The social, historical, cultural and democratic context of civic engagement: imagining different communities and making them happen.

Our research studies how communities connect people, both today and in the past. These connections take many forms, but often include people coming together to seek change and pursue a different future. We are interested in the role imagination plays in how such futures are conceived and pursued. The history of people's involvement in community initiatives includes both successful innovation and frustration and disappointment, in the UK and elsewhere. Our project will learn from both scenarios. We will study community connections in different types of community (some present, some past). Using our new knowledge, together we will imagine how communities might be different and experiment with different forms of community building.

Communities are made up of people who share some things in common, but also have differences. In the light of this we want to ask four main questions: 1) What are the best ways of conceptualising, researching and promoting connected communities so that they have the potential to accommodate and benefit from social, cultural and economic differences and diverse opinions and practices? 2) What does the history of civic engagement tell us about how and why the social, historical, cultural and democratic context matters to community-building? 3) What role can imagining better futures play in capturing and sustaining enthusiasm and momentum for change? 4) Is community research being transformed by developments in research methodologies, particularly the development of creative and collaborative methods?

Our approach to these questions challenges ideas of community that focus on what is lacking, highlighting instead the role that harnessing imagination plays in shaping community futures. It brings together researchers from a range of disciplines across the social sciences and arts and humanities interested in community relationships together with partner organisations dedicated to community development in a range of locations. International colleagues will add further dimensions to the consortium's activities, acting as keynote speakers at events, and as advisory committee members.

The projects will employ a range of approaches to research, but with collaborative and participatory methods (community partners and universities working together) being central. Several projects involve going back to sites of previous research to explore what can be learned that is of relevance to to-day's debates about community. The return to sites of the Community Development Project of the late 1960s/early 1970s will include analysis of background statistics, documentary records, interviews, oral history, community arts and other community-based activities, tracing that history and its legacies down to the present. We will revisit culture and arts projects, and projects working with disadvantaged groups, all of which have sought to promote community resilience. Reflections on the lessons of these experiences will feed into planned interventions with members of 'disadvantaged' communities to fire imagination about the future and help to build resilience and a momentum for change. Another project will investigate what motivates volunteers to cross social and geographical boundaries, using mapping techniques, surveys and focus groups to capture these connections. The context of this proposal is a strong impetus globally towards people looking for new ways to participate in decision-making about issues that affect their lives, and to participate in research that involves them - the so-called 'democratisation of social research'. The various strands of research are held together by the team's shared interests in how people envisage co-operating and how these ideas get put into practice in diverse communities. Answering these questions requires working collaboratively to look at a range of different cases, both past and present, and to draw appropriate conclusions to inform current debates and visions of the future.

Many groups can be identified that will benefit from this research. Most direct beneficiaries are the organizations outside of academia who have already agreed to collaborate with the projects in the consortium, including 37 whose letters of support are included in this application. Others have agreed verbally. Collectively these partners represent a very wide range of organizations including museums and galleries, charities, and national organizations as well as local community-based organizations with established links to both community members and policy-makers. This range of organizations can only grow as the research proceeds. Several of the proposed projects involve re-visiting organizations involved in previous community-university partnerships (such as those in the SECC and Beacons programmes), and further broadening of the network of organizations benefitting from the research will occur through the programme of annual conferences and other dissemination events and through the use of the project website to reach out. In the commercial private sector, efforts will be made to engage with architects and builders involved in community-building and regeneration, through invitations to the conference at which Cheshire will provide an international perspective. Similar invitations will be targeted at public, voluntary and commercial sector organizations in relation to the conferences devoted to collaborative working, fostering historical imagination, democratic methods for researching communities, the sights and sounds of imagined community futures, and comparative perspectives on community dvelopment, all of which will be of interest to commercial organizations in the cultural sector. Finally, beneficiaries will include individuals who do not necessarily have formal links to organizations. The consortium will draw on the wealth of its members' experience of engaging the wider public through dissemination events and other activities.

These diverse groups will benefit in several ways. The most direct of these relate to the outcomes of the projects that involve planned interventions to explore the potential of communities of practice to foster resilience and momentum for change among members of disadvantaged communities. Alongside these projects are others which are also designed to promote active engagement in the process of thinking about different community futures and making them happen. Community relationships are at the heart of people's quality of life, and the promotion of active engagement in community processes has the potential to contribute to this, especially if these activities are inclusive and participatory. In working towards the achievement of this ideal, the consortium's approach emphasises the importance of learning from experience, both the knowledge of previous community development initiatives in the UK and lessons derived through engagement with international partners, who will each make extended visits to allow them to feed in across the consortium. The public policy dimensions of these issues include examination of how community initiatives avoid the well-known pitfalls of 'top-down' processes, while the fact that diverse communities in the UK will be involved will allow direct engagement with the localism agenda. The fact that the consortium's work involves a programme that unfolds over 5 years means that projects later on in the schedule will be able to build on the results of the earlier work, such as the engagement with the Participedia project on participatory politics. These results will be available at the end of year one, and community partners and advisory group members will advise on how best to feed them into the later projects. In this way, the development of skills in more democratic of research among academic researchers and community members will be promoted. Efforts will also be made to maximise the legacy of the consortium's work through creation of durable resources.