Empowering Settings and Voices for Social Change

This book focuses on understanding social settings as loci for empowering intervention and relates these settings to understanding and giving voice to citizens. The volume illuminates advances in theory and method relevant to changing a broad spectrum of social settings from a strength-based perspective. Three cross-cutting concepts - a strength-based approach to research and social action, empowerment, and narrative research methods - serve as integrating and foundational themes.

This volume first takes up issues of setting processes and outcomes of influence, research methods, and implications for setting and community change efforts and social policy. Authors then examine how action scientists have sought to understand and amplify the voices of individuals and communities who serve as the focus of their research and social change actions. The volume concludes by contextualizing the text in decades of work on empowering settings, giving voice, and social change.