun in seaside towns in the summer months in the UK; it remains paradoxical, familiar and unfamiliar, changing with the tides and the seasons, full of risky possibilities, a place for hopes and dreams and new imaginations of delight. In many parts of the world –​the Mediterranean, the English Channel –​the land at the sea’s edge is a front of hope in a more material sense, offering a firmer chance of life, even if only momentarily, to those whose crossing of the waters in search of asylum and safety, places their lives in great peril. 230

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Elsewhere –​for example in islands in the Pacific at the frontline of climate change –​the sea’s edge is the indicator of the future inhabitability, and even existence, of the land. The imagination of hopeful practices of community development cannot now ever occur far from such waters. Young people at the forefront of radical democratic practices of community development all over the world can be seen as involved in practices of hope in transition zones, in places and times of turbulence, in threshold or liminal practices, and in places and times that provoke imagination and delight, sustaining a possibility of extended equality, liberty, solidarity and care: a radical democracy-​to-​come. Their hopeful practice can serve as a reminder that the last word has not been spoken yet nor the last act of citizenship in community occurred. Since, despite the power of authoritarian and identitarian versions of community, in the poet June Jordan’s (2003 [1982]) words, it is not who we are but what we can do for one another that will determine the connection. References Amsler, S. (2015) The Education of Radical Democracy, London: Routledge. Bloch, E. (1986 [1958]) The Principle of Hope, Boston: MIT Press. Braidotti, R. (2020) ‘ “We” are in this together, but we are not one and the same’, Bioethical Inquiry, 17(4): 465–​9. Castells, M. (2015) Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age, Cambridge: Polity Press. Derrida, J. (2001) On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, London: Routledge. de Souza, M.L. (2021) ‘ “Sacrifice zone”: The environment–​territory–​place of disposable lives’, Community Development Journal, 56(2): 220–​43. Freire, P. (1992) The Pedagogy of Hope, London and New York: Continuum. Gibson-​Graham, J.K. (2018) A Postcapitalist Politics, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Harvey, D. (2000) Spaces of Hope, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Jordan, J. (2003 [1982]) ‘Report from the Bahamas’, Meridians, 3(2): 6–​16. Mayo, M. (2020) Community-​based Learning and Social Movements: Popular Education in a Populist Age, Bristol: Policy Press. Mayo, M. (2021) ‘Community development and popular education in populist times’, in S. Kenny, J. Ife and P. Westoby (eds) Populism, Democracy and Community Development, Bristol: Policy Press, 71–​88. Mouffe, C. (2018) For a Left Populism, London and New York: Verso. Mudde, C. (2004) ‘The populist zeitgeist’, Government and Opposition, 39(4): 542–​63. Mudde, C. and Rovira Kaltwasser, C. (eds) (2012) Populism in Europe and the Americas: Threat or Corrective for Democracy? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 231

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Nancy, J.-​L. (1991) The Inoperative Community, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rowbotham, S. (1979) Beyond the Fragments, London: Pluto Press.

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Index References to figures appear in italic type. References to endnotes show both the page number and the note number (40n1).

A abyssal lines  4, 9, 168, 174, 178, 181 activism  3–​8, 10, 11, 15, 18, 25, 28, 35–​40, 40n1, 45–​55, 61, 67, 83, 136, 144, 176, 221–​3 adulthood  4, 11 Afghanistan  24, 47 African Caribbean  206, 212, 213n16, 213n18 African Youth Charter  154 agriculture  62, 69 alcohol  188 allyship  12, 30, 134 Ambedkar, B.R.  136, 147 Animal Crossing  121 animal welfare  62 Ankara  24, 31, 40n1 Anthropocene  80 anti-​capitalism  3, 8, 15, 23, 25, 37, 40n1, 45, 51, 53–​5 Arendt, Hannah  7, 8, 15, 24–​6, 29, 30, 32, 36, 38, 39 asylum seeker  25 austerity  48, 77, 86 authoritarianism  4, 14, 15, 26, 40, 147, 228, 229, 231

