This adaptable book offers diverse applications of the empowerment model to the promotion of mental health and the prevention of mental illness. Topics span the developmental trends of empowerment as an individual achievement, a community experience, and a professional aim in relation to social intervention strategies and tactics.

This book re-imagines the essence and role of adult education at both the individual and societal levels. It provides arguments for understanding adult education as a process of agency and empowerment, which has not only instrumental but intrinsic and transformative roles to play. This book brings together ideas from the capability approach with insights from recognition theory; the embeddedness approach; the political economic perspective for understanding public and private goods and the common goods perspective. The analysis draws on data from large-scale international studies – alongside qualitative data - and adopts a wide-ranging European comparative perspective. The book develops original instruments for measuring different dimensions of adult education as a common good, and its realisation in different social contexts. It is aimed at academics, students, practitioners, and policy makers interested in adult and/or higher education and the social justice perspective to human life.

Participatory research has emerged as an approach to producing knowledge that is sufficiently grounded in local needs and realities to support community-based natural resource management (CBNRM), and it is often touted as crucial to the sustainable management of forests and other natural resources. This book analyses the current state of the art of participatory research in CBNRM. Its chapters and case studies examine recent experiences in collaborative forest management, harvesting impacts on forest shrubs, watershed restoration in Native American communities, civic environmentalism in an urban neighborhood and other topics. Although the main geographic focus of the book is the United States, the issues raised are synthesized and discussed in the context of recent critiques of participatory research and CBNRM worldwide. The book's purpose is to provide insights and lessons for academics and practitioners involved in CBNRM in many contexts. The issues it covers will be relevant to participatory research and CBNRM practitioners and students the world over.

Rethinking Empowerment looks at the changing role of women in developing countries and calls for a new approach to empowerment. An approach that adopts a more nuanced, feminist interpretation of power and em(power)ment, recognises that local empowerment is always embedded in regional, national and global contexts, pays attention to institutional structures and politics and acknowledges that empowerment is both a process and an outcome. Moreover, the book warns that an obsession with measurement rather than process can undermine efforts to foster transformative and empowering outcomes. It concludes that power must be restored as the centrepiece of empowerment. Only then will the term and its advocates provide meaningful ammunition for dealing with the challenges of an increasingly unequal, and often sexist, global/local world.

On weekday afternoons, dismissal bells signal not just the end of the school day but also the beginning of another important activity: the federally funded after-school programs that offer tutoring, homework help, and basic supervision to millions of American children. Nearly one in four low-income families enroll a child in an after-school program. Beyond sharpening students’ math and reading skills, these programs also have a profound impact on parents. In a surprising turn—especially given the long history of social policies that leave recipients feeling policed, distrusted, and alienated—government-funded after-school programs have quietly become powerful forces for political and civic engagement by shifting power away from bureaucrats and putting it back into the hands of parents. In State of Empowerment Carolyn Barnes uses ethnographic accounts of three organizations to reveal how interacting with government-funded after-school programs can enhance the civic and political lives of low-income citizens.

This volume gives scholars and students a working knowledge of the procedures, challenges, and benefits of using photo methods in their ethnographic work through studies by researchers who are currently using it. The studies are both examples of exemplary scholarship and serve as tutorials on the procedures and methodological considerations of using this personal, even intimate, method. These eight authors were asked to re-open their carefully packed-away studies, disassemble the methods and the findings, and reflect on the contents. Like looking through old photo albums, these reflective essays allowed us to have new conversations with different audiences. Each chapter contains sections that penetratingly explain the research problem, describe why photo methods were used for the study, elucidate and reflect on the method, summarize the findings, and then examine participant empowerment through the method. This unique structure is specifically designed to be used in masters and doctoral classrooms and with researchers looking for new methods or to strengthen their existing work. The editors and authors believe that using photo-methods can empower participants to become part of the research process. Each author uses photo with the same goal; to create rigorous science that has meaning for the participants.

Globally, young people’s health is an increasing priority area for health practitioners, policy-makers and researchers, and concepts of empowerment feature strongly in international public health discourses on young people’s health. Yet the concept of empowerment remains under-theorized, and its relationship to young people’s health is not well understood. This innovative volume critically examines the concept of empowerment and its relationship to young people’s health. Empowerment, Health Promotion and Young People is set out in two main parts. Part one examines differing conceptions of power and empowerment and how these concepts have been variously defined and used in relation to young people’s health and health promotion. Part two offers a new theoretical framework for understanding empowerment as it relates to young people’s health. Drawing together key works in the field and findings from an empirical enquiry on young people’s health, this framework looks at health as it is defined by young people themselves, and offers new directions for empowerment, and critical insights into the field of young people’s health and health promotion. Critically engaging with the concept of power and opening up the debate about the relevance and effectiveness of using contemporary understandings of empowerment to promote health, this book is suitable for researchers and students of health, sociology, education and youth studies interested in young people’s health and health promotion.