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This paper identifies ways in which community action can enhance the quality of life of older residents and reports specifically on four community gardening initiatives developed with older people living in disadvantaged communities in Manchester.

The Community Action in Later Life – Manchester Engagement (CALL_ME) project used an action research approach to engage older people. Older people and other stakeholders were actively involved in designing, planning and implementing the projects.

Drawing on a range of qualitative data, the paper provides evidence of how older people can be actively engaged in community projects, and explores the benefits of involvement including: enhanced well‐being, and increased socialisation, learning and empowerment. The challenges faced by the older people are also reported which include maintaining interest, recruiting new members and needing external support.

The paper also reports the implications for practice, discussing how gardening initiatives can involve and benefit older people and the wider community and the value of an action oriented approach in disadvantaged communities. Recommendations are made regarding ensuring sustainability of such projects by providing education and training to enhance participants' skills and build their confidence.

Whilst recognising the problems associated with living in disadvantaged communities, the CALL‐ME project takes a new approach and moves the focus to ways in which older people can become engaged in and benefit from community action, and empowered to sustain the projects they develop.

The 2006 General Assembly adoption of the United Nations (UN) Global Counter-terrorism strategy marked the first time all member states ratified a collective counter-terrorism (CT) agenda. Building on the 2000 Millennium Development Goals, the strategy incorporated Amartya Sen's capability-based approach to development. This promised human-oriented and holistic methods for countering terrorism and violent extremism, in contrast to the post-2001 ‘hard security’ context of the United States–led Global War on Terror (GWOT). Although the first pillar of the strategy emphasised human rights and social progress over isolated economic growth, poverty, violence and retrogression in conflict zones since 2006 have led to the deaths of millions. Combined with resource scarcity and environmental devastation, insurgency-related conflicts have resulted in 70 million people displaced worldwide in 2019, while the politically violent phenomena of extreme right-wing nationalism and neo-jihadism remain prevalent. Reflecting on the social and economic outcomes of the GWOT, this chapter evaluates development-related discourses and activity in UN-led initiatives to counter and prevent violent extremism and terrorism. In doing so, it accounts for the impacts of UN CT measures on contemporary patterns ‘in phenomena described in policy arenas as ‘violent extremism’ and ‘terrorism’, including ‘neo-jihadism’ and right-wing extremism, in Global North and Global South contexts.

The purpose of this paper is to explore philosophies of progressive education circulating in Australia in the period immediately following the expansion of secondary schools in the 1960s. It examines the rise of the alternative and community school movement of the 1970s, focusing on initiatives within the Victorian government school sector. It aims to better understand the realisation of progressive education in the design and spatial arrangements of schools, with specific reference to the re-making of school and community relations and new norms of the student-subject of alternative schooling.

It combines historical analysis of educational ideas and reforms, focusing largely on the ideas of practitioners and networks of educators, and is guided by an interest in the importance of school space and place in mediating educational change and aspirations. It draws on published writings and reports from teachers and commentators in the 1970s, publications from the Victorian Department of Education, media discussions, internal and published documentation on specific schools and oral history interviews with former teachers and principals who worked at alternative schools.

It shows the different realisation of radical aims in the set up of two schools, against a backdrop of wider innovations in state education, looking specifically at the imagined effects of re-arranging the physical and symbolic space of schooling.

Its value lies in offering the beginnings of a history of 1970s educational progressivism. It brings forward a focus on the spatial dimensions of radical schooling, and moves from characterisation of a mood of change to illuminate the complexities of these ideas in the contrasting ambitions and design of two signature community schools.

Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to show how Moroccan-Dutch young people discuss national belonging in a context fraught with experiences of exclusion.

Design and Methodology – Data were collected in three rounds of focus groups with the same Moroccan-Dutch participants, addressing a different aspect of their identity in each round. To analyse the data, a narrative approach was used that considers both the import of stories as well as the contextual opportunities and constraints for sharing stories.

Findings – The analyses show how participants used ‘subjunctive stories’, which highlight the possibility of alternative meanings, to address the controversial issue of national belonging without contradicting the dominant storyline of exclusion. While the Dutch national identity could not be explicitly adopted – at least not in the company of their peers – Moroccan-Dutch young people imagined what national belonging might look like in their stories.

Research Implications – An approach to narrative that considers its subjunctive properties may sensitize researchers to the ways in which people express hopes and desires in spite of macro- and microcontextual constraints.

Value/Originality – This study takes issue with the tendency in academic research on belonging to focus on exclusion; it shows how the actual narratives reveal a longing to belong, even in the face of exclusion.

The Minimum Income Standard (MIS) research gives an insight into living standards in the United Kingdom, and provides a way of tracking the adequacy of incomes over time. As such it offers useful context for discussions of inequality. At the core of the research are deliberative groups held with members of the public who identify and discuss the goods and services that are considered necessary for a living standard that provides a socially acceptable minimum. Groups decide not only what is enough to maintain health and well-being, but also what is needed for social inclusion. This chapter begins with an outline of MIS before exploring what the qualitative data from the research tell us about how people conceptualise socially acceptable living standards. These data also reveal how particular items, opportunities and choices are considered important in enabling individuals to feel socially included and how that has changed over time. The chapter then looks at how this living standard relates to UK household incomes and at the adequacy of income relative to MIS, in the years following the recession. We identify the groups at greatest risk of having inadequate incomes and explore how this risk has changed during a period in which there has been a sustained decline in living standards. In combining qualitative and quantitative findings from a decade of research, this chapter provides rich insight into living standards and their relation to income within the United Kingdom.