B Bangladesh  133 banlieues  101, 111, 113n4 Beyoğlu  28 Beyond Acceptance Research Project (BARC)  124–​5 bigotry  140, 144 binary discourse  5, 10 biopsychosocial  74 bisexual  12, 25, 115, 117, 118 see also LGBTQI+​ Black Lives Matter  16, 19, 55 Black people  13, 16, 19, 20, 49, 55, 123, 169–​4, 182n1, 182n3, 188, 194, 206 Bloch, Ernst  225–​30 Bodies of Water (BoW)  81, 85 Body-​Mind Centering  80 Bolsonaro, Jair  169 bonding  12, 137, 140 border  14, 24, 28, 34, 47, 106, 109, 120, 222, 228, 230

Bourdieu, Pierre  7, 12, 13, 25, 26, 31, 38, 72, 170–​3, 201n1 Braidotti, Rosi  227 Brazil  8, 11, 20, 167–​77, 182n1, 182n3, 187–​201 see also favelas, Rio de Janeiro Brook  115 Brown, Anthony  204, 206, 207n4, 209n8, 209n9, 214 bureaucracy  158, 173 Burning Work  20, 204–​8, 209n8, 210, 213n16, 214

C capitalism  6, 11, 15–​17, 45–​56, 61, 119, 178, 215n22, 225, 226, 228, 229 see also anti-​capitalism Canada  16, 24 Caribbean  7, 20, 206, 212, 213n16, 213n18 caste  13, 15, 16, 19, 131–​47, 132 censorship  120, 141 Centres Sociaux  101 charity  35, 125, 127 childcare  28 childhood  11 children  11, 12, 29, 30, 36, 54, 77, 86, 100–​3, 167, 182n1, 189 choir  89 choreography  88, 92 cisgender  116 Citizen Council  101–​9, 112 citizenship  10, 112, 115–​29, 146, 147, 175, 177, 181, 190, 193, 199, 206, 207n4 acts of  5, 8, 9, 13–​18, 21, 226 paradigm  20, 175–​77, 199 Citizenship Amendment Act and National Register for Citizens  146 City of God  170 classroom  135–​8 coalition  16, 17, 23, 24, 25, 31, 33, 36, 39, 61 coexistence  20, 168, 174, 175, 178–​81, 189, 190, 194, 197, 221, 226 see also convivência/​coexistence collectivism  121, 126, 128, 138 colonisation  10, 174, 178, 215n23 Comic Con  122 communism  5, 48, 49, 53, 230

233

Young People and Radical Democracy Doctors Without Borders  see Médecins Sans Frontières domination  50, 61, 62, 70, 100, 106, 108, 111, 113, 170, 193, 200 dress codes  172–​4, 178 drugs  10, 20, 104, 112, 171, 187, 188, 189–​93, 196 trafficking  167, 188, 189, 199, 201

community  10–​21, 24–​9, 34–​7, 189, 192–​7, 200, 204, 206, 208, 213n18, 217n28, 222–​3, 231 centre  29, 48, 101–​12, 117, 118, 204 development  3, 10–​21, 174, 175, 177–​82, 187, 192, 201, 222, 225–​31 education  15, 60, 131–​2, 144, 188, 189 organisation  14, 85, 144, 151, 176, 181, 188, 192, 200 concrete  92, 93, 95n5 consumerism  72, 74, 85 convivência/​coexistence  167, 169, 174–​81, 189, 190, 197 conviviality  7, 15, 18, 62, 63, 68, 69, 85 COP26  3, 17, 20, 221–​3 Cork  78, 79, 82, 86, 87 corruption  152, 171 counselling  137, 146 counterculture  27, 29, 116 coup d’état  27 COVID-​19  16, 45, 50, 94, 123, 144, 225, 227 see also lockdown creaming  172 creative writing  34 criminality  10, 16, 150, 168, 171, 182n1, 187–​9, 191 see also drugs, violence criminal justice  150, 167, 171, 177 curriculum  55, 135, 138, 159

