Academic publishing and the privilege of a platform

2024 sees the re-launch of the CDJ Plus website. The site, which includes a blog, information about the journal, and resources relating to past and upcoming events, can be accessed at: https://cdj.org.uk/. In the inaugural blog post for the new site, our editorial assistant and digital domain editor Ilya Maude (2024), reflects on why it is important for the Community Development Journal (CDJ) to offer an alternative space for conversations, creative responses, and the promotion of community development research and practice more generally. Much academic work, including that published in this journal, remains behind a paywall. Meanwhile, pathways to ‘gold open access’ material, which is free to read, typically involve exorbitant costs to authors, unless they are lucky enough to be based in an academic institution that has a ‘read and publish’ agreement with a major publisher. These issues are not new; the opportunities and contradictions presented by open access have been extensively discussed by the CDJ editorial board over the past decade and reflected on in these pages by ourselves and previous editorial teams. The CDJ Plus website and social media platforms continue to represent an imperfect response to this matter: spaces in which we can share freely available news, writing, audio, and video recordings that sit alongside the peer-reviewed articles published in this journal. We have also sought to ensure that the new CDJ Plus site offers a more accessible platform for this material; this is reflected in design choices, such as formatting, choice of font, and alternative text for images, plus the range of viewing styles available under the ‘accessibility tools’ button. The website is funded by the journal’s profit share, which the editorial board (a voluntary body) receives from the publisher, Oxford University Press (OUP). That money is raised through subscriptions from organizations and individuals, as well as by authors who pay to publish gold open access. In this sense, we hope the website will have some redistributive function, utilizing funding from the academic publishing industry to support the distribution of free knowledge, ideas, and resources. We strongly encourage readers to consider pitching an article to the CDJ Plus blog: information on how to do this can be found on the CDJ Plus website. We are keen to publish pieces for a general audience that accompany the more specialist peer-reviewed articles in the journal, which may sit behind a paywall. We are also interested in work that goes beyond the scope of that published in the journal, such as non-academic reflections on activism or practice, or works that utilize formats such as comics or roundtables. In time we intend also to use the site to share materials generated through our 60th anniversary events, which will take place in 2025–2026. As an editorial board based in the UK and Ireland, we have been reflecting on the responsibility and power we hold through our stewardship of this journal. It is easy for us to feel relatively powerless within the context of a relentlessly profit-driven academic publishing industry; yet through CDJ, CDJ Plus, and the colonial legacies of the Anglophone academy, we have the ability – and a responsibility – to provide a global platform for insights and knowledge that might otherwise be silenced. Using this power wisely is vital if we are to learn with, from, and alongside a truly international body of community development practitioners and researchers. One small intervention we undertook this year was to support a visit to Scotland for Ukrainian practitioners Nataliya Drozd, of the Dobrochyn Centre, and Oleksandr Pidhorniy, of the Chernihiv Centre for Human Rights. Drozd previously visited us to present a paper on her work at our 50th Anniversary conference in Edinburgh in 2015 and also published a reflection piece on community development in Ukraine a couple of years later (Drozd, 2017). On this occasion, she and Pidhorniy undertook a number of activities to share their expertise in participatory approaches to recovery, which included meeting with voluntary groups, guest lecturing students at the University of Glasgow, and participating in a public conversation with peacebuilding expert Professor Sinéad Gormally at Glasgow’s Advanced Research Centre. After the visit, we invited Drozd to submit an article for the new CDJ Plus website. The site enabled us to provide a rapid publishing turnaround for her new piece, which reflects on the importance and possibility of community collaboration in ‘building back better’ even as the Russian invasion of her country is ongoing (Drozd, 2024). Given the wider context of politicized international reporting around the war in Ukraine, it is important to hear directly from such voices on the ground and reflect on what lessons we all can learn from community development practitioners who continue their work under extreme circumstances. Editors and guest editors of CDJ have also been able to utilize the ‘editors choice’ function to further this work of redistributive knowledge-sharing. ‘Editors choice’ allows, by arrangement with OUP, that one article per issue is made freely available without the author having to pay. This was used in the 2017 special issue on ‘Practising solidarity: challenges for community development and social movements in the 21st century’ to highlight the peer-reviewed article by Lena Meari (2017). Meari’s article, ‘Colonial dispossession, developmental discourses, and humanitarian solidarity in “Area C”: the case of the Palestinian Yanun Village’, critiques the colonial history of community development and the limits of humanitarian discourse regarding the occupied Palestinian territories, contrasting these approaches with radical