New Co-Authored Publication: "Participation - with what money and whose time?'"

This new publication, "Participation—with what money and whose time?’ An intersectional feminist analysis of community participation", (Fursova, J., Bishop-Earle, D., Hamilton, K., & Kranias, G., 2022), is co-authored with community collaborators. It features Community Engagement Continuum, a template to reflect on the characteristics of technocratic/instrumental vs transformative and empowering community engagement processes. For more information or for community members to gain access to the full article, please contact Julia Fursova.

Fursova, J., Bishop-Earle, D., Hamilton, K., & Kranias, G. (2022). ‘Participation—with what money and whose time? ’An intersectional feminist analysis of community participation. Community Development Journal. bsac025, https://doi.org/10.1093/cdj/bsac025

Abstract

The paper presents the results of community-based participatory action research that evaluated the quality and extent of resident participation in community development projects initiated by a network of non-profit and public agencies in a lower-income, racialized neighbourhood in Toronto. The paper examines dynamics of community engagement and volunteer participation in relation to the socio-political context of neoliberal urban development within which they unfold. Against this backdrop, the paper discusses processes of normalization and the mainstreaming of a technocratic or instrumental approach to community engagement. The paper argues how this instrumental approach extracts volunteer participation from residents to meet short-term organizational targets while offering no genuine opportunity for residents to co-create long-term, meaningful solutions to community needs and priorities. Such short-term, ‘band-aid’ community engagement and capacity building projects contribute to a crisis of trust between residents and the non-profit agencies. The paper presents a community engagement continuum mapping indicators for technocratic and extractivist community engagement in contrast to indicators for transformative and empowering processes.