Tracing discourses of social action: inner-city Sydney neighbourhood centres

Abstract

This article reports on my doctoral research around community organizations in the inner city of Sydney, Australia. The neighbourhood centres (NCs) provide a case study of sites where discourses of feminism, multiculturalism and urban environmentalism have been activated within a social justice framework. The research participants were activists involved in the establishment of the organizations and community workers employed by the organizations in the past. These activists and community workers have an interest in structural theories of social change; however, the introduction of theories from post-structural and post-modern perspectives into the research conversations provided a way to talk through dilemmas identified in community organization practice. This points towards a productive use of ‘post’ theories in examining community practices and also opened up some surprising directions in the research. For example, the language of political subjectivity and pos itioning provided additional tools for the activists and critical community workers to locate their place in contemporary social and political discourses that surround understandings of ‘the local’ and ‘community’.

The following organizations have been supportive of the research project:

Harris Community Centre, Ultimo/Pyrmont;

Inner Sydney Regional Council for Social Development Co-operative Ltd, Waterloo;

South Sydney Community Aid Co-operative Ltd, Redfern;

Surry Hills Neighbourhood Centre Co-operative Ltd, Surry Hills;

Sydney University Settlement Neighbourhood Centre, Chippendale;

Walla Mulla Family & Community Support Ltd, Woolloomooloo.

I thank the peer reviewers who challenged me to be clearer about the methods used in the research and who drew attention to the need to explicate further the stories about gender and class. I have tried, within the article, to respond to feedback about the inclusion of governmentality as part of the reflexive stories—I have suggested that using governmentality and language associated with the concept has, in my research, encouraged the telling of reflexive stories of social action.

Notes

1. In the research I was not so interested in examining linguistic details of texts produced by the activists and community workers, or the linguistic details of texts produced in the research, but more interested in examining the social and political discourses, or, rather, ‘sets of practices’ (Ball, 1990; Olssen, 1999, p. 45) that exist in and around these NC sites. I did not carry out a microanalysis of language used in the research; rather, it was a contextualized analysis of the operation of discourses at specific sites and a consideration of this within a larger discursive framework in the manner described by Sanguinetti (2000).

2. Zukin (1992, p. 240) argues that some forms of localism and neighbourhood urbanism in modern cities have the effect of creating liminal and ambiguous spaces where, even though there may be significant erosion of the ‘archetypal place-based community’, the loosening of stable identities allows the possibility of the emergence of new identity formation. Through my doctoral research I was also interested in exploring how the identities of ‘activist’ and ‘community worker’ could be loosened, opened up and perhaps re-invigorated.

3. For a more thorough account of the notion of the ‘politics of place’ in post-modern times and the usefulness of identity mapping projects see Keith and Pile (pp. 1–38) in Keith and Pile (1993). The politics of place and of location is also found in the educational research work of Giroux (1992) and Edwards and Usher (2000). In recent times the imaginary work of feminist poets and writers Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde and June Jordan has contributed significantly to the development of a politics of place. See especially Rich (1995, pp. 23–24, 56–71), who argues against reducing politics to a focus only on ‘government’ and parliamentary process and who places identity struggles at the centre of politics which must speak from an alternative pla ce and through this challenge current, dominant, hegemonic social structures.

4. See also Healy (2000) for post-structural research challenging notions of ‘heroic’ activists and ‘critical’ social workers; in my research the ‘self’ definitions of ‘activist’ and ‘critical community worker’ were also held up for scrutiny and deconstruction.

5. This is similar to the social constructivist view of identity described by Stokes (1997), Archer (1997) and especially Benhabib (1992, p. 73), who refers to ‘constitutive attachments’ helping individuals to construct and define their identities.