This book defines the current identity of community studies, provides a critical but reliable introduction to its key concepts, and is an engaging guide to the key social research methods used by community researchers and practitioners.

Concise but clear, it caters for the needs of those interested in community studies by offering cross-referenced, accessible overviews of the key theoretical issues that have the most influence on community studies today.

It incorporates all of the important frames of reference including those which are:

Theoretical; Research focused; Practice and policy oriented; Political; Concerned about the place of community in everyday life

The extensive bibliographies and up-to-date guides to further reading reinforce the aim of the book to provide an invaluable learning resource.

Interdisciplinary in approach and inventive in its range of applications this book will be of value to students studying sociology, social policy, politics and community development.

Liquid Modern Communities

Liquid modern communities

This concept is predicated on the idea that the more our lives have become separated from community, the more we long to experience it. It might be said that liquid modern communities came of age once people began to recognize that the safe, familiar world of modernity in its formative era was vanishing forever, and when they found consolation for this in their passion for a community life that could not help but be missing.

Section Outline: The starting point of this chapter is Zygmunt Bauman's assertion that community must be understood in the context of the shift from a solid modern society to a liquid modern sociality. After outlining what Bauman means by the term ‘liquid modernity’ and discussing what ...

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