Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1 Community and Its Discontents
Chapter 2 History Matters: Canons, Anti-canons, and
Critical Lessons from the Past
Chapter 3 The Market, the State, and Community in the
Contemporary Political Economy
Chapter 4 “It Takes a Village”: Community as
Contemporary Social Reform
Chapter 5 What’s Left in the Community?
Chapter 6 Radicalizing Community
Bibliography
Index
Subtitle: The Limits
and Potential of Local Organizing Author: James
DeFilippis, Robert Fisher, and Eric Shragge Subject:Sociology
/ Human
Rights / Anthropology
/ Public
Policy Paper ISBN: 978-0-8135-4756-5 Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8135-4755-8 Pages:
208 pages Publication Date: June 2010
Praise:
"This book offers the most incisive,
compelling treatment of community organizing that I have seen. As
a study of the strategic challenges of community-based action, it is
not only authoritative but also highly original in its combination of
sure-handed historical grasp, careful intellectual critique, and
practical engagement with important community efforts taking place on
the ground."—William Sites, School
of Social Service Administration, University of Chicago
"This book could not be more timely. DeFilippis, Fisher and
Shragge give us a seriously analytical yet readable discussion of the
possibilities and limits of locally-based organizing. A major
contribution to the ongoing debates about community and social movement
organizing."—Frances Fox Piven,
CUNY-Graduate Center and author of Challenging
Authority: How Ordinary People Change America Description:
What do community organizations and
organizers do, and what should they do? For the past thirty years
politicians, academics, advocates, and activists have heralded
community as a site and strategy for social change. In contrast,
Contesting Community paints a more critical picture of community work
which, according to the authors—in both theory and practice—has
amounted to less than the sum of its parts. Their comparative study of
efforts in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada describes
and analyzes the limits and potential of this work.
Covering dozens of groups, including ACORN, Brooklyn’s Fifth Avenue
Committee, and the Immigrant Workers Centre in Montreal, and discussing
alternative models, this book is at once historical and contemporary,
global and local. Contesting Community addresses one of the vital
issues of our day—the role and meaning of community in people’s lives
and in the larger political economy. About the Authors:
JAMES DeFILIPPIS is an associate
professor in the Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at
Rutgers University. He is the author of Unmaking Goliath, named Best Book
in Urban Politics by the American Political Science Association.
ROBERT FISHER is a professor at the University of Connecticut School of
Social Work. He is the author of several books on community
organizing.
