Residents' experiences provide rich insight into the factors that drive widening social and health disparities, and those experiences are not homogeneous. Only through attending to people's lived experiences will society begin to see these as issues of the entire community, and only by engaging residents in the process of community change can the kinds of change that are needed ever be achieved. Photovoice is a participatory qualitative research method that gives voice to participants' experiences and perspectives while simultaneously facilitating critical consciousness-raising for social action and social change. This study employed a Photovoice process to explore experiences and perspectives of residents and people working in organizations that serve West Louisville, and to facilitate dialogue and action leading to social change. Forty-three individuals across eight groups completed the Photovoice project, representing youth, older adults, LGBTQ people, faith leaders, educators, activists, and two groups of Black men. Analysis of photos and group dialogue within and across the eight groups identified several common themes that pointed at the historical and present structural racism in the community, the city's lack of concern for the Black community, the importance of Black history, and the need for collective community action. The public Photovoice exhibit helped inform the subsequent agenda for the city's Center for Health Equity.
Although community capacity has been prominent in the public health literature for nearly 20 years, the field has only operationalized a few dimensions. An intriguing dimension of capacity is a community's ability to critically reflect. On the basis of previous research as well as theoretical and practical insights from management and organizational learning literature, we offer a process framework for critical reflexivity practice in community. The framework draws on ideas regarding cognition and agency, praxis, as well as the transformative learning model to conceptualize how reflexivity happens as an emergent community process. The implication is that reflexivity is a community-level process of making meaning of experiences that drive a common narrative. Inclusivity and establishing consensus are paramount, and can be difficult in light of power dynamics and consideration of dissenting voices and different experiences; enlightened self-interest and creating conducive spaces for dialogue are key in this process. Strengthening communities' ability to gain and employ collective wisdom from their experience will also build their overall capacity for population health improvement.
To balance radical changes in the built environment that accompany urban renewal, many cities deploy historical design elements to provoke a sense of physical and temporal continuity. By examining the theory and practice of nostalgia in renewal projects, I argue that this strategic deployment of historical signifiers is more complex and normatively problematic than it first appears. Analysing the design and construction of Baltimore's Oriole Park at Camden Yards through Walter Benjamin's theories of cultural production and historical succession, I show the problematic political effect of such image-led regeneration projects. The stadium exemplifies a system of urban and historical design and construction that uses material artifice to make totalizing political claims, deploying specific historical signifiers as a means to silence others. Drawing from Benjamin's materialist historiography, I conclude with a survey of the resources that remain for the practice of an architecture of memory in light of my critique.
I examine the effort that some theorists make to write to, and inspire a new sense of agency in, their readers. I will consider the work of John Dewey and Hannah Arendt, two theorists who attempt to close the gap between political reality and a theoretically informed politics by using their texts to rethink and recreate their reader. By working between a determined past and the possibility of a redeemed future, Dewey and Arendt use their theory to implant a sense that their present readers can become self-aware, free, and potent agents for political change.
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