Radicalizing Community Practice and Education

Abstract

We write this article on radicalizing community practice and education in the midst of an ongoing global economic crisis related to the neoconservative and neoliberal strategies that have dominated the world stage for more than thirty years. As the Scottish referendum recently demonstrated, participatory forms of grassroots social change have become a possibility again. The referendum revealed that making the case for democratic initiatives which recognize the failures of neoliberal policies has become easier in the contemporary context. We are not, however, naïve about the prospects of change. Crises can result, as with the origins of neoliberalism in the 1970s, in simply new forms of a reasserted class power. And crises can, and certainly do, bring about surges in reactionary and xenophobic (usually anti-immigrant) politics and social movements. The lessons we proposed five years ago in Contesting Community are timelier than ever. The opportunity exists for the development of new theories and practices in and about community efforts.