(Person) Percentage - Sabanci University Research Database

The Asian Conference on Media & Mass Communication Osaka, Japan
as the target of negative perception and images. While the post 9/11 discussion falls
outside the time frame of this study, it can be suggested that the post 9/11 and 7/7
scenarios had a historical and social continuity with things happening in the past.
There are many theoretical perspectives, which resonate between the discourses of
develomentalism and social exclusion. Besides the striking similarities observed in
the conceptualization of the ‘third world’ and ‘inner city’, modernism as an
overarching discourse seems to be behind both processes. It won’t be out of place
to mention that social exclusion is an extension of developmentalism in the as the
discourse only gets reframed, not fundamentally altered in the west. The process
of social exclusion is generally attributed to non-white minority groups, mostly
generations of the immigrants from South Asia. These people originate from the
parts of the world (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh), which has gone through the
experiment of developmentally for decades, and in some cases developmental
agencies and western governments still continue with the politics of aid there. This
assumed relationship between the ‘beneficiaries’ of aid in the east and welfare
benefits in the west creates another interesting ‘link’.
The programmes and initiatives of social inclusion including economic regeneration,
neighbourhood renewal and social cohesion are all based on the principle of
modernity characterised by managerialism, top to bottom strategies and seen largely
to be biased towards the knowledge and experience of marginalised people. As in the
‘third world’, the victims of poverty are blamed for it as their cultural practices are
seen a liability rather than an asset to help them take control of their situation.
In order to develop an argument from the margins, it is important to understand
critique of the ‘authoritative foundation of knowledge’ from a variety of perspectives
and disciplines. This helps to develop a non-positivist and participatory research
approach which offers an epistemology and methodology that addresses people,
power and praxis underlying the importance of action, participation and critical
consciousness. Thus knowledge creation or validation of ‘other’ worldviews is
reached in a collaborative way where research methodology (approach) and methods
(tools) become integral part of this process.
In this paper I explored a number of shifting and strategic, real and symbolic concept
of ranging from the idealized Ummatic concept to a more racialised ethnic minority
notion and from a politicized black categorization to a romanticized ‘back home’
view of community. While all these notions remain in flux but it is the discursively
created concept of socially excluded community that brings the burden of being a
Muslim, ethnic, black, immigrant and ‘other’ into a disadvantage. This disadvantage
brings with it whole lot of issues about poor health, poor housing, under achievement
in education, higher rate of crime, higher dependency on welfare benefits. Whether
these realities gravitate people to cluster together into deprived areas or are pushed by
the ‘collective failure’ of the system to look for communal and kinship support, the
concept of community is very much live though not in a fixed form and shape.
However, at a time when there is a growing assertiveness about the identity politics
among the marginalized communities, the fixed, racialised constructs are being
challenged along with demand for other way of living ad knowing. Within this
paradigm shift, it will be interesting to explore how a dynamic construct of
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