Before the core settings of an informal public life can be restored to the urban landscape and re-established in daily life, it will be necessary to articulate their nature and benefit. The core settings of the informal public life must be analyzed and discussed in terms comprehensible to these rational and individualistic outlooks dominant in thought. Read more…
The behaviour of the group is enigmatic and group psychology has long been studied to understand certain behaviours. A group acts in our minds as a corporate person in as much as we imagine what the norm is and normalize behaviour to what this imagined person embodies. This gives rise to worrying outcomes in many situations. Throughout history, the madness of crowds has been known to overtake the individual responsibility of thinking and acting according to personal responsibility. Read more…
Pierre Bourdieu is a sociologist who’s interest focused on social class and stratification along with inequality. His perspectives evolved through trying to develop a cultural anthropology of social reproduction. In the 1960s he described the dynamics of structured sets of values and ways of thinking as forming ‘the habitus’. This alludes to the space between the subjective agency and objective position. Read more…
What the concept of social capital has brought to the debate is, at bottom, an interest in the pay offs that arise from our relationships. The idea that social capital returns tangible benefits to its holders is obviously open to testing against evidence.
Hi, my name is Juan. Many years ago, I fundraised my way into university. I could have missed out because of money and that sparked a fire in me: I decided to dedicate my career to making poverty optional.
And so, as a young student, I started researching what tools could be used to tackle poverty. A powerful one I came across is social capital. I knew exactly how this could work, because it was what I used to get to university in the first place. I was never very academic, so please forgive the sloppiness of my writing, but this is a paper I wrote when I was 21. Read more…
This paper ‘Developing Social Capital; From Promises to Knowledge Exchange’ was written and presented by Alex Dunedin and Susan Brown at the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC) Annual Conference 2012. The theme of the conference was ‘Promises: Crisis and Socio-Cultural Change’. It was held at Manchester University. Read more…
During the Edinburgh International Festival of August 2012 twenty two talks were given at Leith on the Fringe at the Out of the Blue venue. They were free and open to everyone…
Name of speaker and subject:
Alex Dunedin
Title of talk:
Social Capital – Fancy Words for Working Together
Bullet points of what you would like to cover:
Social Capital – what is it
Why is trust important for communities to function
Through working with the Public Engagement Policy of the University of Manchester and working closely with Susan Brown, I was called to do a presentation in University of Manchester on ‘Rethinking Inequality in Historical Perspective’. Pedro Ramos Pinto and Patrick Joyce were the key organizers and invited me to make a contribution by virtue of the Ragged project, as it is both an inclusive project and one borrowed from history.
