Communities of difference: active citizenship in BME communities
Bristol Institute for Public Affairs (BIPA),Tuesday 19th May 2009
Abstracts
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The Changing Role of RCOS in the UK
It is commonly claimed that refugee community-based organisations (RCOs) are adaptive and integrative mechanisms with a high degree of positive functionality for refugee communities. To what extent does the experience of RCOs under dispersal substantiate or contradict this claim? Once viewed as prime movers in integration and the nucleus of social activity, refugee community organisations now fill the void left by the withdrawal of state support and resources. The paper discusses how and to what extent changes in policy and legislation concerning refugees and asylum seekers introduced in the last few years have had a marked effect on the role of refugee organisations in the UK.
Partnership Working in Aotearoa New Zealand.
This paper draws on a larger project that explores how social movements and community activists have contributed to the reconfiguration of governance in Aotearoa New Zealand. It identifies how political struggles around bi-culturalism have given rise to distinctive community development strategies and partnership working practices. Because partnership claims can be referenced back to the Treaty of Waitangi and the sharing of power that implies, culturally specific understandings of community, family and personhood are often recognised in political efforts to build community capacity through collaborative initiatives.
Slavery Fatigue? Communities, Cohesion and the Rembering of Slavery and Abolition in Bristol.
Notions of community cohesion and public memory feature in this paper which offers an evaluation of the impact of 'Abolition 200' , the series of events in Bristol, England which commemorated the ending of the British Slave Trade in 1807. How were the national and civic efforts to mark the bicentennary of Parliamentary Abolition received in the city? What does their reception tell us about the way Race and History are variously conceived by 'the public'? What were the faultlines which emerged within the city's African-Caribbean population over this commemoration and how significant were they?
