Empowering Settings and Voices for Social Change

Empowering Settings and Voice for Social Change focuses on 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 (including programs, organizations, institutions, communities, and social policy) from a strengths-based perspective. Three cross-cutting concepts---a strengths-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.

is Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research focuses on collaborative community-based intervention, contextual influences on individuals' understanding of race, racial equity in public schooling, and school racial climate. Aber was past president of the Society for Community Research and Action.
Kenneth I. Maton is Professor of Psychology and director of the Community-Social Psychology Ph.D. Program in Human Services Psychology at the University of Maryland in Baltimore County. His research focuses on empowering community settings, minority youth achievement, and the community psychology of religion.
Edward Seidman is Senior Vice President, Program, at the William T. Grant Foundation and Professor of Applied Psychology at New York University. At the Foundation, he is particularly interested in facilitating higher quality theory, measurement, and intervention research on youth-serving organizations that successfully impact on practice and policy. Before coming to the Foundation, his research examined the nature and course of the positive developmental trajectories of economically at-risk urban adolescents, and how these trajectories are affected by the social contexts of family, peers, school, and neighborhood.