My first book chapter

My first book chapter is coming out soonly. It’s entitled Time, belonging and development – a challenge for participation and research and is part of a collection edited by Nick Gallent and Daniela Ciaffi called Community Planning and Action published by Policy Press.

I was honoured to be asked to offer the chapter by Nick and Daniela. My chapter is one of the front three theoretical thinkpiece chapters and I’m in illustrious company with Nick and Daniela and Yvonne Rydin. The chapter was my first book chapter and I relished the opportunity to do a bit more “blue-skies” thinking and theoretical work in my writing. However, at the start I was slightly paralysed by fear. Some of the book chapters of this ilk I have read and have been some of the most inspiring and influential writing for me – was I up to the job? I’d also only really written my thesis and many journal articles in my academic career. At this time I was particularly into the swing of journal article writing and this style of writing is very different indeed. Luckily Pat Thomson came to the rescue after a plea from me with this very useful blog post that enabled me to frame my chapter as a contribution to a “topic based edited collections”.

The chapter itself moves some of the theoretical work I started doing in my Very Difficult Theory Paper forward. Essentially I play around with the temporal points I was making in that paper – that much as moments of community planning and engagement can be highly antagonist it seems, from my empirical work, that over the longer term debate tends towards Habermasian communicative norms, particularly in land-use planning because the tangibility of the outputs means they become part of the discourse itself; literally buildings speak. They are also imbued with meaning. This is theoretical work I’d like to take further considering the listing of modernist buildings and the controversies around this, but also the meaning-full-ness (I’m using wanky po-mo construction there deliberately, forgive me) of demolition.

(There’s also some interesting arts stuff here about “invitations” to participate and participation on a spectrum from witnessing to engagement which I learnt about yesterday, but that I’m still processing that I want to bring into this theoretical debate…)

Of particular interest in writing the chapter, and something I am definitely going to take further, was the idea of critical temporalities, which I got from Michelle Bastian’s fantastic Temporal Belonging project and the outputs of the Power, Time and Agency workshop. This is basically the idea that our sense of time – our temporalities – are highly varied, subjective, and unequal and created by power structures in wider society. These power structures can be conceived in Foucauldian or structuralist ways. If you go back to the old title of this blog – Urbanity and History – this focus on the nuances and experiences of time greatly appeals to me.

A final note of thanks has to go to Nick Gallent, the editor. He was enormously helpful in providing ample and extremely useful critical feedback on drafts of the chapter and has helped make it something that when I go back to look at it again, as I did when I was reviewing the proofs, I actually thought “hang on, this isn’t too bad at all.”

So, if you’re interested in purchasing the book – the other chapters are excellent as well – if you download this flyer you can get a substantial discount. Once I know the rules (i.e. whether I can) I’ll pop a pre-print version on my page of the Stirling institutional repository as well.

Now I just have to crack on and edit my first book with Dr Dave O'Brien. With Nick's example, this will be a very tall order to follow!