Community Engagement and Active Citizenship: A Case Study of an Estate in Camden, London

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.