Mobilizing Memory: Bolivia's Enduring Social Movements

In Bolivia, the most indigenous of South American countries, powerful social movements have drawn on collective memory to build effective coalitions across significant differences in ethnic identity and awareness, class consciousness, generations and regions. We contend that this deployment of memory to strengthen protest identities is reinforced by pervasive indigenous cultural practices. Deeply rooted in oral storytelling, perceptions of time, place and a reverence for ancestors, collective memories help bring the past into the present, and create responsibilities to those who came before. The result is a mutually constituting relationship between memory and activism, where an instrumental construction of collective memories serves to provide shared meanings to divergent movements. We suggest that scholars of social movements could deepen their analysis by interrogating rather than normalizing the cultural backdrops that movements operate within.     

上海非物质文化遗产的保护与旅游开发

非物质文化遗产被誉为＂人类精神的家园＂,应该加以珍视。在保护的基础上,非物质文化遗产可以进行适当旅游开发。本文以大都市上海为背景,廓清了非物质文化遗产的特色、优势、作用、影响,以使非物质文化遗产重新走入大众视野,焕发出盎然生机,实现非物质文化遗产保护与旅游开发的＂双赢＂。     

Mobilizing in transnational contentious spaces: linking relations,emotions and space in migrant activism

Despite proliferation of political protest by migrants in recent years, analyses from a social movement perspective remain scarce. This lacuna is not coincidental, but theoretically grounded. According to dominant movement theories, migrants are unlikely subjects of mobilization due to legal obstacles, scarce resources and closed political and discursive opportunities. The article therefore explores how marginalized migrants organize transnational political protest against all evident odds. Drawing from extensive fieldwork and bridging transnational migration and social movement studies, it is argued that migrants mobilize within transnational social spaces, which link relations and emotions acquired on the move with the relational qualities at the locality of arrival. The article illustrates how the transnational spaces most migrants inhabit can be politicized and transformed into particular social formations, for which the term ‘transnational contentious spaces’ is suggested.     

Reconstructing Missionary History in China Today: Cultural Heritage,Local Politics and Christianity in Xiamen

This article examines a memorial service held in Xiamen in 2010 for an American missionary who died and was buried there in 1910. The missionary, accused of association with imperialism under Mao, had been largely forgotten by the locals until this event. During the ceremony, all charges against the missionary were unofficially dropped and his service was highly commended. By attempting to explain what sociocultural mechanisms enabled Xiamen citizens to counter official amnesia and demolish the state’s domination of discourse on missionaries, I argue that the official manipulation of missionary discourse is not always effective; the reconstruction of missionary history in today’s China is an ongoing, dynamic process of negotiation in which all parties involved remake the past to suit their own interests.     

Knitted warmth: the simple analytics of social cohesion

Self-interested agents are randomly matched to play a variant of the prisoners dilemma in which social capital increases the return to mutual cooperation. The stock of society-wide social-capital investments is social cohesion; the rate of return to social-capital investment increases with social cohesion. I derive sufficient conditions for equilibrium cooperation when agents know only the level of social cohesion. In communities, there exists better information and some social standard of behavior that supports equilibrium cooperation. I distinguish between characteristics of individuals and those of populations, and between mechanisms that favor cooperation in low-information “mass society” and in information-rich settings.     

Building School,Family, and Community Partnerships: Developing a Theoretical Framework

School, family, and community partnerships are among the suite of strategies advocated for improved school outcomes in which social workers can play a valuable role. Such partnerships are complex to implement in practice and there is little systematic research to guide the practitioner. This study evaluated an early intervention partnership program involving school, family, community, and philanthropic partners implemented in two primary schools in rural Victoria, Australia. The findings highlighted challenges in the process of evaluation and program implementation and in the opportunities this provided to identify key enabling factors. These involved having: a shared vision and aims; democratic governance; a supportive policy and organisational environment including external funding; workers with skills and clear roles; activities for project momentum; and ongoing review and evaluation. These factors can be used by social workers and others working with schools as a valuable conceptual framework to facilitate school, family, and community partnership processes.     

Getting in touch with history: The role of historic preservation in shaping collective memories

This paper argues that historic preservation is playing an increasingly important role in shaping collective memories. Historic preservation encompasses the range of strategies by which historic structures are maintained, manipulated, and managed. These strategies include preservation, restoration, conservation and consolidation, reconstitution, adaptive re-use, reconstruction, and replication (Fitch 1982: 46–47). While people are drawn to historic sites in the hopes of an immediate encounter with authentic, physical remains, this encounter is never unmediated. Instead, three social processes can be identified that shape it and the collective memories associated with the site: namely 1) selection, 2) contextualization, and 3) interpretation. Focussing on examples drawn from the field of industrial preservation in Great Britain and the United States, I demonstrate how these processes shape our encounters with history, and how this form of commemoration inevitably involves a political dimension.     

