New 'Connectivities': Civil Society, The 'Third Sector' and Dilemmas for Socially and Economically Sustainable Healthcare Delivery

This project, Historicising Contemporary Civic Connection (HCCC), sought to capitalise on historical frameworks for understanding contemporary issues around community and civic engagement. Undertaken by three Victorianist/neo-Victorianist researchers, the main study involved desk-based research scoping out the various disciplinary perspectives on notions of the "civic" in relation to the nineteenth century, and their relevance to contemporary discourses. In order to make the scoping study both focused and manageable the framework employed use two case studies, Liverpool and Glasgow.

The project highlighted the continued reinvention of a terminology of civic connection across historical frameworks and periods. Difficulties encountered in the early stages of the research involved the complexities of meaning associated with 'civic' and 'community' across Victorian studies and its constituent disciplines. Thus, increasingly use of such terms in urban geography and studies of physical spaces of encounter and exchange are often matched by a downplaying of 'civic' in concepts of literary study or historical narrative. In these instances, flexible approaches to the language utilised in the course of the study was required, including a permeating sense of how civic values are not only absent as explicit referents in works written from an arts and humanities perspective but where present run counter to social science or other disciplinary definitions.