Contesting Community: The Limits and Potential of Local Organizing

What do community organisations and organisers do, and what should they do? For the past thirty years politicians, academics, advocates, and activists have heralded community as a site and strategy for social change. In contrast, Contesting Community paints a more critical picture of community work which, according to the authorsin both theory and practicehas amounted to less than the sum of its parts. Their comparative study of efforts in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada describes and analyses the limits and potential of this work. Covering dozens of groups, including ACORN, Brooklyns Fifth Avenue Committee, and the Immigrant Workers Centre in Montreal, and discussing alternative models, this book is at once historical and contemporary, global and local. Contesting Community addresses one of the vital issues of our daythe role and meaning of community in peoples lives and in the larger political economy. See more