Coming to Know Your Community - Using a Social Atlas

There’s a venerable tradition of ‘community studies’ in Australia and across the world; many have been inspired by sociological and anthropological themes and most have taken a long time to be accomplished, let alone published. Often, they have used language which was off-putting if not a bit useless for ‘practitioners,’ who often were not ‘inducted’ by their employers or program managers into the community they were meant to serve… let alone being given the time to do so… The social Atlas offers a tool or a template to assist in this process; it offers a three-dimensional framework to stimulate and organise practitioners’ observations and experiences as well as the data they glean from documents, statistics, photos, etc. The three dimensions – the ‘physical’ or ‘material’ aspect; the ‘relational’ aspect; and the consciousness aspect – will be ‘populated’ with information gained from a number of approaches and the template will grow as the information becomes more complex and interrelated.