Community engagement needs radical re-design. All too often decision-making is top-down and decision makers do not adequately engage, deeming ‘community engagement’ a passive exercise.
This new and exciting programme of research asks:
What happens when diverse communities and academics come together to re-shape engagement and work creatively with ideas that run through society, law, history and art?
Can the findings of this research help release creativity, knowledge and the passions within parts of society often on the margins of decision-making and power, to co-produce new forms of engagement and decision-making?
Themes
Spaces for dissent
How can local perspectives become knowledge that can be used creatively and critically to enhance policy, official maps and top-down definitions? We seek to understand how neighbourhoods can become bridges to engagement with regulators, policy-makers and business.
Investigator: Martin Innes
Harnessing digital space
How can social media technologies (e.g. digital geographic information systems or GIS, wikis, blogs) be used by communities to share information and co-produce Knowledge? We trace how grassroots digital spaces emerge and how networks, systems and rules produced by digital providers are used to support or hinder community engagement.
Co-investigators: Ros Sutherland and Gabrielle Ivinson
Mobilising neighbourhoods
How might groups whose views dissent from the mainstream be engaged to inform how social problems are understood and addressed? We identify how new understandings and ways of working emerge when communities resist authority, exploring if and how these practices create new forms.
Co-investigators: Tim Cole and Emma Renold
Current and completed projects
- The hidden value of community anchor organisations
- Regulation of food habits
- Seeing regulation differently
- Harnessing digital space studentship
- Isolation and loneliness of older people
- Mobilising neighbourhoods studentship
- Mapping, Making and Mobilising in Merthyr
- Spaces of dissent studentship
- Life chances: low-income families in modern urban settings
- Muslim community engagement in Bristol
- Women, data and the future
