Introduction

This chapter continues the themes of the previous chapter, but with a focus on how the issues discussed, of gendered dynamics of care in society, social welfare and conditions of austerity, create a context for forms of political subjectivity and action, or citizenship. This begins with a focus on the specific context of the UK state, and its relationship to the scale of community and local action. The second section focuses on more conceptual issues around citizenship and the ‘politics of everyday life’, including notions of vulnerability, the lifecourse and storytelling as forming aspects of political action, that can enable us to trace this emergent politics.

‘Community’ is obviously a contested term (Joseph, 2002), suggesting both a local scale and also a social entity denoting belonging and inclusion or exclusion. Communities may be based on locations or on identities or both. For the purposes of this book, community represents a space for action, a space both material, but also emotional, relational and political. As will be further explored, the spaces of community potentially offer spaces for political action and citizenship to those who are unable to participate in more formal and wider scales of politics (Staeheli, 2008). There are debates around the definitions of ‘activism’ at such a scale (Martin et al, 2007), an issue discussed further in the next section of this chapter. For the purposes of this book, I generally use the terms ‘local action’ or ‘activism’ as opposed to ‘community action’, as I feel these terms enable links to wider debates around politics and citizenship that the term ‘community’ can render problematic, as will be explained.

As subsequent chapters will show, for those undertaking forms of activism and local action, ‘community’ might be defined in a wide range of ways, from a fairly large urban area to a small neighbourhood (indeed ‘community’ is sometimes used interchangeably with the term ‘neighbourhood’ in policy), from online spaces, to service users of a particular ‘community centre’, to a diaspora stretching across continents or an axis of identity. Community is clearly ‘imagined’ (Anderson, 2006), and a notion of a settled and non-conflictual community is a fiction. Therefore acting in the space of community involves grappling with these conflictual dynamics (Staeheli and Thompson, 1997).