This paper aims to present a multi‐dimensional measure of poverty. The proposed method has been applied to the Panel Set of Belgian Households dataset for Belgium for the years between 1994 and 2000.

First, a common model is decided upon by exploratory factor analysis, and applied by confirmatory factor analysis. Cluster analysis (CA) is then used to separate the multi‐dimensional poor. Finally, the possible causes of multi‐dimensional poverty are surfaced by estimating a discrete duration model.

The proposed method reveals three dimensions of poverty: “material deprivation”, “social deprivation” and “psychological health”. Between 9 and 11 per cent of the representative sample of Belgian individuals are poor. The paper also identifies causes of poverty, including not having a job, not having the Belgian nationality, having a poor health or a disability, being lower educated, experiencing financial poverty, being divorced or widowed, living in the Walloon or Brussels regions, and having a bad psychological health.

Research implications include the use of polychoric and tetrachoric correlations as a starting point of factor analysis, as well as the combination of factor analysis and CA.

The paper proposes an alternative multi‐dimensional measure of poverty. It argues that previous measures may suffer from categorisation errors and suggests a solution to this problem. The advantages of the proposed method are that all information is used to disentangle the poor from the non‐poor and that dimensions of poverty are defined using the correlations between deprivations. Finally, the paper identifies “psychological health” as one of the dimensions of poverty.

Librarians planning for the future and unsure about the place of books in an age dominated by technology and media need evidence to make sound decisions. Library and information science researchers have studied the impact of pleasure reading on individuals but not on society. The purpose of this paper is to raise awareness about the benefits of recreational reading for societies and to consider the implications of these findings for libraries.

Examining a wide range of studies by government bodies, intergovernmental agencies and academics, this paper addresses a gap in the library literature by critically evaluating the combined implications of sources not hitherto viewed together.

The more leisure books people read, the more literate they become, and the more prosperous and equitable the society they inhabit.

Librarians should create a more robust culture of reading and play a stronger advocacy role for books in libraries.

No one has yet examined government reports about literacy in relation to studies on the impact of pleasure reading. The implications of this combined research highlight the fact that pleasure reading benefits societies as well as individuals, a finding that has significant implications for the future direction of libraries. Decision-makers who need a robust mandate for book-focused resources and services will find supportive statistical evidence in this paper.

Disruptive students in the classroom can affect classroom dynamics and individual teacher-student interactions. The purpose of this qualitative research study was to discover perceptions female teachers harbor toward misbehaving African-American elementary school males. The study incorporated a narrative inquiry to investigate perceptions female teachers have toward African-American male elementary school students. The research project involved a purposeful sample of eight female elementary teachers, four African-American teachers and four Caucasian teachers from one public school district in the southeastern United States. The female teachers reflected on their lived experiences and perceptions derived from experiences and encounters they have with African-American elementary school males. Data collection from the study occurred through individual responses from a survey and follow-up telephone interviews. From teacher's descriptions of perceived successes and failures, coded commonalities in reports, labeled themes, conclusions, and recommendations resulted from data collection and analysis. The findings revealed some African-American male elementary school students misbehave in the classroom and others do not. The term “misbehave” is based upon the experiences and type of interactions and exchanges teachers had with African-American male students in the classroom and African-American males outside the school environment. Gender, culture, and language may factor in creating effective teacherstudent interactions to enable better relationships and student outcomes.

Relative deprivation is associated with poor mental health but the mechanisms responsible have rarely been studied. The purpose of this paper is to hypothesize that childhood perceived relative deprivation (PRD) would be linked to sub-syndromal psychotic symptoms and poor wellbeing via beliefs about justice, trust and social rank.

In total, 683 undergraduate students were administered measures of childhood PRD, hallucination-proneness, paranoia and wellbeing and measures of trust, social rank and beliefs about justice. A subsample supplied childhood address data. Multiple mediation analysis was used to assess pathways from childhood experiences to outcomes.

Childhood PRD was associated with all three outcomes. The relationship between PRD and paranoia was fully mediated by perceptions that the world is unjust for the self and low social rank. The same variables mediated the relationship between PRD and poor wellbeing. There were no significant mediators of the relationship between PRD and hallucination-proneness.

Although our outcome measures have been validated with student samples, it may not be representative. The study is cross-sectional with a retrospective measure of PRD, although similar results were found using childhood addresses to infer objective deprivation. Further studies are required using prospective measures and patient samples.

Social circumstances that promote feelings of low social worth and injustice may confer risk of poor psychological outcome. Ameliorating these circumstances may improve population mental health.

Improvements in public mental health will require an understanding of the mechanisms linking adversity to poor outcomes. This paper explores some probable mechanisms which have hitherto been neglected.