Urban Studies and Planning Commons^™

The Community Case For Violence: Toward A Materialist Perspective On Community Work, Aven Handley-Merk

University Honors Theses

This paper examines and synthesizes existing critiques of contemporary community work in the United States. These critiques are substantiated and developed by a discussion of nonprofit history and formal structure, establishing the premise that contemporary community work is constrained both by its powerlessness and its collaboration with government. It is constrained to an extent that it cannot meaningfully address or remedy community problems. Theorists often see the root of this problem in the birth of neoliberalism in the 1970s, but this paper argues that it arises instead from liberal philosophy, and is rooted much more deeply in Western history and …