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身份一直是一个中心焦点。在我的个人生活中，我从经济贫困和脱离学校到写这份提案的旅程，讲述了一个增加社区参与和积极公民的故事。在我的学术之旅中，我在埃塞俄比亚进行了实地考察，主题是积极的公民身份和空间分散的社区的形成，同时我写了我的本科和研究生论文，主题是积极的公民身份和终身学习。最后，在我的专业角色，我促进了多个参与式行动研究项目，探索如何使成年人与多重劣势的经验，通过终身学习制定积极的公民身份。这促使我与第三部门组织和公共服务提供者合作，将我以前的研究结果嵌入到他们的服务中。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，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透镜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结构的活动，如志愿服务，或与当地社区组织合作。相比之下，在城市环境中的定性研究强调，个人从事批判性和创造性的社区参与和积极的公民身份的过程。在科赫对英国理事会遗产的工作中（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，选择性的方式参与国家，同时试图保持惩罚性的状态，以支持家庭和社区的互助和关怀网络（科赫，2018年）。此外，根据Chauvin和Garcés-Mascareñas（2014），非法移民还颁布了非正式的公民行为，这些行为往往植根于社区参与和积极公民的概念。从这些不同的例子中可以清楚地看到，虽然不同形式的理解和参与可能相互交叉、重叠甚至矛盾，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，任何对卡姆登庄园社区参与和积极公民身份的研究，都需要位于居住在那里的人们的细微差别的视角和生活经验之内，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.