The Interrelated Realm of Communication & Community

Jessica A. Wade
Master’s Student
University of Colorado at Boulder
Department of Communication
Communication 5210
Seminar: Communication Theory
Spring, 2000

Community is one of the most widely used terms in today’s society (Selnik, 1992). As noted by scholars, community recently hit a relative boom in our practical, everyday discourse (Simonson, 1996). To demonstrate the proliferation of this word in our everyday lives and organizations, all it takes is a closer look at some of the different contexts in which this word is used. On this campus alone, we speak of the classroom as community, scholars from multiple disciplines study community and now confront virtual community, we debate over the future of our community(ies), and we even have a campaign to build community. But as Goodall (1999) states, "It is difficult to build community, or to repair one, when our conception is so vast, so ambiguous, so interconnected" (p. 487).

The academy is not the only context in which community flows through messages, time and space. In politics, presidential campaigns serve as just one example where we see this word used and often abused (Simonson, 1996). "Everywhere in recent Democratic Party discourse, visions of the local community are being communicated" (Lee, 1995, p.40). And, as Lee adds, democrats use this talk successfully. Ever since 1968, each candidate who has ascended to office has articulated such a vision.

What walks hand-in-hand with this notion and proliferation of community in our everyday discourse is the statement by many that we, somehow, have lost community (Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler, & Tipton, 1985; Selnik, 1992). What we lose, we must find again. As Della-Pianna and Anderson (1995) state, "Currently, a "search for community" has engaged and captivated the imagination of scholars and the public alike" (p. 187). Bellah et al (1985) explain this "therapeutic quest" as the fulfillment of individual needs through engaging in social life. Goodall (1999) demonstrates this himself as he tells a narrative tale of searching for community in his scholarly path, searching for this place of community, what he colorfully refers to as a "filling station", that stable place that one could always return to as needed.

There are those, both scholars and members of the general population, who see this loss of community as synonymous with the loss of place and the rise of corporate nonplace (Mitchell, 2000; Oldenburg, 1997). In his work that celebrates as well as laments community, sociologist Ray Oldenburg (1997) coins the term third place to describe "generic designation for a great variety of public places that host the regular, voluntary, informal, and happily anticipated gatherings of individuals beyond the realms of home and work" (p. 16). He explains America’s mourning of the loss this "great good place":

Bleak as the picture may be that Oldenburg paints, it is true that what once survived and thrived in the public realm has now retreated into the private. "Some of what was there is gone for good. Much of it has been transported into the home as private versions of that which people used to share and gain community from the sharing" (p. 215). Local-self reliance activist and researcher Stacy Mitchell (2000) writes regarding the rise of corporate takeover and the diminishment of Oldenburg’s third place, "When people lament the disappearance of the local bookseller or neighborhood pharmacist, too often they speak with a deep sense of resignation. We mourn the loss, but deep in our hearts we accept these enterprises’ extinction as an inevitable part of market evolution" (p. 1). These plastic nonplaces with their familiar logos welcome the transient people, the tourists and the business executive, offering a place to many, but a "real place to nobody" (Oldenburg, 1997, p. 215).

Arnett (1986) also argues that since Martin Buber’s death in 1965, community has dwindled and become scarce. The small town, where community once thrived in daily and democratic life, no longer exists nor do small towns’ stable residents as life has become more fragmented and individuals have become what Bauman (1996) calls "nomadic". America has yet to find something that will replace the integral community of the small town (Lerner, 1957; Oldenburg, 1997). Yet others view the small town as a myth or a "master story of American identity", discrediting the widely held ability of small towns to foster genuine community (Lee, 1995).

The shear fact that we are "searching" for community prompts me to ask several questions. How is it that we, as scholars and as members of the "community", feel that we lost "it"? What is it that people lost? Is community something that you can see? Is community something that you can experience? That you can study? Is community something that you recognize or inherently know when you "find it"? Or is it even findable?

In all this talk about community, it seems to me that we simply don’t know exactly what it is we are talking about or yearning to regain. The flipside of community’s popularity in talk is that its meaning has become more and more ambiguous. Rhetorician Richard Weaver explained community as a "charismatic term"--one with enormous circulation and a wide range of meanings to accompany it (Simonson, 1996). Not to make matters worse, but community, I argue, is intrinsically linked to yet another widely used term, communication. As Penman (1996) notes, "when we talk about such things as ‘conversation’ and ‘community’, along with other related things like ‘communication’, ‘society’, ‘persons’, and ‘language’, we are talking about things that are essentially contestable’’ ( p. 16).

