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The politics of austerity has seen governments across Europe cut back on welfare provision. As the State retreats, this edited collection explores secular and faith-based grassroots social action in Germany and the United Kingdom that has evolved in response to changing economic policy and expanding needs, from basic items such as food to more complex means to move out of poverty.
Bringing together scholars from different disciplines and practitioners in several areas of social intervention, the book explores how the conceptualization and constitutive practices of citizenship and community are changing because of the retreat of the State and the challenge of meeting social and material needs, creating new opportunities for local activism.
The book provides new ways of thinking about social and political belonging and about the relations between individual, collective, and State responsibility.
About the author
Shana Cohen is Deputy Director of the Woolf Institute in Cambridge, UK and Associate Researcher with the Sociology Department, University of Cambridge. She is leading on a comparative analysis of local responses to austerity in Europe.
Christina Fuhr has a PhD in Sociology from Oxford University. She is currently a Junior Research Fellow at the Woolf Institute in Cambridge and has focused her research on food banks and homeless shelters in Berlin and London.
Jan-Jonathan Bock holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge, and is currently a Junior Research Fellow at the Woolf Institute and a Research Associate at St Edmund's College, Cambridge. He is studying crisis experiences, changing practices of citizenship, and realities of pluralism in Berlin and Rome.
Summary
Exploring secular and faith-based grassroots social action in Germany and the UK, this book provides new ways of thinking about social and political belonging and about the relations between individual, collective and State responsibility.
