The Fractured Community

"The Fractured Community: Landscapes of Power and Gender in Rural Zambia" is a book written by Kate Crehan. The University of California Press originally published the book in October 1997 and presents its online version, as well as a summary of its contents.

While environmental disputes and conflicts over fossil fuel extraction have grown in recent years, few issues have been as contentious in the twenty-first century as those surrounding the impacts of unconventional natural gas and oil development using hydraulic drilling and fracturing techniques—more commonly known as “fracking”—on local communities. In Fractured Communities, Anthony E. Ladd and other leading environmental sociologists present a set of crucial case studies analyzing the differential risk perceptions, socio-environmental impacts, and mobilization of citizen protest (or quiescence) surrounding unconventional energy development and hydraulic fracking in a number of key U.S. shale regions. Fractured Communities reveals how this contested terrain is expanding, pushing the issue of fracking into the mainstream of the American political arena.

Americans today are frustrated and anxious. Our economy is sluggish, and leaves workers insecure. Income inequality, cultural divisions, and political polarization increasingly pull us apart. Our governing institutions often seem paralyzed. And our politics has failed to rise to these challenges. No wonder, then, that Americans -- and the politicians who represent them -- are overwhelmingly nostalgic for a better time. The Left looks back to the middle of the twentieth century, when unions were strong, large public programs promised to solve pressing social problems, and the movements for racial integration and sexual equality were advancing. The Right looks back to the Reagan Era, when deregulation and lower taxes spurred the economy, cultural traditionalism seemed resurgent, and America was confident and optimistic. Each side thinks returning to its golden age could solve America's problems. In The Fractured Republic, Yuval Levin argues that this politics of nostalgia is failing twenty-first-century Americans. Both parties are blind to how America has changed over the past half century -- as the large, consolidated institutions that once dominated our economy, politics, and culture have fragmented and become smaller, more diverse, and personalized. Individualism, dynamism, and liberalization have come at the cost of dwindling solidarity, cohesion, and social order. This has left us with more choices in every realm of life but less security, stability, and national unity. Both our strengths and our weaknesses are therefore consequences of these changes. And the dysfunctions of our fragmented national life will need to be answered by the strengths of our decentralized, diverse, dynamic nation. Levin argues that this calls for a modernizing politics that avoids both radical individualism and a centralizing statism and instead revives the middle layers of society -- families and communities, schools and churches, charities and associations, local governments and markets. Through them, we can achieve not a single solution to the problems of our age, but multiple and tailored answers fitted to the daunting range of challenges we face and suited to enable an American revival.

Scanning across half a century, Fractured Society…Causes, Effects and Resolutions looks at how human relations have been coming apart psychologically, summarised by the widespread failure to understand each other. Young people seem more stressed than others, while politics are now more polarised than for a long time past. Wherever you look, at gender relations, the working environment, responses to traumatic events and how people relate to their sense of place – whether positively or negatively - there are profound tensions around how we interact with each other. But maybe all is not lost! Hugh Roberts examines how every situation can look different in context, applying lessons learned from many years working internationally across diverse cultures and value systems. He proposes a fresh approach to relationship building, based on empathy and understanding of individual agendas. COVID-19 brought communities a renewed sense of collective purpose with digital communication proving vital in sustaining meaningful connections. However, the Internet needs to take its rightful place in, rather than take over, the slow re-building of mutual trust. Fractured Society delivers an upbeat message advocating a better-connected world, encouraging us to adopt a positive empathetic approach to one another, replacing the fear and mistrust of forming new acquaintances.

Congregational leaders are charged with caring for those inside and outside of faith communities. The care required is not only personal but involves dealing with deeply rooted fractures within the community. Fractures like racism, education inequality and poverty, to name a few, plague those inside and outside of the church. Given our fractured landscape and the diversity of contexts where congregations exist, "How can congregational leaders be both healers and agitators at the same time?" The danger of simply being a healer ignores the underlying causes of the fracture(s) in a community. The danger of simply being an agitator is others ignore you because your voice is monotone. Being a leader who lives in this tension inside a faith community and the public square requires nimbleness. A nimbleness that allows for being an ointment and an irritant when needed. Each chapter of Healing Fractured Communities is written by a pastoral leader engaged in the work of renewal, resilience, and resistance in congregations, on college campuses, and in communities. Each chapter paints a picture of the work of healing, includes takeaways, and questions for reflection.

