Women's community work challenges market citizenship

Abstract

This article examines the connection between women's community provisioning work and their participation in citizenship activities that seek to alter an inequitable distribution of rights and resources. As neo-liberal policy regimes restructure the collective work of women, we explore whether women's community work has become a substitute for public resources or whether it serves as a fundamental challenge to an individualization of citizenship by reconnecting citizenship and social rights. We draw on interview and focus group data from a multi-year year investigation of what supports and what limits the provisioning work women perform in six community organizations in Canada serving vulnerable populations and neighborhoods. Three connections between citizenship activities and community provisioning are discussed: how women challenge notions of the worthy citizen; how they bring privatized need back into the public arena; and how they move from solidarity to advocacy.

Constructing Spaces of Discourse and ‘Regroupment’: The Case of Women’s Self-Reliant Groups in Scotland

“…The process of sharing experiences, without judgement provides SRG members with a sense of solidarity and belonging (Baker Collins et al, 2011, Pell, 2008) and provides further insight into the regroupment that occurs in such spaces, where the women could describe their social reality in their own words as Fraser (1990) suggests.…”

“…In this way, the SRG space became one in which members shared and validated one another’s experiences (Baker Collins et al, 2011) and within this space, the shortfalls of the context as well as their own conditions were acknowledged and discussed. Thus, through regroupment into a counter public sphere, alternative narratives and strategies were developed.…”

“…Findings from this study show that SRGs initially developed in a way that reproduced ideas of individualising discourse of welfare reform. However, they soon became a space where stigma was reduced as members shared and validated one another’s experiences (Baker Collins et al, 2011) Although SRGs were created to support empowerment through self-reliance (and eventually employment), the empowering potential was realized through sharing of experiences in relation to poverty and the welfare system. While the findings in this paper speak to the contributions of other investigations of the lived experiences of the social security system (see for example Dwyer (2002), Dwyer and Wright (2014), Edmiston (2017), Patrick (2017), this paper offers a different perspective to a widely debated theme in two ways.…”

Black Women in the United States and Unpaid Collective Work: Theorizing the Community as a Site of Production

“… 7 It is important to note that community-based nonprofit organizations that have market interactions often develop out of women’s informal, unpaid collective efforts to challenge injustices and disparities within their communities. For example, S. B. Collins et al (2011) state that the six nonprofit Canadian community organizations in their study emerged out of women’s struggles for social justice and that the organizations enable women to collectively work on issues of food security, housing, racism, employment, and child care.…”

“… 13 The terms “community work” and “unpaid community work” are not new. Scholars of community-based research such as S. B. Collins et al (2011) use the term “women’s community work” to describe the activities of women’s organizations in Canada that provide collective provisions.…”