Adult Learning, Citizenship and Community Voices by Pam Coare

Author:Pam Coare
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9791862011600
Publisher: NIACE

Boundaries between public and private are becoming increasingly blurred, and the extent of the central state’s sphere of influence is masked by a diversity of players whose accountability is unclear. (Taylor, 1995: 104)

The meaning of citizenship

The ‘shifting significance’ of citizenship as a parcel of rights and obligations has become crucially important ‘for the wellbeing of all rather than as something which was primarily a palliative for the poor and dispossessed’. (Hoggett, 1997: 13)

The collapse of excluded communities during the late 1980s and 1990s due to economic ‘restructuring’ led to the realisation that continuing social inequalities could lead to political instability. Hoggett suggests that ‘community’ is invoked in public policy responses as part of a strategy to incorporate the population as citizens in a ‘new participatory democracy’. However, the sense of belonging to a community has become decoupled from geographic place as communities and occupations such as mining have declined, while the resulting ‘delocalisation of community’ has led to the emergence of ‘non-place communities’ and identities among those able to move within a more fluid global economy. This change is paralleled in marginalized groups becoming locked into ‘geographically determined place’, trapped in physically isolated public housing estates by the realities of economic and social deprivation.

This should not lead us to simply equate geographically marginal groups with a failure to participate in ‘community’. Sharon, a young woman living on a peripheral housing estate, chose to move there because she found living in the centre of town very isolating and quite difficult with young children. She describes her ‘geographically determined’ community as a place she cares about. While acknowledging she has exchanged social isolation for physical isolation, she states clearly the importance of contributing to her community to her personal fulfilment:

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