Nathan Eisenstadt

Emerging scholarship on university–community co-production rightly emphasizes the importance of preparatory work to build research partnerships. Such preparation creates the necessary common ground on which to build a meaningful collaborative relationship. Drawing on our experiences on a large university–community co-production experiment in historical mapping, we argue that this work is particularly important in partnerships where relationships are characterized by difference. If academics wish to work with individuals and groups beyond the bounds of those with whom they already agree, ‘foregrounding’ co-production is a critical component. We identify three dimensions of foregrounding co-production: practical, epistemological and affective. Each become increasingly important in cases where communities lack trust in, or actively mistrust, the university. Understanding and navigating difference, historical harm and power asymmetries can be time-intensive, and it may require a reorien...

There has been a long running debate as to whether interventions to change the behaviour of domestic abuse perpetrators actually ‘work’ in the sense of reducing perpetrators’ violent and abusive behaviour and making the lives of victims-survivors and their children safer. In this report we summarise the findings from the evaluation of the Drive Project (‘Drive’), showing that the intervention does indeed ‘work’. As the report indicates, Drive enabled perpetrators to reduce their use of abusive behaviour. As a result of Drive, victims-survivors were safer and more likely to be free from abuse, and the work with perpetrators created space for victims-survivors to make decisions for themselves.

In this paper I analyse and problematise what I argue are the dominant modes of liberated subject formation performed through divergent modes of organising within two anarchist social centres in Bristol, UK. Drawing on practical examples, I show how practices oriented to equality, like consensus decision-making and more formalised and codified modes of conduct, perform and presuppose a conception of freedom as coextensive with the attainment of rational subjectivity. In order to participate, to consent and to practice the self-limitation required to safeguard the freedom of others, sovereignty over the self is required reason must outweigh desire. Yet as the activist subject defers pleasure for the sake of others, the practice of freedom comes to feel more like moral duty. Participation is at once the marker of freedom yet enacted out of an obligation that is as oppressive to anarchists as it is patronising to the mythical community we/they try to attract. Arising in opposition to t...