E

D dance  16, 18, 77, 85–​90, 95n7, 151, 152, 157–​60, 217n28, 226 see also choreography, Global Water Dances death  32, 133, 146, 171, 227, 229 see also suicide decentralisation  154 dehumanisation  10, 20, 171, 172, 174 democracy  3, 15, 46, 70, 100–​1, 109, 112, 123, 146–​7, 159, 160, 176–​7, 180, 181, 226 radical  3, 4, 8–​14, 18–​20, 26–​28, 73, 99, 110, 111, 116–​19, 149–​50, 159, 222, 225, 227–​31 Democratic Republic of Congo  149, 157 deportation  204, 206, 207n4 Derrida, Jacques  7, 213n17, 227, 228 deviance  117, 173 diet  61, 64, 72 digital world  19, 115, 120, 126, 226 dignity  8, 9, 109, 131, 174, 181 see also human dignity discrimination  20, 74, 123, 128, 131–​40, 143, 171–​2, 181, 187 Disha  19, 131–​47 Module  138

eating disorder  74 eco-​justice  6, 11, 15, 17 education  4–​12, 18, 29, 38, 49–​56, 56n2, 60–​3, 99, 105, 111–​13, 119–​124, 131–​9, 144, 150–​60, 173–​5, 189, 191–​98, 201n1 see also school elderly  33, 104 election  31, 151, 152, 169 emancipation  6, 9, 109, 205n3 employment  4, 38, 51–​6, 104, 150, 152, 152, 154, 120 see also unemployment Empowerment People  115 England  8, 45, 46, 49, 50, 55, 124, 204, 211 environmental crisis  16, 17, 46–​51, 223 epistemology  8, 9, 90, 95n3, 174, 178 equality  5, 8, 14, 15, 29, 30, 35–​9, 45–​8, 54–​5, 70, 100–​1, 116, 118, 127, 146, 152, 231 Escapes Routes  20, 187, 188–​94, 197 ethnicity  104, 124 Europe  8, 10, 24, 25, 28, 40n2, 45, 178, 206, 230 European Union (EU)  24 exclusion  4, 5, 8, 9, 13, 14, 19, 25, 33, 37, 67, 72–​4, 113, 116, 117, 127, 133, 138, 155, 195 Extinction Rebellion  52, 223

F faith  117, 120, 204, 226 see also religion fantasy  120–​1 fascism  84, 230 favelas  13, 188, 190–​4, 198, 200–​1 fear  54, 72, 140, 147, 169–​72, 188, 225, 227 feminism  27, 30, 32, 80, 84, 121, 122, 131, 134–​7, 141, 147, 227 fiction  121 First World War  230 flooding  78, 84, 86, 88, 95n5 fluid bodies  77, 84 food  13, 15–​18, 50, 60–​74, 102, 139, 188, 217n28 banks  60 sustainable  13, 17, 60–​74

234

Index waste  63, 64, 71 see also diet, Slow Food Network France  8, 18, 99–​108, 111, 113n2, 133, 159 FreeCihanErdal  16 freedom  15–​16, 19, 24, 39, 40n1, 116, 119, 120, 128, 135, 139, 140, 158, 194, 196, 201 see also liberty Freire, Paulo  7, 10, 20, 99, 123 128, 135, 141, 147, 187, 189, 191, 193–​7, 199, 201, 226 see also Pedagogy of the Oppressed French National Institute of Statistics (INSEE)  105, 113n1, 113n2 French Revolution  14 Fridays For Future  17, 20, 57n3, 221 friendship  5, 7, 9, 13–​17, 20, 24, 28, 30, 36, 37, 66, 119, 128, 131, 137, 144, 225, 229

hexis  170, 173 higher education institution (HEI)  132, 133, 134, 136, 144–​6 HIV/​AIDS  151, 155 Home Office  20, 206, 213n16 homicide  10, 169, 171 homophobia  12, 15 see also LGBTQI+​ hooks, bell  135, 137, 147 hospitality  13, 15, 228 housing  7, 40n2, 61, 99–​102, 111, 124, 150, 153, 206 Housing Association  104, 109, 206 human dignity  9, 174, 181 human rights  9, 29, 146, 167–​9, 176, 181, 187, 189, 191–​4, 206

