Towards Understanding Community People and Places

This is a timely book written in the temporal and political context of the British New Labour Government's ongoing reliance on the word "community." Its key focus is on understanding community from action into theory and theory into action. Academics and activists engage critically with the range of ways in which contemporary ideas of community are being used and contested, examining the current theoretical and practical challenges of building and sustaining convincing senses of community in national and trans-national contexts. Contributions are organised into three thematic sections--Locating community, Justice within and between communities and Building health communities.

CHRISTOPHER J. CLAY is Head of Programme for Community Studies, York St John University, U.K. Over the last 30 plus years he has occupied a variety of roles within York St. John including a period in the 1970s and 1980s as a community worker, first in Hoyland (near Barnsley) and then in York. His teaching and research interests include the social construction of HIV/AIDS, surveillance and social control, and teaching and learning.

MARY MADDEN is Research Fellow, Department of Health Sciences, York University, U.K. She has an interdisciplinary background in English Literature, Critical Theory, Sociology, and Social and Community Work. Her work history combines practical field experience with complex epistemological and methodological challenges to forms of enquiry in the social sciences.

LAURA POTTS is Reader in Public Health and the Environment at York St. John University. She chairs the U.K. Public Health Association's Environmental Pollution and Health Group, and is on the board of Trustees of the Pesticides Action Network U.K.