A Typical American Family? How Adoptive Families Acknowledge and Incorporate Chinese Cultural Heritage in their Lives

When a child from China is adopted by U.S. parents, the adoptive family must address questions about if, when, how, and how much to acknowledge the birth cultural heritage of their child. This paper addresses these concerns by presenting findings of a study that examined ways families address the myriad issues surrounding cultural heritage. Drawing on work by H. David Kirk, D. M. Brodzinsky (Brodzinsky, Schechter, & Henig, 1992. Being adopted: The lifelong search for self. New York: Anchor Books), and others, a conceptual framework is presented to aid in understanding the dynamics involved in emphasizing (or de-emphasizing) cultural heritage Second, results of a web-based survey that extends the results of earlier work on cultural heritage in families with children adopted from China (Rojewski & Rojewski, 2001. Intercountry adoption from China: Examining cultural-heritage and other post-adoption issues. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey) are presented. Specific findings reveal the range of actions taken by adoptive parents on (a) how families cope with family-child differences, (b) how families acknowledge the child’s birth culture and heritage (e.g., acknowledging birth cultural heritage and culturally-related events, having contact with other Chinese children and adults), and (c) the perceived benefits and importance of incorporating Chinese cultural heritage into family life. Results add to an emerging baseline for understanding the range of responses adoptive families have to address issues of Chinese heritage, as well as trends in the reasoning parents use when deciding about cultural heritage-related issues.     

广州“三旧”改造中历史文化保护与利用研究

通过回顾和分析广州“三旧”改造的历史进程和政策演变,对广州的城市风貌和历史文化保护的现状和处境进行了整体分析和研究,提出了广州在“三旧”改造建设中,要先致力于历史文化遗产的调查考证、探讨具体界定标准或评估体系,深入进行“再创造、再开发、再利用”的理论研究与工程实践,建设“印象广州”的文化名城新风貌。     

Elements of a Theory of Place Attachment and Socio-Territorial Belonging

The aim of this paper is to furnish elements both theoretical and empirical useful for the formulation of a theory of place attachment and socio-territorial belonging, two dimensions that are analytically distinct but empirically co-present and interrelated. After delineating a frame of reference which accounts for the distinction and interrelation between place attachment and socio-territorial belonging, the structure of social belonging, of socio-territorial belonging and its relations with other components of human action, and of dynamics of socio-territorial belonging, consideration is made of results from surveys conducted in diverse geographical and social contexts, comparing them with those of surveys carried out in Italy in recent years (1985–2000).     

Witness Citizenship: The Place of Villa Grimaldi in Chilean Memory1

The rebuilding of democracy on the former site of a bloody dictatorship continues to be a work in progress in contemporary Chile. Since 1990, the importance of Villa Grimaldi, and other key cultural sites like it, cannot be dismissed as mere sideshows to the “real business” of democratic state‐making.The conversion of a former torture complex to a peace park raises a provocative question both around the function of cultural memory and memorialization: What is the role of a former concentration camp turned memorial park in Chile’s process of democratization? I argue that public memorials like Villa Grimaldi Peace Park can be important complements to the incomplete process of transitional justice in nations that have experienced grave human rights violations. Such sites provide significant forms of sociability, which I call “witness citizenship” (human rights participation, generational transmission, and other forms of civic action) that deepen the reach of democracy, especially in the social spaces where truth commissions and institutional processes have not been able to reach.     

Justifying Justice: Therapeutic Law and the Victimization Defense Strategy

As cultural sociologists have long held, systems of collective meaning invariably take on concrete institutionalized form. In as much as a therapeutic code of moral understanding has become a dominant impulse in American culture, we would expect to find evidence of this cultural sensibility in society's major institutional structures, including the criminal justice system. In this article, we consider the impact of the therapeutic ethos on criminal adjudication through an examination of the `victimization defense strategy'—an increasingly popular legal argument that explains criminal action through a focus on past experiences of social victimization. We find that the emergence and application of this legal strategy relies heavily on the therapeutic ethos, a development that both reaffirms the validity of the therapeutic culture and potentially transforms the very essence of the adjudicative process.     

Heritage and Community Regeneration in Northern Ireland: Finding Points of Coalescence in the Development Planning Process

ABSTRACT

Bringing heritage resources to the forefront in communities can serve to help heal long-standing divides with impacts not only in economic dimensions, but also social and cultural. It is an ironic turn—some of the heritage resources in Northern Ireland have been the site of intense and violent conflict over long periods of time—and now serve as focal points for bringing together divergent groups, helping heal divisions in communities. Seventeen communities throughout Northern Ireland are examined, gauging impacts and perceptions of community regeneration and redevelopment processes. Results provide insights for addressing lingering conflict and finding points of coalescence, with heritage playing a role in transformation.     

