1 Participatory practice Jane Springett
BUP Copyright Material: Individual use only. Not for resale.
To be denied the capacity for potentially successful participation is to be denied one’s humanity. (Doyal and Gough, 1991: 184) ‘May you live in interesting times’ goes the old Chinese saying, and certainly that has been the case for us all recently. During the last 40 years, we have seen an increase in inequality in health and well-being, with wealth and power being concentrated in the hands of the few and, most seriously, an assault on nature in such a way as to undermine the very existence of life, including that of humanity itself. At the same time, we have seen rising demands for social justice with the emergence of movements such as #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter, reflecting a general rise in citizen organising supported by the internet. Former colonising powers are being asked to face up to their past, but at the same time, social cohesion seems to be breaking down as people become polarised, angry and frustrated, whipped up by those whose aims are to retain power for themselves, rather than for the many, through creating division. Add a pandemic to the mix and we were able to see the cleavages in technicolour and the contrasts highlighted by the differential impact of the virus on population groups, alongside excess profiting by already privileged individuals and corporations, but at the same time, an outpouring of self-organised care and support by communities and people for each other. Historically, humanity has been here before, wealth has been accumulated in the hands of corrupt tyrants, division has been fomented by dictators and civilisations have collapsed due to ecological disaster and disease. However, it is the global scale at which this happening that is so unprecedented, and for those who live in the privileged West, it seems that the advances made in the middle of the last century with regard to social justice are slipping away. We appear to be at a point of no return. For the last 300 years we have developed institutions and systems that have been increasingly based on the story of selfish ‘man’, and those institutions that have been created reflect that dominant story, reinforced by a particular interpretation of economics – the ‘free market’; also of science – Newtonian; and, finally, of religion – man is sinful, all based on the notion that humans are basically selfish. As Europeans colonised the world, this story went with them and this Western mindset was imposed on others, taking away what had previously been shared and appropriating the collective into private ownership. Increasingly, power has been concentrated in the hands of 13
