There is an alleged crisis of cohesion in the UK, manifested in debates about identity and 'Britishness', the breakdown of social connections along the fault lines of geography, ethnicity, faith, income and age, and the fragile relationship between citizen and state. This book examines how these new dimensions of diversity and difference, so often debated in the national context, are emerging at the neighbourhood level. Contributors from a range of disciplinary backgrounds critically assess, and go beyond the limits of, contemporary policy discourses on 'community cohesion' to explore the dynamics of diversity and cohesion within neighbourhoods and to identify new dimensions of disconnection between and within neighbourhoods. The chapters provide theoretically informed critiques of the policy responses of public, private, voluntary and community organisations and present a wealth of new empirical research evidence about the dynamics of cohesion in UK neighbourhoods. Topics covered include new immigration, religion and social capital, faith schools, labour and housing market disconnections, neighbourhood territoriality, information technology and neighbourhood construction, and gated communities. Community cohesion in crisis? will be of interest to academics, policy makers, practitioners and students in the fields of human and urban geography, urban studies, sociology, politics, governance, social policy, criminology and housing studies.

Mutual aid is the radical act of caring for each other while working to change the world. Around the globe, people are faced with a spiralling succession of crises, from the Covid-19 pandemic and climate change-induced fires, floods, and storms to the ongoing horrors of mass incarceration, racist policing, brutal immigration enforcement, endemic gender violence, and severe wealth inequality. As governments fail to respond to—or actively engineer—each crisis, ordinary people are finding bold and innovative ways to share resources and support the vulnerable. Survival work, when done alongside social movement demands for transformative change, is called mutual aid. This book is about mutual aid: why it is so important, what it looks like, and how to do it. It provides a grassroots theory of mutual aid, describes how mutual aid is a crucial part of powerful movements for social justice, and offers concrete tools for organizing, such as how to work in groups, how to foster a collective decision-making process, how to prevent and address conflict, and how to deal with burnout. Writing for those new to activism as well as those who have been in social movements for a long time, Dean Spade draws on years of organizing to offer a radical vision of community mobilization, social transformation, compassionate activism, and solidarity.

Covid-19 and Governance focuses on the relationship between governance institutions and approaches to Covid-19 and health outcomes. Bringing together analyses of Covid-19 developments in countries and regions across the world with a wide-angle lens on governance, this volume asks: what works, what hasn’t and isn’t, and why? Organized by region, the book is structured to follow the spread of Covid-19 in the course of 2020, through Asia, the Middle East, Europe, the Americas, and Africa. The analyses explore a number of key themes, including public health systems, government capability, and trust in government—as well as underlying variables of social cohesion and inequality. This volume combines governance, policies, and politics to bring wide international scope and analytical depth to the study of the Covid-19 pandemic. Together the authors represent a diverse and formidable database of experience and understanding. They include sociologists, anthropologists, scholars of development studies and public administration, as well as MD specialists in public health and epidemiology. Engaged and free of jargon, this book speaks to a wide global public—including scholars, students, and policymakers—on a topic that has profound and broad appeal.

This book makes a forthright case for a shift in policy focus from 'community cohesion' to the broader notion of social cohesion, and is distinctive and innovative in its focus on evaluation. It constitutes an extremely valuable source both for practitioners involved in social cohesion interventions and for researchers and students studying theory-based evaluation and the policy areas highlighted (housing, intergenerational issues, the recession, education, communications, community development).

Crisis and migration have a long association, in popular and policy discourse as well as in social scientific analysis. Despite the emergence of more nuanced and even celebratory accounts of mobility in recent years, there remains a persistent emphasis on migration being either a symptom or a cause of crisis. Moreover, in the context of a recent series of headline-hitting and politically controversial situations, terms like ‘migration crisis’ and ‘crisis migration’ are acquiring increasing currency among policy-makers and academics. Crisis and Migration provides fresh perspectives on this routine association, critically examining a series of politically controversial situations around the world. Drawing on first-hand research into the Arab uprisings, conflict and famine in the Horn of Africa, cartel violence in Latin America, the global economic crisis, and immigration ‘crises’ from East Asia to Southern Africa to Europe, the book’s contributors situate a set of contemporary crises within longer histories of social change and human mobility, showing the importance of treating crisis and migration as contextualised processes, rather than isolated events. By exploring how migration and crisis articulate as lived experiences and political constructs, the book brings migration from the margins to the centre of discussions of social transformation and crisis; illuminates the acute politicisation and diverse spatialisations of crisis–migration relationships; and urges a nuanced, cautious and critical approach to associations of crisis and migration.

Examines the literature on social cohesion. Presentsa range of indicators that have been used to measure social cohesion.