This book offers a unique focus on the everyday ethics of community development practice in the context of local and global struggles for equity and social justice. Contributors from around the world (from India to the Netherlands and USA) grapple with ethical dilemmas and tensions, including how to: respect and learn from Indigenous values and philosophies; challenge environmental destruction; gain consent in divided communities; maintain or breach professional boundaries; and develop new paradigms for transformative community organising, sustainable development and ethically-sensitive practice. Offering theoretical frameworks, philosophical perspectives and practical case examples (from sex worker collectives to tree action groups and Australian Indigenous communities) this book is essential reading for community-based practitioners, students and academics.

Drawing on a growing consensus about the importance of community representation and participation for ethical research, community engagement has become a central component of scientific research, policy-making, ethical review, and technology design. The diversity of actors involved in large-scale global health research collaborations and the broader ‘background conditions’ of global inequality and injustice that frame the field have led some researchers, funders, and policy-makers to conclude that community engagement is nothing less than a moral imperative in global health research. Rather than taking community engagement as a given, the contributions in this edited volume highlight how processes of community engagement are shaped by particular local histories and social and political dynamics, and by the complex social relations between different actors involved in global public health research. By interrogating the everyday politics and practices of engagement across diverse contexts, the book pushes conversations around engagement and participation beyond their conventional framings. In doing so, it raises radical questions about knowledge, power, expertise, authority, representation, inclusivity, and ethics and to make recommendations for more transformative, inclusive, and meaningful community engagement. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Critical Public Health journal.

How do we deal with difference personally, interpersonally, nationally? Can we weave a cohesive social fabric in a religiously plural society without suppressing differences? This collection of significant essays suggests that to truly honour differences in matters of faith and religion we must publicly exercise and celebrate them. The secular/sacred, public/private divisions long considered sacred in the West need to be dismantled if Canada (or any nation state) is to develop a genuine mosaic that embraces fundamental differences instead of a melting pot that marginalizes. An ethics of difference starts with a recognition of difference, not as deviance or deficit that threatens but as otherness to connect with, cherish, and celebrate. The book begins with the suggestion that our inability to come to terms with social plurality is not fundamentally the fault of religious differences, and that a public/private split inadequately deals with matters of basic difference. It then explores how encouraging people to live out their respective faiths may open new possibilities for respectful, honourable, and just negotiations of contemporary dilemmas arising out of the multicultural fabric of Canadian life. Towards an Ethics of Community introduces readers to some of the most challenging and divisive dilemmas we face in this increasingly pluralistic, postmodern world — issues such as family and domestic violence, Aboriginal rights, homosexuality and public policy, and female genital mutilation. This is a book truly global in scope and significance.

One of the leading thinkers to emerge in the postwar conservative intellectual revival was the sociologist Robert Nisbet. His book The Quest for Community, published in 1953, stands as one of the most persuasive accounts of the dilemmas confronting modern society. Nearly a half century before Robert Putnam documented the atomization of society in Bowling Alone, Nisbet argued that the rise of the powerful modern state had eroded the sources of community—the family, the neighborhood, the church, the guild. Alienation and loneliness inevitably resulted. But as the traditional ties that bind fell away, the human impulse toward community led people to turn even more to the government itself, allowing statism—even totalitarianism—to flourish. This edition of Nisbet’s magnum opus features a brilliant introduction by New York Times columnist Ross Douthat and three critical essays. Published at a time when our communal life has only grown weaker and when many Americans display cultish enthusiasm for a charismatic president, this new edition of The Quest for Community shows that Nisbet’s insights are as relevant today as ever.

Everyday life in contemporary rural China is characterized by an increased sense of moral challenge and uncertainty. Ordinary people often find themselves caught between the moral frameworks of capitalism, Maoism and the Chinese tradition. This ethnographic study of the village of Zhongba (in Hubei Province, central China) is an attempt to grasp the ethical reflexivity of everyday life in rural China. Drawing on descriptions of village life, interspersed with targeted theoretical analyses, the author examines how ordinary people construct their own senses of their lives and their futures in everyday activities: building houses, working, celebrating marriages and funerals, gambling and dealing with local government. The villagers confront moral uncertainty; they creatively harmonize public discourse and local practice; and sometimes they resolve incoherence and unease through the use of irony. In so doing, they perform everyday ethics and re-create transient moral communities at a time of massive social dislocation.

From the contents:00I. Participatory art now01. The normalisation of participatory art 0II. What is participatory art?02. Concepts03. Defnitions04. The intentions of participatory art 05. The art of participatory art 06. The ethics of participatory art 0III. Where does participatory art come from?07. Making history 08. Deep roots 09. Community art and the cultural revolution (1968 to 1988) 010. Participatory art and appropriation (1988 to 2008).

The Major Declamations is a collection of nineteen full-length Latin speeches attributed in antiquity to Quintilian but most likely composed by a group of authors in the second and third centuries CE. Though there has been a recent revival of interest in Greco-Roman declamation, the Major Declamations has generally been neglected. This is the first book devoted exclusively to the Major Declamations and its reception in later European literature. It argues that the fictional scenarios of the Major Declamations enable the conceptual exploration of a variety of ethical and social issues. These include the construction of authority, the verification of claims, the conventions of reciprocity, and the ethics of spectatorship. Chapter 5 presents a study of the reception of the collection by the Renaissance humanist Juan Luis Vives and the eighteenth century scholar Lorenzo Patarol. A brief postscript surveys the use of declamatory exercises in the contemporary university and will inform current work in rhetorical studies.