community organizing led by and for Palestinian people. Meari argues for the importance of ordinary Palestinian voices being directly heard in accounting for the violence they face, especially as others so often presume to speak for them. Access to Meari’s (2017) article feels especially important given the events of the last year, especially the 7 October attacks on Israeli civilian and military targets by Hamas-led Palestinian militant groups and the subsequent bombing and invasion of the Gaza strip by Israeli forces. In an article written shortly after the current hostilities began, Butler (2023) insists that if we are to condemn violence in good faith, context is vital. Hamas’ terror attack was horrifying and indefensible. It must also be understood within a history of dispossession, colonial rule, and apartheid imposed on the people of the Palestinian territories by the Israeli state and Zionist settlers: a history very intentionally explored by both Meari and Butler. Moreover, the events of October 7 cannot possibly excuse the genocidal atrocities committed against the people of Gaza. As Abdelwahab El-Affendi argues: Even before the current assault, Gaza, had become “hell on earth,” as a result of a prolonged siege (since 2007) and three devastating Israeli wars. The latest assault does not appear coincidentally genocidal. The over 90,000 victims (dead, missing, and wounded) and two million displaced, do not look like “collateral damage.” One cannot destroy over 350,000 homes with ineffectual warning, assault and invade hospitals and schools crammed with refugees, and not intend to maximize civilian casualties. Even if we overlook the official and semi-official rhetoric that is strongly suggestive of a genocidal intent, this is beyond the pale. (El-Affendi, 2024: 6) Simply to name this context is controversial in countries allied politically with Israel, including within academic contexts. In the US, student encampments created in solidarity with the Palestinian people have been misrepresented in the mainstream press, widely condemned by politicians, and frequently met with violent responses from university authorities and police (OHCHR, 2024a). In the UK, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak called university vice chancellors to a meeting to demand action against similar campus protests (Joseph, 2024). In Germany, amidst a wider crackdown on public criticism of Israel, the Jewish-American academic Nancy Fraser had a visiting professorship cancelled by Cologne University due to her support for Palestinian people, while University of Glasgow Rector Ghassan Abu-Sittah, a British-Palestinian surgeon, was barred from both entering the country and addressing a German conference remotely on Zoom (Ferguson, 2024; Hauenstein and Fraser, 2024). Meanwhile, every university in Gaza has been levelled in the Israeli assault, an atrocity described as ‘scholaricide’ by United Nations experts (OHCHR, 2024b). Such attacks on academic speech, on academic existence, are not a side effect of war. Rather, they represent a deliberate attempt to quash any attempt to present either scholarly evidence or first-person narratives regarding (for example) the Israeli state’s genocidal actions in Gaza. There has never been a more important time to assert not just the importance of academic freedom but also the responsibility held by those of us with access to publishing platforms. As such, we feel it is important to highlight the (admittedly few) articles about Ukraine and Palestine in past issues of CDJ. Williams et al. (2012) examine everyday community economies in Ukraine, reflecting on how and why non-market-oriented practices persist in the post-Soviet context. Tony Longland offers a critical analysis of the 1993 Oslo I Accord agreed between the Israeli Government and Palestinian Liberation Authority, arguing that ‘the consequences of failure are too awful to contemplate’ (Longland, 1994: 140). With that awful failure having played out in practice, Manal Shqair and Mahmoud Soliman (2021) examine the role of Palestinian women in fighting back against both Israeli settler-colonialism and accompanying environmental destruction in the West Bank, highlighting the significance of women’s everyday land-based knowledge. These articles represent just a fraction of the vast body of knowledge and experience that is held within community development practice, most of which is never published in this journal or others. In warzones, especially, writing for a peer-reviewed publication is unlikely to be a priority. We recently received the news that a Palestinian author was unable to continue writing an article intended for CDJ due to the impact of the ongoing genocide in Gaza. It was devastating to hear, but hardly surprising. This is the context in which we remain committed to using our publishing platforms ethically and effectively to share critical reflections on community development theory, research, and practice, while acknowledging that our contributions can only ever be partial. We open this issue with an article that again emphasizes the vital importance of context in comprehending violence within and between communities. In ‘The political economy of destructing essential services in the quest for basic services: the case of violent protest in Cato Manor’, author Nsizwazonke E. Yende seeks to understand why protesters in Cato Manor, South Africa, often damage the little infrastructure that they have while demanding better service delivery from the government. He argues for the importance of understanding what otherwise might seem to be a counterintuitive protest strategy for underserved communities. Yende applies displaced aggression theory to show how extreme levels of detachment and alienation – caused in part by the lack of basic services – coupled with a long history of protest as one of the few means of democratic participation available to people have shaped continued barriers to the development of infrastructure. The next article looks at peaceful approaches to community development within areas impacted by conflict. Norkaina C. Samama and Wilfred D. Bidad examine the implementation and members’ experiences of community-based enterprises (CBEs) in ‘Sustainability assessment of community-based enterprises in selected fragile and conflict-affected areas in the Southern Philippines’. As highlighted in the article, many academic assessments of CBEs have focused on their implementation in the Global North; this piece therefore provides a new case study context through its focus on the Southern Philippines. This enables the reader to understand the particularity of the implementation of CBEs in conflict-affected areas and how this might inform community capacity building and poverty reduction. The authors argue that the CBE model offers flexibility to respond to specificities of context while ensuring connectivity and wider structural support. Following on from the success of CDJ’s previous special issue (59.2, on queer and trans community building in India), the following article picks up the thread of centring LGBTQ voices in work on LGBTQ issues. In ‘Risk and resilience: exploring the potential of LGBTQ third sector and academic partnership’, authors Nuno Nodin, Catherine Pestano, Elizabeth Peel, Ian Rivers, and Allan Tyler provide an overview of the research process for a project on LGBTQ mental health that took place in England from 2010 to 2016. Researchers took a Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) approach, involving charity and academic advisors, lay panel advisors, volunteers, and interns throughout the project, to ensure that project impact was rooted in community needs. The article concludes with a valuable list of recommendations for any researchers seeking to conduct collaborative research involving partnerships between academics and the third sector. Our next article, ‘Local community capacity building: exploring non-governmental organizations approaches in Tamil Nadu’, by Sten Langmann, Pieter-Jan Bezemer, and David Pick, explores why and how non-governmental organisations (NGOs) select their approaches to community capacity building (CCB). They focus on Tamil Nadu in India as a state that has been doing significant work on poverty reduction in a country that has a particularly high number of NGOs. Interviewing members of local NGOs, the authors argue that ‘emotional empowerment’ is key to the operation and success of CCB approaches in this context. Emotional empowerment of community members builds capacity within the community to challenge the affective barriers that might otherwise lead to an acceptance of existing oppressive social structures. In another article that reckons with the complex social processes at play in the ways in which communities operate, Lindsay Stephens argues that assemblage theory is useful in understanding how the ‘arrangement’ of relationships between community members produces and maintains power and capacity in ‘What does community do? Reconsidering community action on the Toronto Islands using assemblage theory’. This theoretical framework allows for analysis between assemblage, affect, and emotion; Stephens’ particular focus on the intense and uncomfortable emotions at the ‘edges’ of the assemblage leads to a deeper understanding of the operationalisation of ‘community’ and thereby opportunities for change within this small island settlement just offshore from the city of Toronto. Next, we have two pieces that reckon with communities’ responses to globalized market pressure. First, an article examining the role of tourism in the remote coastal village of Viet Hai, Vietnam. In ‘Tourism, social networks, and community development: a case study of a coastal Vietnamese village’, Thu Dinh, Edo Andriesse, and Jamie Gillen note that the community’s fostering of rural tourism to develop employment opportunities has been heavily shaped by social networks, leading to increased intra-village disparities. The authors posit that their application of social network theory is a fruitful way for community development practitioners to recognize the complex social processes at play. Our editor’s choice for this issue is ‘Understanding change in traditional sustainable livelihoods: a complex socio-ecological system in an indigenous community in Mexico’, by Carla Galán-Guevara. This article examines the complexities navigated by indigenous communities in managing traditional sustainable livelihoods in a global monetized economy. The UN’s sustainable development agenda recognizes the importance of safeguarding the traditional practices of indigenous communities. Yet, this article charts the way in which the Purepecha indigenous people in Santa Fe de la Laguna have shifted their practices from a diversity of agriculture, fishing, farming, and commerce in ceramic and wooden handicrafts to a stronger emphasis on ceramic and pottery production. The majority of households now participate in some aspect of pottery production due to its booming trade on the global market, yet the increased scale of pottery production comes with a toll on the communities’ soil quality and wood and water reserves, thereby affecting other aspects of their traditional livelihoods. The authors examine this through a systems change lens to recognize the interdependencies at play and argue that community development practitioners must recognize the broad contexts at play that affect each community. We round off the issue with several articles that continue the theme of arts and crafts in community development. 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