Guildford map

Guildford map
Originally uploaded by rabinal

"Community" does not, any longer, just refer to the place where you live. Flickr (www.flickr.com) is a collection of communities, for example.

Traditionally, the concept of community referenced geographically specific, culturally homogeneous, and seemingly natural entities such as families, villages, academic disciplines, neighborhoods, races, and religious groups. Whether by choice or by force, people belonged to one primary community and such communities were typically ranked. The massive social changes of the post-World War II era changed all of this. The growth of global capital marketplaces and their ensuing population migrations, the successes and failures of the civil rights, feminist and similar social movements for social justice, the rapid emergence of new technologies of transportation and communication, and the increased attention to security and surveillance of the post-9/11 period all greatly transformed traditional understandings of community. No longer seen as naturally occurring, apolitical spaces of home and homeland populated by people who belong, communities of all sorts now constitute sites of political engagement and contestation. [More...]

In this context, the term community resonates throughout social policy, popular culture, and everyday social interaction in ways that generate dynamic social and political identities. People understand community in diverse ways: from the face-to-face interactions of small group dynamics, to the contested communities of schools, workplaces and other organizations, to the large-scale imagined political communities of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, nation-state and diaspora. The social practices of community catalyze new meanings of freedom – for example, youth with access to computers construct new virtual communities in cyberspace whereas others seek to escape the confines of their inner city neighborhoods. The ideal of community also holds significance for quite different populations with competing political agendas – political groups of the right and left invoke ideas of community, yet have very different definitions in mind. These practices among others reveal how the idea of community constitutes an elastic social, political and theoretical construct that holds a variety of contradictory meanings and around which diverse social practices and understandings occur.

Through the theme of the 2009 Annual Meeting, “The New Politics of Community,” the Program Committee invites you to consider the significance of these changing and contradictory understandings of community. We also hope that the meetings will catalyze the process of building more robust, excellent and diverse sociological communities. In this sense, when it comes to the discipline of sociology, the new politics of community constitute both an object of study and a matter of practice.

Patricia Hill Collins
ASA President
University of Maryland