Shaw, M. and Mayo, M. (Eds.) Class, Inequality and Community Development,

Abstract

Shaw and Mayo’s book promotes the centrality of class analysis as a platform for liberatory community development.  Recognising class-based, structural inequality is, in the editors’ view, basic to resisting and subverting a community development agenda that serves a retreating state and which tends to reach out charitably rather than transformatively, masking and reproducing structural inequalities in the process.  The contributors to this volume build on this argument and provide case-studies which highlight the class-informed roadblocks to liberation and the tensions and possibilities generated by class-conscious, anti-neoliberal and counter-deficit approaches to community development.