I

gatekeeper  23 gender  13, 19, 99, 105, 106, 115–​25, 128, 129, 132, 133–​44, 146, 147, 149, 158, 169, 225 dysphoria  117 see also cisgender, non-​binary Germany  28 Gezi Park  15, 17, 27 ‘ghetto’  113n4 Glasgow  3, 20, 221–​2 see also COP26 Global Financial Crash  46, 48 Global Majority  8 Global North  3, 4, 8, 9, 48 Global South  4, 8, 54, 221–​2 Global Water Dances  16, 18, 77, 86 grassroots  4, 5, 8, 9, 11, 13, 17, 25, 35, 48, 61, 62, 67, 99, 103, 107, 108, 118, 134, 137, 229 Greater Merseyside Connexions Partnership  115 Greece  28, 117 green movement  27 Green New Deal  74, 222 Green Party  52 Gross Enrolment Ratio (GER)  132 Guattari, Felix  5, 6 guilt  12, 16, 33, 37

imagination  35, 53, 56, 94, 100, 109, 225–​31 immigration  6, 28, 30, 34–​8, 101–​3, 108, 113n4, 124, 206 impoverished  5, 10 imprisonment  see incarceration incarceration  16, 169 income  40n2, 45, 47, 48, 67, 100–​1, 105, 111, 139, 146, 155 India  8, 13, 19, 81, 131–​7, 140–​7 see also Pune Indian Independence Day  140 indigenous communities  50, 54, 221, 222 individualism  6, 17, 19, 36, 53, 55, 121–​2, 125, 126 inequality  5, 30 38, 39, 45, 46, 48, 54, 55, 127, 134, 152 injustice  5, 9, 100, 103, 136, 144, 152, 172, 175, 206, 207n6, 226 IN SEE  see French National Institute of Statistics (IN SEE) International Labour Organization (ILO)  188, 189 internet  116, 118, 119, 120, 136 intersectionality  124, 143, 169 Iraq  47 Ireland  8, 77, 78, 79, 80, 82, 85 see also Cork Islamic State  31, 37 Istanbul  17, 23, 25, 27, 28, 31, 35–​7, 40n1 İzmir  29, 40n1

H

J

Halton Youth Service  115 hate  14, 15, 25, 168, 169, 172 health  29, 38, 50, 60, 61, 120, 132, 136, 149–​52, 159, 160, 173, 187, 188, 191, 195, 198–​9, 206 see also mental health heteronormative  118

Jamaica  204, 211, 215n23 Jewish  121, 226, 227

G

K Kenya  8, 19, 149–​60 Kumar, Kanhayya  147 Kurdish  27

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L language  4, 12, 26, 28, 34, 47, 71, 79, 93, 99, 108, 116–​18, 120, 122, 125, 137, 145, 151, 154, 157, 168, 172–​80, 190, 197, 204, 208, 226, 228 law  14, 16, 23, 24, 29, 79, 105, 108, 113n3, 117, 132–​3, 211n10 Lefebvre, Henri  7, 100, 110 leisure  102, 107, 120 lesbian  12, 25, 115, 117, 118, 121 see also LGBTQI+​ lexicon  12, 19, 115, 116, 118, 121, 122, 128 LGBTQI+​  12, 19, 25, 115–​29 LGBT Youth North West  115 liberty  8, 14, 106, 107, 231 see also freedom Lightbulb Youth Theatre  86, 87 Local Authority  48, 115 localism  190 lockdown  50, 86, 123 loneliness  24, 124, 125, 138

M Mama Edwards  204, 205, 205n2, 206, 207n5, 208, 209n7, 213n18, 214 Manchester  118, 150, 204–​8 Central Cathedral  204, 205 Central Library  205n2, 207n5, 209n7, 213n18, 217 Metropolitan University  150 marginalised groups  54, 73, 122, 159, 181, 182, 187, 223 marriage  138 Marxism  49, 201n1 materialism  54, 55, 227 Mauss, Marcel  71 Médecins Sans Frontières  29 media  28, 55, 150, 168, 169, 176, 197, 208, 217n27 see also social media medicine  117 mental health  132–​46, 149–​52, 159, 160 first aid  146 Mental Health Act  146 middle class  40n1, 49, 50, 52, 72, 103, 138, 142, 143 migrant  17, 23–​40, 40n1, 103, 112, 152 Migrant Letters  31–​7 Migrant Solidarity Association  29–​32 Migrant Solidarity Kitchen  28–​35 Migrant Solidarity Network  28, 29, 34, 35 Millennium Bridge  47 mobilisation  25, 100–​5, 159, 195 monsterisation  13, 20, 169–​74, 177, 189, 197 Moss Side riots  204

