Eleanor Jupp

Participation, local knowledge and empowerment: researching public space with young people

A growing number of reflective and critical voices around participatory research practices have questioned the extent to which power can be transferred to participants through such methods. In this paper I begin by reflecting on everyday difficulties using participatory methods with a group of young people who belonged to a youth forum in Stoke-on-Trent, England. These difficulties point to the way that research spaces constitute contexts which can enable the production of certain kinds of knowledge, and to the way that such contexts are influenced by other spaces where people might be asked to participate and self-represent. For my fieldwork participants, official or government-led initiatives around participation in decision making were often seen as problematic. However, I also argue that the young people drew on more embodied or experiential forms of knowledge in their activities, generated through participation in everyday collective practices and sociability. Such knowledge may not have been articulated but was nonetheless powerful. This suggests new ways of thinking about participation and empowerment, both for research projects and for other kinds of intervention.

Enacting parenting policy? The hybrid spaces of Sure Start Children's Centres

This article draws on research in three UK Sure Start Childrens Centres which explored them as particular kinds of spaces, with the intention of understanding how policy imperatives and discourses interact with other dynamics. The role of the material spaces of the buildings, of ambivalent interactions of users with staff, and friendship groups among users are seen as key to understanding the centre as a ‘hybrid’ space in which policy intentions were exceeded by other aspects of everyday life. This has implications not only for understanding policy programmes in action, but also for how academic analysis and theory positions itself in relation to these spaces.

Rethinking local activism: 'cultivating the capacities' of neighbourhood organising

This article seeks to reposition understandings of local neighbourhood organising in the UK, which has often been approached through the lens of neighbourhood policy initiatives and overlooked within accounts of ‘urban activism’. This article draws on fieldwork among small community groups in disadvantaged neighbourhoods in Stoke-on-Trent, UK. An argument is made for paying attention to the often gendered capacities used by members of informal residents’ organisations, that enable them to connect with other residents as well as negotiate with officials and policy frameworks. Despite being grounded in everyday practices and being entangled with policy programmes, it is argued that these practices do constitute powerful forms of activism and that those concerned with supporting such activity should begin with an understanding of these capacities.

‘I feel more at home here than in my own community’: Approaching the emotional geographies of neighbourhood policy

This article explores the dynamics of UK neighbourhood policy in a new way, by bringing together an attention to emotions and identities in social policy governance with approaches to the experiential dynamics of place from social and cultural geography. The article draws on two sets of fieldwork among residents and professional workers in ‘disadvantaged’ neighbourhoods in the UK. These neighbourhoods frame contradictory emotional dynamics for both citizens and workers, in particular around geographies of ‘deprivation’ and ‘community’, producing multiple experiences of closeness and distanciation, inclusion and exclusion, visibility and invisibility. The article shows how the processes and outcomes of neighbourhood policy interventions are unavoidably bound up with these complex emotional geographies of place, especially those that seek to engage residents in change, and that this makes such policy interventions fragile and time-consuming.

Home space, gender and activism: The visible and the invisible in austere times

This article argues for the centrality of the home in understanding both the impacts of ‘austerity’ in the UK and potential activist responses. The article focuses on gendered forms of activism, particularly among low-income women. Empirical material is drawn from research with women in different contexts, a network of migrant women in London and a group of community activists in Stoke-on-Trent, in order to identify three particular registers of home-based and, by extension, community activism, including notions of ‘the everyday’, ‘the inbetween’ and experiences of trauma. There is also a brief discussion of housing activism in contemporary London in order to explore how such analysis might be applied to other forms of organising. There is a call for more sustained consideration of these often hidden forms of activism from researchers in understanding, as well as intervening in, the dynamics of contemporary social policy and governance.