‘Community’ is a concept at the heart of a lot of the work I’ve done over my life. I think for most people most of the things that bring them happiness and allow them to assert their identity are through ideas of community and family.
Within both these overlapping concepts are a dazzling array of possibilities across place and time. Communities can be intentional (e.g. through hobbies and sports), emergent (neighbourhood-based), or through circumstance (people with shared medical conditions). They can be formed in response to injustice (e.g mutual aid groups and protest organisations), around shared consumer interests (comic con, collecting), through shared identity (trans or PoC meet-up groups) as a form of workplace networking (employee special interest groups such as tech worker meet-ups) or explicit place-based working practices (NHS community workers, housing association residents schemes).
Despite these enormous differences of materiality and intent, at the coalface of doing ‘community’ work, there is often a silence around what we mean by community that we explored in a podcast episode: who is in it and why? How do people join and leave it? Who holds the power and what is the material substance of it? Who gets to define the edges of it?
Probably the central concept with community is a kind of intentionality: a decision to be involved with a certain group of people for reasons unrelated to money. However even that gets complicated when involvement in workplace communities is an unacknowledged necessity for career advancement for example, or when people are identified with being in a community that they don’t necessarily feel part of themselves.
How they are described differently from without and within can be disorienting. From the outside, when I’m filling in any given form I’m usually lumped in with the ‘LGBTQ community’. I don’t really think this is a thing that anyone who ticks that box experiences as confidently as the form suggests, and I know many in the ‘BAME community’ feel the same. Personally I would say culturally I am big-Q Queer, but identify mostly as trans and have a fraught relationship with lesbianism and bisexality even though objectively they are boxes I would tick on a form if asked. To be honest on a day-to-day level I currently feel really alienated from any specific, tangible ‘LGBTQ’ community that offers me support and care. I have friends I talk to, sure, parties I attend, groups I do some work with, but on a personal level I don’t feel part of a ‘community’ at the time of writing in the perhaps ideal sense it exists in my head. I have at other times in my life, and hope to feel like I do again one day, though.
There is therefore a vast gulf between real, affective, visceral day to day relations I have with others and the categorisation that they might be given from within, and the virtual potential of communities I can sometimes inhabit but don’t feel a part of. Maybe this is the difference between ‘a community’ (noun) and ‘being or feeling in community’ (verb).
This is possibly another exploration of Goodharts Law that we explored last time. Community is clearly a valuable concept, or people wouldn’t want to be in them, and capitalism wouldn’t be constantly trying to use it to it’s own ends. These ends could be as a way to motivate workforces, retain customers, or to measure ‘community-ness’ against statutory goals whilst eliding the reasons we are talking about them in the first place.
On the most fundamental level, perhaps this is simply the middle between the equally difficult ideas of ‘individuals’ and ‘a society’, and so we shouldn’t expect to have any clear cut answers over even what kind of thing a community is. I still think community is an utterly vital concept at the heart of everything we do, but I’m increasingly becoming unwilling to let the term lie unexamined and uncritiqued, as so much else we do hinges on this virtual concept in very real and material ways.