Mouffe, Chantal  7, 14, 26, 69, 99 movement-​based thinking  90 murder  see homicide music  86, 104, 151, 152, 227 Muslim  108 mutual care  19, 127, 128

N National Confederation for Housing (CNL)  102, 104, 109 National Council of Churches  151 national curriculum  55 National Family Allowance Fund (CAF)  102 National Health Service (NHS)  206 nation-​state  8, 9, 25 necropolitics  7, 171 neighbourhood  15, 18, 30, 34, 35, 38, 73, 99–​113, 113n3, 113n4, 118, 139, 169–​71, 193 neoliberalism  4, 6, 16, 23–​8, 35–​9, 40, 40n1, 45–​50, 53, 100, 122, 128, 176, 177, 223, 225–​9 New National Renewal Program (NPNRU)  102 Nia Cultural Centre for Black Arts  204, 205n2, 207, 209, 213n18 nihilism  7, 24, 40 non-​binary  49, 125 non-​governmental organisation (NGO)  7, 25, 28, 29, 176, 188 Nzumari Africa  19, 149–​60

O obesity  60, 74 Occupy  28 Ochieng, Yvonne  149–​50 Okey, Festus  28 online communities  119–​20 oppression  15, 16, 28, 54, 84, 100, 193, 200, 201, 226, 228, 229 organic  61, 63, 64, 68, 71, 176, 180 othering  117, 136 Oxfam  45

P Pakistan  133 pandemic  see COVID-​19 participant  23, 27, 33, 34, 35, 40n1, 64, 70, 72, 86, 89, 137, 142–​5, 187, 191–​201 participation  18, 26, 33, 35, 39, 49, 54–​5, 72, 74, 75n1, 81, 86, 99–​113, 115, 123, 138, 149–​60, 176, 179, 181, 189–​93, 201, 226 partnership  8, 17, 24, 34, 115, 150, 151, 177, 179, 188 paternalist  108, 110, 126 peace  31, 32, 84, 111, 154, 226

236

Index pedagogy  20, 134, 135, 137, 147, 167, 171, 174–​5, 181, 190, 193, 197 Pedagogy of the Oppressed  147 see also Freire, Paulo peer support  13, 19, 131, 133, 137, 138, 142, 146, 147, 150 see also Disha performing arts  78 Perry, Grayson  120 philosophy  5, 34, 79, 84, 90, 134–​5, 141, 147, 175, 227, 228 plastic  83–​4, 94 playfulness  81, 84, 86, 226 Pluriel(le)s  102–​5, 111–​12 poetry  7, 18, 20, 140, 155, 157, 208, 231 Polari  123 police  15, 16, 28, 104, 112, 153, 170–​3, 188, 195 Policy for the City  101, 105, 109 policy-​making  154, 157, 177, 182 politics  13, 17, 25, 26–​8, 40, 47, 49, 51, 52–​6, 61, 68–​9, 79, 81, 83, 99, 100, 132, 152, 169, 171, 230 pollution  84, 95n3 population  4, 7, 13, 15–​19, 24, 28, 45, 60, 100–​9, 112, 113n2, 136, 149, 152, 159, 160, 169, 227 populism  4, 5, 14, 147, 228–​30 Portugal  133 posthuman  227 potência/​potency  168, 175, 201 poverty  29, 31, 38, 48, 60, 61, 74, 102–​3, 113n1, 138, 142, 149, 152, 167 powerholder  54, 223 Power The Fight  127 practitioner  3, 4, 8, 10, 19, 45–​9, 56, 66, 112, 115–​20, 122–​8, 135, 138, 146, 168, 171–​3, 180, 187, 192–​200, 208 prejudice  36, 136, 141–​3, 146, 159, 172 Pride Sports  115 privilege  11–​13, 16, 19, 30, 32, 33, 38, 128, 131–​6, 141, 143, 146, 174 profit  46, 81, 83 pronouns  125 protest  11, 15, 23, 30, 47, 47, 49, 55, 61, 77, 81, 100, 104, 110, 147, 223 Proud Trust, The  115, 125 psychology  131, 132, 134, 192 puberty  11 public services  34, 38, 48 public sphere  10, 13, 26, 27, 107 Pune  19, 131, 137, 145, 146 punishment  15, 169, 170