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relation between community and communication in depth. The goal, here, is not to make a clean-cut decision on the one correct definition of community for there is not one that dominates this discussion or our everyday discussion (Fowler, 1995). Rather the goal is to look at the many ways in which communication functions within this multifaceted notion. This in-depth look can offer us some insight into how people make sense of this contested concept and perhaps provide ways in which we as communication scholars might apply such concepts in research. In the remainder of this paper, I seek to answer two questions: a) What are the different conceptualizations, meanings, and theories of community at play in the academic literature? b) From a communication perspective, what is the function or role of communication within these different notions of community?

In answering these questions, I pose the following discussion for this paper. First, I conduct a review of these conceptualizations of community in the social science literature, paying specific attention to the role of communication. Second I address the ways in which communication scholars, in particular, have researched community. Here, I also explore how their research, especially in a sociocultural theoretical tradition, explains the discursive link between how people communicate and therefore construct meaning(s) of community. Lastly, I look at the implications of this theoretical and empirical literature for future work in this area.

As we begin the discussion here of the ways in which the social science literature has conceived of community, the vastness of this concept is quite clear and a bit overwhelming. The definitions derive from theoretical as well as political and religious thought (community of others, of ideas, of memory) and those that are situated in geographical location or time and space (community as place and virtual community). What I offer below is an overview of these conceptualizations and insight into the workings of communication within each.

Hindman (1998) in his study of community newspapers provides a way of looking at the boundaries of community as physical. Community, here, is bound by geographical, shared space. As Goodall (1999) discovered, though, in his career long search for community, one must heed the advice of Herodotus, "You can’t step in the same river twice", for communities, even if bounded physically, change as do the people within them.

Other scholars offer a geographically bounded theory of community, stating that it allows us to get away from the individual nostalgic ideal of a greater "sense" of community. One such scholar is Simonson (1996), who privileges the Sittlichkeit strain of talk about community taken from Hegel. Sittlichkeit is community viewed as places, sites of life and work, and sites to address social problems. Of particular emphasis within this view of community are the concrete institutions located within the larger political order as opposed to the personal or the individual. These institutions constitute civil society, "the public domain between family and state" (Simonson, 1996, p. 326). Simonson provides three types of face-to-face communities with each type characterized by a different approach to communication and implications for political life. These three broad categories are lifestyle enclaves, voluntary associations and local communities of public space.

Lifestyle enclave. Borrowing this first category from the noted work of Bellah et al. (1985), Simonson (1996) shows how the community of lifestyle enclave is organized around its leisure activities, consumption and shared appearance. The definition for lifestyle enclave is:

Communication in this community typically revolves around the shared interest and is characterized as open but not political in orientation.

Voluntary associations. Simonson (1996), states, "The voluntary association, in contrast, has the clearest boundaries and the strongest political presence of the three" (p. 327). Within these typically small and politically active communities, the communication is characterized as purposive deliberation, discussion as a means to an end. This category of face-to-face community resembles what Fowler (1995) discusses as the community of ideas existing in political thought. This conceptualization is based on participatory community, which emphasizes "the importance of people deciding together, face to face, conversing with, and respecting each other in a setting which is as equal as possible" (p. 89). Voluntary associations and community of ideas extend the Greek ideal of polis to the modern day.

Local communities of public space. This third category of face-to-face community develops based on individuals physical proximity to each other. Simonson (1996) draws on Oldenburg’s (1997) notion of third place to exemplify the types of places in which this community occurs, taverns, coffee houses, shops, pedestrian malls, based on some type of regular clientele. In my study of a community coffee house, one of the participants I interviewed mentioned "synchronisity" to explain how people meet up within these third places and take part in less intimate and unplanned/scheduled talk. Because these physical places occur in the public realm, the level of political and civic obligation is higher than what we see in the lifestyle enclave (Simonson, 1996).

The communication role of place, particularly the city, in these face-to-face communities is contested. There are those who argue the urban environment with its higher populations serves as the death of community (Rothenbuhler, Mullen, DeLaurell, & Ryu, 1996); while others claim the city allows for community’s rebirth (See discussion in Hindman, 1998). For instance, Parks (1981) in his work addressing the strength of weak ties, praises the city for offering places that allow for nonobligatory, less intimate relationships as they , "assist in the diffusion of innovations, offer important opportunities for social comparison, and promote large scale social cohesion and action" (p. 95). These relationships "serve important personal and social functions which cannot be ignored in an adequate theory of interpersonal communication" (Parks, 1981, p. 92). Others criticize the weakening of social ties, or individualization, as leading us away from community to "more rational, more interpersonal, more fragmented forms of thought and action" (Selznik, 1992).

