Practising place : stories around inner city Sydney neighbourhood centres
- Publication Type:
- Thesis
- Issue Date:
- 2006
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The Neighbourhood Centres (NCs) in Sydney, Australia, were established to encourage forms
of local control and resident participation and to provide a range of activities to build, strengthen
and support local communities and marginalised groups. This thesis is concerned with exploring
the personal conceptions, passions and frameworks, as well as the political and professional
identities, of activists and community workers in these NCs. It also explores stories of practice
and of how these subjective experiences have been shaped through the discourses around the
NCs, some of which include feminism, environmentalism, multiculturalism and social justice.
The following key research questions encouraged stories of community practice: What do the
terms empowerment, participation, community service and citizenship mean for community
organisation? What did community workers and organisers wish for when they became involved
in these community organisations? What happened to the oppositional knowledges and dissent
that are part of the organisational histories? Foucault’s concept of governmentality is used to
explore the possibility that these NCs are also sites of ‘government through community’. This
theoretical proposition questions taken-for-granted assumptions about community development
and empowerment approaches. It draws on a willingness of the research participants to take up
postmodern and poststructuralist theories.
‘Practising place’ emerges in the research as a description of a particular form of activism and
community work associated with these inner city Sydney NCs. The central dimensions of
‘practising place’ include: a commitment to identity work; an openness to exploring diverse and
fluid citizenship and identity formations; and the use of local knowledges to develop a critique
of social processes. Another feature of ‘practising place’ is that it involves an analysis of the
operation of power that extends beyond structuralist explanations of how to bring about social
change and transform social relations.
The research has deconstructed assumptions about empowerment, community participation,
community organisations and community development, consequently another way of talking
about the work of small locally based community organisations emerges. This new way of
talking builds upon research participants’ understandings of power and demonstrates the utility
of applying a poststructural analysis to activist and community work practices. Overall the
research suggests that if activists and community workers are to work with new understandings
of the operation of power, then the languages and social practices associated with activist and
community work traditions need to be constantly and reflexively analysed and questioned.
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