Q queer  12, 16, 25, 115, 116, 120, 124, 139, 226 see also LGBTQI+​

R racism  15, 20, 28, 47, 50, 143, 155, 167–​ 74, 187–​90, 204 radicalism  104, 152 see also democracy, radical ragging  133, 138 rag picker  145 Ravi, Disha  147 see also Disha realism  6, 53, 225, 228, 229 recession  46–​7, 54 Red Cross  159 refuge  120 refugee  8, 24–​5, 29–​37, 102, 160 Reina nightclub  37 relationality  15, 16, 36, 40, 85 religion  71, 104, 120, 134, 137, 151 repression  110, 111 republican  101, 107, 108, 112, 113n4 resilient networks  127–​8 Ricoeur, Paul  27, 39 Rio de Janeiro  13, 20, 187–​8 river  47, 86–​7, 88, 211 Rotherham  150, 153, 155 Roy, Arundhati  146

S Sanitas  13, 18, 99–​109, 112 Collective  101–​3, 109 sanitation  151 Santos, B.  174–​5, 178–​9 SAYiT  115 scapegoat  25, 113n4 school  48, 51, 52, 56n2, 86, 102, 103, 105, 128, 133, 139, 140, 153, 157, 173, 188, 189, 195, 199, 213n18, 217n28 science  54, 79, 95n3, 138, 154 Scotland  167–​8, 221 see also Glasgow sea  32–​3, 92, 94, 230 self-​care  127, 145, 198 self-​esteem  108, 138, 156 self-​expression  54, 89 self-​identity  121, 125 Senegalese  106 sexual identities  115–​16 see also LGBTQI+​ slavery  10, 170, 174, 182n3, 217n28 Slow Food Movement  13, 15 socialism  49, 51, 99, 221, 223, 230 Socialist Workers Party  51, 223 social media  55, 63 sociology  11, 101, 192 solidarity  3, 5, 6, 8, 12, 14–​17, 23–​39, 48, 56, 62, 63, 68, 69, 101, 109, 140, 144–​ 7, 221–​3, 231 Solid Waste Collection and Handling Cooperative Society (SWaCH)  144–​5

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Young People and Radical Democracy somatic practice  77, 80 Soviet Union  5 Sri Lanka  133 stereotype  143, 190 stigma  104, 131, 134, 138, 160, 167, 169–​73, 188, 194, 198 Stonewall  118 strike  12, 15, 17, 48–​55, 57n3, 221–​3 suicide  133, 136, 144, 146 suppression  147, 176 swimming  47, 78, 88, 91, 94 Switzerland  8, 13, 15, 17, 60, 63 see also Zurich Syrian  24, 30, 31, 36, 37

T Tagore, Gurudev Rabindranath  140 Tarlabaşı  28–​35 Teach The Future (TTF)  51 territory  79, 113, 167–​81, 190 theatre  86, 87, 193, 216 see also Lightbulb Youth Theatre Therapeutic Youth and Community Work  115, 120, 126–​9 Thunberg, Greta  3, 15, 48 see also Fridays For Future, Youth Strike for Climate Justice tokenism  14, 19, 56, 149–​50, 158, 179–​80 totalitarianism  8, 15–​17, 24, 27, 38 Tours  101–​3, 109, 192 toxic masculinity  144 transformative change  17, 45–​50 transgender  12, 25, 115, 117 see also LGBTQI+​ trauma  15, 117, 120, 127–​8, 152, 195 Turkey  8, 16, 23–​31, 40n2 see also Ankara, Beyoğlu, Istanbul, İzmir, Tarlabaşı Twitter  24 tyranny  147, 225

U Uganda  149, 157, 159 Ummeed  145–​6 unemployment  4, 28, 40n1, 102, 105 UNICEF  188 unifier  112 United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties  see COP26 university grants  133 urban regeneration  100–​2 utopia  35, 39, 134, 226

