This research group is researching community, resilience, and the conditions that enable people to thrive.   

Participation of different kinds contributes to a healthy community, a functioning democracy, and also to high-quality research. This research theme explores participatory approaches that, through community empowerment and civic involvement, effectively utilise local assets, capacities, and resources in order to address citizens’ needs. Focusing on communities of place and communities of interest, our work investigates pathways to successful co-production and social innovation. The contextual importance of different geographies, policies, and culture is central to this theme. We thus explore how the concept of citizenship is interpreted and mobilised across different settings and scales of society: from urban and rural communities to the workplace and the state.  

We work closely with government representatives as well as community groups, trade unions, and social enterprises, co-constructing responses to social vulnerabilities, empirically testing new ideas through action research, participatory evaluation, surveys, and outcome measurement.  

Our research creates applied knowledge that informs community development practice, labour market policies and participation policies as well as advancing theories in the field.  

Here, you can explore some of our projects and outputs of our work  

Current projects