Community and social capital in Slovenia—the impact of transition

The transition from socialism to capitalism has many impacts on the everyday life of the people of Slovenia. Amongst others it has an impact on their community ties and their choices regarding participation in public life. Community can enable or diminish the basic processes, such as solidarity, equal choices and opportunities, and respect for the differences that are needed for an inclusive society. This article researches such processes through the concept of social capital and provides some responses necessary for the political and professional planning of social policy and the practice of social services.     

Engaging communities: Ostrom's economic commons,social capital and public relations

This article discusses the research of economics Nobelist Elinor Ostrom. It argues her analysis of long term community co-operation contains important insights for public relations, especially in the area of community engagement. Informed by Ostrom's focus on common pool resource management, the article highlights the importance of organisations adopting an attitude of mutuality to the external stakeholder environment. It also associates public relations practice with the promotion of a social commons. It then examines Ostrom's insights on the role that face-to-face communication plays in the generation of social capital and the norms of behaviour that promote co-operation. The article ends with a discussion of the implications of these findings for the practice of public relations in organisations and suggests areas for further research.     

The Sunday Times Heritage Project: heritage,the media and the formation of national consciousness

Since the advent of democracy in 1994, the landscape of memory in South Africa has undergone significant changes. While most new monuments, memorials and heritage sites have emerged under the aegis of the government, this article focuses on a private sector initiative, the Sunday Times Heritage Project (STHP), sponsored by the Sunday Times newspaper in celebration of its centenary in 2006. The project involved the installation of 30 small-scale memorials commemorating key moments in the history of South Africa, with each memorial being accompanied by a website entry. The article focuses on the role of the media in shaping a new national consciousness in South Africa and specifically investigates how a new, supposedly shared history emerges through the work of the Sunday Times journalists in selecting stories and negotiating with stakeholders. With reference to specific examples, significant differences are highlighted between the newspaper’s heritage initiative and the state-initiated memory projects, but ultimately, it is argued, the STHP reveals a calculated or unconscious acceptance of the state-endorsed historical discourse structured around resistance narratives, which has become hegemonic since 1994.     

Community change: Water management through the use of social media,the case of Australia's Murray-Darling Basin

Social media can influence behavior, disseminate knowledge and impact on social change during times of conflict. Communication literature is important when considering community members’ perception of priority areas of the media, however, limited attention has focused on communication theory in depth, through the use of Social Media. This qualitative study explores the Australian Government Department, The Murray-Darling Basin Authority, and their effective use of social media to engage with a community previously in conflict with the Government.     

Aligning research and practice: The role of academic-community partnerships for improving measurement and process

ObjectiveCommunity programs addressing social determinants of health are growing in prominence and are increasingly expected to provide metrics of success. Our objective is to assess the role of an academic-community partnership for a community health worker program targeting social and medical needs, and determine factors impacting its effectiveness.MethodsWe draw on a 4.5-year partnership that includes both quantitative and qualitative data collection and analysis. Quantitative data collection mechanisms evolved as a result of the partnership. Qualitative interviews were conducted with community health workers and leadership.ResultsTo align medical and social support services in a sustainable and measurable manner, our academic-community partnership found that creating and maintaining a mutually beneficial space through small wins enabled us to then address larger problems and needs. Ongoing self-study and process evaluation allowed quick adjustments. Unique partnership elements such as having consistent funding and flexible timelines and objectives were essential.ConclusionsWhen integrating health and social services, academic-community partnerships create pathways for bidirectional learning than can quickly turn research into practice and support sustainability, especially when based on incrementally built trust and a history of small wins.     

Changing Contexts of Practice: Challenges for Social Work and Community Development

ABSTRACT

In a rapidly changing global environment, there have been renewed calls to position community development more centrally in social work, particularly in the face of contemporary practice challenges. This paper analyses the broad policy contexts of neoliberalism, globalisation, and governance change and discusses how these forces interact with social work and community development, drawing on examples from Australia and Ireland. The paper argues that sociopolitical forces both restrict and present opportunities for social work and community development practice and we seek to reactivate debate about the position of community development within changing and challenging contexts.

IMPLICATIONS

• Contextualises community development practice, policy, and research within contemporary environments of neoliberalism, globalisation, and governance change.

• Critically evaluates implications and new opportunities for social work and community development, drawing on examples from Australia and Ireland.

• Reactivates debate and analysis on the position of community development in contemporary social work as we move forward into the new decade, and the next global agenda for social work and social development.