V vegan  71 vegetarian  71

violence  7, 9, 10–​15, 20, 24, 25, 37, 38, 74, 84, 85, 110, 112, 127, 136, 143, 144, 149–​52, 167, 169–​73, 176, 181–​2, 188, 191, 194, 197, 227 volunteer  28, 102, 103, 110, 138, 145, 151 voting  11, 196

W war  4, 24, 31, 32, 37, 47, 84, 94n1, 169, 230 water  7, 17, 18, 40n2, 77–​80, 81, 81–​3, 84–​9, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94n1, 95n5, 95n6, 95n7, 229–​31 politics  81 see also Bodies of Water (BoW), river, sea waterway  77–​8 wealth  45–​7, 120 weather  78, 95n3, 230 welfare  62, 120 wellbeing  61–​2, 149–​50, 159–​60, 193, 198–​9 Westoby, Peter  15 We Want to Live Together Initiative  29 white privilege  143 whoness  26, 31, 33, 35, 38 Windrush  7, 20, 204, 205n3, 206, 207n4, 208, 209, 213n16, 213n20 Compensation Scheme  206, 207n6 Defenders  7, 13, 16, 20, 204, 208, 209n8, 213n18 Millennium Centre  204 Scandal  20, 206 women  6, 15, 25, 29–​35, 64, 102, 105–​6, 113, 122, 132, 134, 136, 138, 154–​6, 225 see also feminism Women’s Solidarity Foundation  30 working class  8, 10, 25, 31, 49, 50, 53, 101, 112, 121 workshop  29, 31, 34, 49, 138, 154, 159, 193, 199 world-​making  8, 11, 17, 35

X xenophobia  28

Y young people  3–​10, 12–​21, 25, 27, 29, 33, 36–​9, 40n1, 40n2, 45–​56, 56n2, 61–​5, 73, 74, 99, 101, 105–​13, 115, 118–​28, 131–​47, 149–​60, 167–​81, 182n1, 187–​201, 221–​3, 225–​31 see also youth youth  3, 5, 10, 12–​20, 33–​40, 40n1, 40n2, 49–​56, 62, 63, 69, 75n1, 77–​81, 86, 91, 99, 100–​13, 115, 117–​29, 149–​51, 155, 168, 169, 170, 175, 181, 187

238

Index activism  25, 33–​40, 45, 46, 49–​56, 57n3, 136, 221–​2 centre  117, 159 leader  19, 49, 149, 160 loneliness  124–​5 worker  3–​5, 17, 46–​8, 120, 123, 126, 153, 155 Youth Initiatives Kenya  151, 153 Youth Strike for Climate (YSC)  12, 15, 17, 48–​55, 222

Youth Sustainable Food Network  17, 62–​4, 67, 69 YouTube  145, 213n19

Z Zones Urbaines Sensibles (Sensitive Urban Areas)  105, 113n3 Zurich  17, 60, 61, 63, 66

239

“This timely book focuses on how more radical practices might be needed to challenge and overcome injustice. The sharing of global challenges and examples will appeal to numerous subject disciplines, and will be well received by academics and students alike.” Alan Smith, Leeds Beckett University “This inspiring collection successfully rediscovers ‘community as a verb’ and cultivates ‘educated hope’ for radical democracy and its possibilities. A pleasure to read, and a powerful resource for scholars, activists and community developers alike.” Jacqueline Kennelly, Carleton University

Young people are often at the forefront of democratic activism, whether self-organised or supported by youth workers and community development professionals. Focusing on youth activism for greater equality, liberty and mutual care – radical democracy – this timely collection explores the movement’s impacts on community organisations and workers. Essays from the Global North and Global South cover the Black Lives Matter movement, environmental activism and the struggles of refugees. At a time of huge global challenges, youth participation is a dynamic lens through which all community development scholars and participants can rethink their approaches.

JANET BATSLEER worked until recently as Reader in Community Education and Principal Lecturer in Youth and Community Work at Manchester Metropolitan University. HARRIET ROWLEY is Senior Lecturer in Education and Community at Manchester

Metropolitan University. DEMET LÜKÜSLÜ is Professor of Sociology at Yeditepe University.

ISBN 978-1-4473-6276-0

@policypress @policypress PolicyPress policy.bristoluniversitypress.co.uk

Rethinking Community Development

9 781447 362760