How does a community redefine itself after events that undermine social cohesion at neighbourhood, national and global level? How can communities influence neighbourhood policies and have a voice? These are questions that are central to policy development.

The concept of social cohesion in neighbourhoods is currently a key policy issue, with the context for this including internal conflicts between groups competing for the same scarce resources, structural inequality, housing and environment neglect, crime and disorder, creating segregation and a culture of ‘us and them’. We, the research team, found that found that arts methodology was a tool for ethnic minority women and young people to negotiate boundaries and hostile territories and to engage in policy questions on community cohesion through photography, portraits and poetry (see Chapter Eighteen, Chapter Nineteen and Chapter Twenty-one in this book).

Hoggett (1997) argues that policies are often made in ignorance of the complexity within communities. This book is about communities in Rotherham, but it is also a book about ‘every’ northern British town in the grip of post-industrialisation and post-colonialism. The current way policies are developed and put into practice is not working for the people living in such communities. This book asks how alternative ways of knowing in neighbourhoods can inform government policy within contested or fractured communities. The answer, we believe, is in the methodology that this book advocates. This includes collaborative ethnography, co-production and arts practice. These methodologies are communicative and situated within the everyday and cultural contexts of communities.

Policy impacts on all areas of community life. This book engages with a number of policy areas, including:

• •the work of early years settings and the importance of listening to parental views;

• •community cohesion and diversity;

• •working with socially excluded young people and providing them with a platform to have a voice.

Our book highlights the importance of the capacity building of women through writing groups and community-based projects that support women's activism and that give them the confidence to speak out. It is vitally important that all sectors of the community are central in policy making; often, the best people to drive policy are the communities who are experts on their own lives.