In the last quarter of the twentieth century, the ideas that most Americans lived by started to fragment. Mid-century concepts of national consensus, managed markets, gender and racial identities, citizen obligation, and historical memory became more fluid. Flexible markets pushed aside Keynesian macroeconomic structures. Racial and gender solidarity divided into multiple identities; community responsibility shrank to smaller circles. In this wide-ranging narrative, Daniel Rodgers shows how the collective purposes and meanings that had framed social debate became unhinged and uncertain. Age of Fracture offers a powerful reinterpretation of the ways in which the decades surrounding the 1980s changed America. Through a contagion of visions and metaphors, on both the intellectual right and the intellectual left, earlier notions of history and society that stressed solidity, collective institutions, and social circumstances gave way to a more individualized human nature that emphasized choice, agency, performance, and desire. On a broad canvas that includes Michel Foucault, Ronald Reagan, Judith Butler, Charles Murray, Jeffrey Sachs, and many more, Rodgers explains how structures of power came to seem less important than market choice and fluid selves. Cutting across the social and political arenas of late-twentieth-century life and thought, from economic theory and the culture wars to disputes over poverty, color-blindness, and sisterhood, Rodgers reveals how our categories of social reality have been fractured and destabilized. As we survey the intellectual wreckage of this war of ideas, we better understand the emergence of our present age of uncertainty.

Set against the backdrop of the Civil Rights Movement, Redlined exposes the racist lending rules that refuse mortgages to anyone in areas with even one black resident. As blacks move deeper into Chicago’s West Side during the 1960s, whites flee by the thousands. But Linda Gartz’s parents, Fred and Lil choose to stay in their integrating neighborhood, overcoming previous prejudices as they meet and form friendships with their African American neighbors. The community sinks into increasing poverty and crime after two race riots destroy its once vibrant business district, but Fred and Lil continue to nurture their three apartment buildings and tenants for the next twenty years in a devastated landscape—even as their own relationship cracks and withers. After her parents’ deaths, Gartz discovers long-hidden letters, diaries, documents, and photos stashed in the attic of her former home. Determined to learn what forces shattered her parents’ marriage and undermined her community, she searches through the family archives and immerses herself in books on racial change in American neighborhoods. Told through the lens of Gartz’s discoveries of the personal and political, Redlined delivers a riveting story of a community fractured by racial turmoil, an unraveling and conflicted marriage, a daughter’s fight for sexual independence, and an up-close, intimate view of the racial and social upheavals of the 1960s.

This edited volume builds on existing alternative food initiatives and food movements research to explore how a systems approach can bring about health and well-being through enhanced collaboration. Chapters describe the myriad ways community-driven actors work to foster food systems that are socially just, embed food in local economies, regenerate the environment and actively engage citizens. Drawing on case studies, interviews and Participatory Action Research projects, the editors share the stories behind community-driven efforts to develop sustainable food systems, and present a critical assessment of both the tensions and the achievements of these initiatives. The volume is unique in its focus on approaches and methodologies that both support and recognize the value of community-based practices. Throughout the book the editors identify success stories, challenges and opportunities that link practitioner experience to critical debates in food studies, practice and policy. By making current practices visible to scholars, the volume speaks to people engaged in the co-creation of knowledge, and documents a crucial point in the evolution of a rapidly expanding and dynamic sustainable food systems movement. Entrenched food insecurity, climate change induced crop failures, rural-urban migration, escalating rates of malnutrition related diseases, and aging farm populations are increasingly common obstacles for communities around the world. Merging private, public and civil society spheres, the book gives voice to actors from across the sustainable food system movement including small businesses, not-for-profits, eaters, farmers and government. Insights into the potential for market restructuring, knowledge sharing, planning and bridging civic-political divides come from across Canada, the United States and Mexico, making this a key resource for policy-makers, students, citizens, and practitioners.

How did we become so divided and what do we do about it? 'Analytically incisive yet infectiously optimistic, Fractured expertly diagnoses the deepest divisions in our society and provides an urgent manifesto for collective healing.' David Lammy MP This landmark book tackles a deceptively simple idea: the more we spend time with people unlike ourselves, doing things together, the more understanding, tolerant, and even friendly we become. Combining fresh analysis with a wealth of fascinating examples, Jon Yates demonstrates the ways in which our societies have become disconnected, so that most of us spend less and less time with people who are different -- as defined by age, race, or class, earning power or education. By answering a series of surprising questions, Yates reveals a set of truths that will change the way you think about yourself and those around you. What unites the England football team, the iPod and Singapore? How did a city that funded its schools the least become the best place to grow up poor? How did Silicon Valley come from nowhere to dominate the tech industry? How did a village of Italian-Americans become incredibly healthy while smoking cigars, drinking red wine and never exercising? And why is talking to our friends about politics the worst thing we can do for our democracy? Fractured is ultimately an optimistic book, showing convincingly how great people are when they're united in diversity. It argues that the pandemic has created an unprecedented opportunity for us to come together. So we must forge a new 'Common Life' - a set of shared practises and institutions -- that can strengthen the glue that bonds our societies, in all their diversity. For the health of our democracy, our society, and our economy, the time to act is now.