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

play of water

play of water
Originally uploaded by rabinal

Christina has been to Washington DC and taken some pics. The quotations and phrases around the various monuments starkly illustrate just how far the USA has slipped away from its traditions since 2001.

Afghan cultural support

The picture here is of an Afghan rug bought by Ted Jefferies in Kabul in 1968, for the equivalent of 5 pounds sterling at that time. It was inexpensive, because the vendor said that the maker had run out of wool before completing it, and indeed, you can see that the two ends are of different lengths. It has, for the past 14 years, been on the direct walkway through the hall in the house and you can see how tough it is and how well it has withstood the traffic.

It is worth supporting Afghan art and culture at the moment. In 2008 they have had the worst winter for many years, and folk have been dying of the cold, and losing limbs through frostbite. If we all buy Afghan art, perhaps they will not need to grow so many poppies for heroin production.

For ALL busy people

Jonathan Deane suggests the "do nothing" machine. It is offered to all busy people who have insufficient time in their day to sit and just relax and "do nothing". By switching on the "do nothing machine", it gets on with the job of doing nothing at all while you get on with your busy life.

Various instantiations of "do nothing" machine are possible. There is the "peaceful do nothing machine" that just sits quietly in the corner and shows no outward sign at all that it is busily doing nothing. At the other end of the spectrum is the "flamboyant do nothing machine" which has flashing lights and bells and whistles, and when it is set running, does nothing at all in a very ostentatious manner.

The disadvantage of a television as a "do nothing machine" is that it may just possibly distract you and divert you from whatever busy task you are getting on with.

The D coefficient

This is a suggestion for a "complex systems" on-line experiment, made today by JHB Deane at Surrey.

This suggestion applies ONLY to one-to-one communications, involving no lists or copies...

When you get email from your friends, or posts on Facebook etc., what proportion of them do you need to acknowledge with a reply in order to keep your friends from dumping you? Jonathan calls this the "D coefficient" and suggests that for himself, for email, it is about 0.3. That is, he finds people will keep him on their emailing list if he responds to about one in every 3 communications.

He suggests that this is empirical science, and that it needs a very large number of people to participate in taking the data in order to establish a "global D coefficient" and a range for this number.

For myself, I find that people are happier if I apply a higher D coefficient than 0.3, and that on Facebook, my D coefficient is nearer 0.1 (I dump "friends" if I get less than one response every 10 communications).

GSA meeting, San Francisco, Nov 2007

Gerontological Society of America meeting 2007.

Christina's factotum-administrator person decided to avoid the on-line information for the Hilton Hotel in San Francisco, and discovered the main direct line, in to the bookings manageress in the hotel. The end result is that all five of the Reading contingent are booked in for all the days of the conference, that is, the nights of 15 16 17 18 and 19th November 2007.

You may be interested to hear that the lady manageress at the Hilton reports that she had had all kinds of irate people from around the planet phoning her up to complain about the website. Partly the problem was with the parochial conference organisers. No-one had thought that any attendees would need to come in early to overcome jet lag. And they had put an upper limit of 4 bodies per booking. And also, the website was broken and reporting there to be no space when actually there is plenty.

It also transpires that for many people, dealing with the Hilton was so much too difficult, that they have instead transferred to other hotels in the vicinity. This further reduces the pressure on the conference space.

A clergyman on chaos and complexity

John Habgood, when Archbishop of York, wrote a book "Faith and Uncertainty" with the following passage in it.



..in the world of nature, it may be that the rules of organisation are comparatively simple, if only we knew what they were. We see them operating in living organisms every time a set of genes gives rise to the enormously complex finished product......

...built into the way things are, there are not only vast possibilities for freedom and creativity, but also certain inherent rules and structures which channel this creativity away from relapsing into chaos, and towards greater complexity and order."



He has been reading books on complex adaptive systems, and for more information we could subscribe to Complexity Digest once a week comdig.org

It is nice seeing a clergyman taking, perhaps, a modern view towards biology. There seems to be hope for us all, pace Richard Dawkins.

"Complexity emerges at the interface between order and chaos," is one modern way of putting this insight.

reference ISBN 0-232-52227-8 Darton, Longman and Todd, 1997