Bottom-up Practices Research Articles

Bottom-up quality improvement theory and practice

Bottom-up quality improvement theory and practice

Shäwthän Dän, Shäwthän Kwänjè: good people, good words: creating a dän k'è speech community in an elementary school

This paper investigates how the processes of language transmission among speakers of Southern Tutchone (dän k'è), an indigenous Athapaskan language of the southern Yukon Territory, Canada, bear out an emerging theoretical interest in how bottom-up communicative practices shape language policy. An examination of dän k'è language practices illuminates how both fluent speakers and novices can actively create a speech community dedicated to the continued maintenance of their language. Drawing upon fieldwork conducted in an elementary school in Whitehorse, Yukon, I examine how language-teaching methods and language practices both inside and outside of the classroom function as ways to challenge the English-dominant speech community of the school. The shifting of linguistic frames in teaching, the addition of dän k'è to the school's linguistic landscape, and the introduction of speaking practices that reinforce the use of dän k'è all promote language use in a way that empowers speakers and encourages language maintenance. Exploring the agency of individual speakers and how their language practices both reproduce and challenge top-down policies reveals how speech communities can be shaped through the bottom-up planning of the speakers themselves.

Can Participatory Action Research Deal with the Mafia? A Lesson from the Field

There are many places in the world where theorizing about planning barely finds fertile ground to grow. Institutional planning, promoted by nepotistic political representatives, is rarely counteracted by bottom-up practices closer to people's needs and dreams. Moreover, the few community organizations and grassroots associations that do exist often find it difficult to increase social consensus, affect decision making, and improve people's lives. In Sicily, Italy, the problems are compounded by the centuries-long history of mafia territorial dominance. Can planning help in such contexts? Can it, in particular, help in weakening the mafia's social consensus and ability to influence every component of society (economics, politics, culture)? If so, what kind of planning is needed? And who should implement it? This paper addresses these questions, telling the story of one “difficult” place—the area of the historical market of Catania (eastern Sicily), where a participatory action-research experience was carried out by the LabPEAT, University of Catania. The paper ends with an optimistic thought: participatory action-research—an approach to action in which a reflective rationality helps practitioners and communities to overcome dilemmas along the way, and to conceive of actions that go beyond the habitual—has shown potential to inform institutional and community planning choices in a way that counteracts Mafia hegemony.

Improving the success of “bottom-up” development work by acknowledging the dynamics among stakeholders: a case study from an Engineers Without Borders water supply project in Tenganan, Indonesia

This paper presents a model of development action synthesising the development arena framework with collective action theory. It shows how application of this model in the Engineers Without Borders Australia (EWB) water supply improvement and capacity building project in Tenganan, Indonesia has helped to maximise the extent to which the project practice can reflect the project rhetoric as "bottom-up" or community-inspired. The model posits a broad range of stakeholders actively engaged in development action: each stakeholder is different, with its own interests, missions, procedures, and ways of deploying power in development action. Recognising the multiplicity of subjects of development is especially crucial for improving bottom-up practice. Connections and interactions among stakeholders are inherently problematic, and must be negotiated to accomplish development work, as tensions in the dynamic among stakeholders may operate to restrict the success of these "bottom-up" development projects.

Cutting Bordello Scenes and Dances: Local Regulation and Film Censorship in Norway before 1913

W hen Robert C. Allen and Douglas Gomery’s Film History: Theory and Practice was published in 1985, one of the issues that was most startling was the discussion of local film history. Many readers reacted with surprise or incredulity when they read in the preface: ‘One exciting thing about film historical research that sets it apart from some other branches of history is that it can be conducted nearly anywhere.’ The discussions about the object of historical study, what counted as evidence and what was being explained in film history, changed after the publication of Allen and Gomery’s book, and the new practice that followed was often named ‘revisionist film history’ or ‘the new film history’. The focus on local film history, and how local film history could be fruitful to historical research in film, was often singled out as one of the most important contributions of Allen and Gomery’s book. Local film history has been important in Cinema Studies since 1985, and especially in the study of early film. This has been seen as a sign that the practice of film history changed, not only from a top-down to a bottom-up practice, using new sources and more thorough research methods, but also a change of policy and explanation; from the survey to the minutiae of history. However, it has also in recent years been seen as a sign that the important issues have already been covered, and in their search for new topics, scholars are forced to work with issues and material that are increasingly more minute and marginal, and of interest only to the very few. Local film history, however, is not only ‘stamp collecting’, or an alternative to film history proper, but a new optic; a method and perspective, an opportunity to view and question the big issues and institutionalised histories of cinema, through the small, the local and the marginal. Local film history offers a good way to rethink many of the fundamental questions of film history. In this essay, I will discuss local regulation and censorship of film in Norway before a central Norwegian Board of Film Censors was established in October 1913. Through a case study, or a local historical ‘snapshot’, I will discuss the institutionalised historical version of the establishing of the Norwegian Board of Film Censors. Local censorship before a national board of film censors was established is one concern that needs more study internationally, and an area that can illustrate the need for and value of local film history.