This book focuses upon the contributions that research can make towards strengthening community development and working for social justice agendas in Britain. Drawing upon original research, as part of the Third Sector Research Capacity Building Cluster, the volume explores different ways in which research can contribute to capacity building and 'research mindedness' in the Third Sector. This includes the contributions that community-university research partnerships can make, enabling organisations and social movements to undertake research for themselves. Examples include research with refugee and asylum seeker organisations and groups, research with faith-based organisations and research exploring the relevance of community arts, media and sports. Whilst the book covers a number of related themes, they share an overall focus upon community development to promote active citizenship and social justice.

Vitalism is usually associated with Romantic theories of nature, but the supposition of a 'vital principle' or life-force recurred throughout eighteenth-century natural philosophy, to counter the inadequacy of mechanism to understand the operation of natural life. This book traces the persistent presence of a language of vital nature not only in eighteenth-century science, but in literary and philosophical writing too: in moral philosophy, theories of sensibility and political economy, and in the radical journalism and women's writing of the 1790s. It explores the influence of the Scottish vitalist physiology of Robert Whytt and others on writers and thinkers as diverse as Adam Smith, David Hume, Erasmus Darwin, John Hunter, John Thelwall and Mary Wollstonecraft. In doing so, it shows the centrality of vitalism to eighteenth-century accounts of the body, nature, matter and life, and offers a new way of understanding the relationship between eighteenth-century science and culture and that of the Romantic period.

This book offers an important account of the relationship between science and culture in the eighteenth century. It examines the 'vitalist' turn in physiology and natural philosophy, and its presence and effect in the burgeoning of philosophical and scientific inquiry of the Scottish Enlightenment, and the radical politics and culture of the 1790s.

This book explores the contributions that research, with refugees and with faith-based organizations for example, makes to strengthen community development and consequently promote active citizenship and social justice.