Community Engagement and Active Citizenship: A Case Study of an Estate in Camden, London

在我的个人、学术和职业生涯中，社区参与和积极的公民意识一直是我关注的焦点。在我的个人生活中，我从经济贫困和辍学到撰写这份提案的经历，讲述了一个越来越多的社区参与和积极的公民意识的故事。在我的学术旅程中，我在埃塞俄比亚进行了关于积极公民身份和空间分散社区形成主题的实地调查，同时我撰写了关于积极公民身份和终身学习主题的本科和研究生论文。最后，在我的专业角色中，我促进了多个参与性行动研究项目，这些项目探索了具有多重不利经历的成年人通过终身学习制定积极公民身份的方式。这促使我与第三部门组织和公共服务提供商合作，将我之前的发现嵌入到他们的条款中。根据我的各种经验，社区参与和积极的公民身份是有争议的概念，因此一个人的立场决定了他们的理解和参与。虽然国家倾向于通过新自由主义的视角来看待社区参与和积极的公民身份，这些术语意味着参与和参与，以创造财富和个人成长为目的，而不是改善社会的集体行动（Bagnall, 2010）；它也倾向于关注有组织和有组织的活动，如志愿服务，或参与当地社区组织。相比之下，城市环境中的定性研究强调，个人批判性和创造性地参与社区参与和积极公民身份的过程。在科赫对英国文化协会遗产的研究中（2018年），她探索了人们“个性化国家”的方式，通过采用策略以本地化、选择性的方式与国家接触，同时试图阻止惩罚性国家，以支持家庭和社区之间的互助和护理网络（科赫，2018年）。此外，根据Chauvin和Garcés-Mascareñas（2014）的研究，非法移民还制定了非正式的公民行为，这些行为通常嵌入社区参与和积极公民的概念中。从这些不同的例子中可以清楚地看出，虽然不同形式的理解和参与可以交叉、重叠甚至相互矛盾，但它们几乎总是受到更广泛的社会、经济和政治结构和进程的影响。认识到这一点，任何关于卡姆登庄园社区参与和积极公民身份的研究，都需要置于居住在那里的人们的细微视角和生活经验中，同时立即认识到为这些过程提供信息的更广泛的系统和结构。

Throughout my personal, academic and professional journey, community engagement and active citizenship have always been a central focus. Within my personal life my journey from economic deprivation and disengagement from school, to writing this proposal, tells a story of increasing community engagement and active citizenship. Within my academic journey, I have conducted fieldwork in Ethiopia on the topic of active citizenship and the formation of spatially dispersed communities, while I wrote my undergraduate and postgraduate dissertation on the themes of active citizenship and life-long learning. Finally, within my professional role, I have facilitated multiple participatory action research projects that explore the ways in which adults with experience of multiple disadvantage enact active citizenship through life-long learning. This has led me to work with third sector organisations and public service providers to embed my previous findings into their provision.Based on my varied experience, community engagement and active citizenship are contested concepts, whereby one's positionality informs their understanding and engagement. While the state has tendencies to view community engagement and active citizenship through a neoliberal lens, where these terms come to mean participation and engagement, for the purpose of wealth creation and individual growth, rather than collective action to improve society (Bagnall, 2010); it also tends to focus on organised and structured activities, such as volunteering, or engaging with a local community organisation. In contrast, qualitative research within urban settings highlights that individuals engage critically and creatively with the process of community engagement and active citizenship. Within Koch's work on a British council estate (2018), she explores the ways that people 'personalise the state', through employing strategies to engage the state in localised, selective ways, while at once attempting to keep the punitive state at bay, in order to support networks of mutual aid and care across families and communities (Koch, 2018). Furthermore, according to Chauvin and Garcés-Mascareñas (2014) illegal immigrants also enact informal acts of citizenship, which are often embedded in notions of community engagement and active citizenship. What is clear from these different examples is that, while different forms of understanding and engagement can intersect, overlap and even contradict, they are almost always affected by wider social, economic and political structures and processes. In recognition of this, any study of community engagement and active citizenship on an estate in Camden, needs to be situated within the nuanced perspectives and lived experience of the people who reside there, while at once recognising the wider systems and structures that inform these processes.