Preface

Summary

This book was born some years ago, when the series editors suggested to Eurig, a committed lifelong activist in the environmental justice field as well as an academic, that a collection on environmental justice and community development might make a useful contribution to the series Rethinking Community Development. During a conference of the Popular Education Network, Eurig approached Anne, an academic who has been involved in environmental justice issues in a different context, to co-edit the collection.

The process of producing the book has been a joy, although not without its difficulties. The contributors are all engaged in some way with struggles against the exploitations of neoliberalism, some as activists, some as academics, many as both. Activists constantly operate to time-scales determined by the situation in which we and our comrades find ourselves. Academics in all parts of the world also face the sustained imposition of neoliberal practices on their working conditions. Writing the stories of the very different struggles included in this book has thus not always been easy, but the book has allowed a valuable space for engagement and reflection, as well as, hopefully, providing important insights and lessons to other activists and academics and activist-academics involved in struggles around the world. It has truly been a privilege to work with such a range of committed activists and scholars.

Many of the chapters have been co-produced, a process that has been a generator of new insights. Many of the chapters began as dialogues between two or more of those involved in a struggle, or acting in solidarity. Thus, even when the name of only one author appears, the chapter is usually the result of some kind of collective process, although one person has taken on the work of writing and the views expressed are those of the author. Where more than one author's name appears, in most cases they are given in alphabetical order, except when the contributors themselves have chosen to deviate from that. Where joint authors have decided, collectively, that one person has taken on most of the work, that person's name is cited first, or we have used ‘with’ to indicate a division of labour between the writing work, content and argument in developing the chapter.