In Vale’s (1995) work on the role of communication in the construction of public perceptions and community identity, he claims "communication occurs simultaneously in cities, about cities, and by cities and that all three forms of communication have significant place-based points of reference" (p. 658). The forces involved in the construction and interpretation of cities and their neighborhoods are the people (interaction), the architecture (symbols) and the media (representations) "that helps to edit and alter our perceptions" (Vale, 1995, p. 646). As Vale concludes, "The built environment communicates to people about who they are and how they fit with others in the world" (p. 659).

Virtual community. Thus far, I have covered those communities situated in physical place/geographic location that are characterized by face-to-face interaction. Yet another realm of community. Located in the conceptual space formed by people using computer-mediated technology, the term virtual community stems from its existence in this virtual space (Allison & Allison, 1995). As Gumpert and Drucker (1998) claim, these communication technologies have reshaped the uses of domestic space. No longer are the divisions of home and the workplace so bounded. "Our definition of community and our perception of home coexist in an environment in which the technological ability to transcend time and space governs and results in a series of seemingly contradictory circumstance and values" (Gumpert & Drucker, 1998, p. 428). Here, the geographic boundaries of shared space that we see in Sittlichkeit above are loose and shapeless. Gumpert and Drucker argue that when we transcend space, we actually lose community and a connection to our immediate surrounding. In a study about how conversation via these communication technologies has implications for men’s and women’s movements, Green (1996) concludes, "Not all conversations are equal. The theory here is that mediated conversations are less health promoting, in terms of the giving and receiving of intimacy and trust, than are face to face exchanges" (p. 65).

We see this argument over the negative effects of communication technology dating back to the Phaedrus in which Socrates warns of writing; "writing allows all manner of strange couplings; the distant influence the near, the dead speak to the living, and the many read what was intended for the few" (Peters, 1999, p. 37). Simonson (1996) also critiques what he calls, communication hope, a notion put forth in the works of communication scholars, Cooley, Dewey, Lazarsfeld and Katz. Communication hope, Simonson explains is "the dream that mass communication might overcome the finitude of local civil society [or face-to-face community] and bring about nationwide community [total solidarity]" (p. 324). These scholars, according to Simonson, overestimate the power of mass communication and underestimate the role of people and their local forms of communicative practices and the potential for reciprocal communication within these face-to-face exchanges. This dialogue versus dissemination debate is a powerful one and is noted in the work of other contemporary scholars (see Peters, 1999).

Genuine Community

In our practical discourse about community, Simonson (1996) puts forth an opposite pole from Sittlichkeit to explain the community talk about the need for a greater "sense" of community. This term, Geimenschaft, is borrowed from German sociologist Toennies. Bellah et al. (1985) offer much to say about this notion of community and why there is this need. Borrowing from Tocqueville’s expression for the traits that make up our national character, Bellah et al.’s (1985) Habits of the Heart addresses the enduring conflict between individualism and community. As stated above, Bellah et al. put forth the notion of lifestyle enclave in which the members are homogeneous in their interests, activities and perhaps even consumer patterns; therefore, a lifestyle enclave is likely to celebrate like-selves not otherness. Although many scholars may use the term lifestyle enclave synonymously with community, Bellah et al. contend that these two cannot be used in such an interchangeable fashion. In fact, they hold community in complete opposition to lifestyle enclave. They offer a definition of community, what they term the community of memory:

Community of memory’s heavy reliance on history and a group’s collective past is what differentiates this term from lifestyle enclave that relies on "shallow" sharing of interests, although Bellah et al. note the possibility for a hybrid of these two terms. "Many of what are called communities in America are mixtures of communities in our strong sense and lifestyle enclaves" (p. 335).

Based on this shared history, and what others point out as reliance on tradition and religion (Fowler, 1995), the community of memory seeks to be an inclusive whole, celebrating the interdependence of public institutions and private life. Examples of such communities of memory are kinships, religions, and republican traditions. The argument Bellah et al. (1985) make is that community in the United States is in deep trouble. For example divorce replacing and negating the sacred communion of husband and wife in marriage points to the fact that Americans do, indeed, neglect traditions. This neglect makes it more and more difficult to nurture our communities of memory. For Bellah et al. (1985), the chief reason behind the neglect of societal traditions is individualism, the egocentricity of people to believe "that the individual has a primary reality whereas society is a second-order" (p. 334). In situating the individual as central, they claim that we have lost the language necessary for communicating about a community of memory. "We do not use language in this book to mean primarily what the linguist studies. We use the term to refer to modes of moral discourse that include distinct vocabularies and characteristic patterns of moral reasoning" (p. 334).

Hart (1998), a rhetorician interested in community fragmentation, possesses what I feel is a possible theoretical explanation of why this neglect for and turn away from community to the centering of the individual and the discourse of individualism. He states, "For each community in existence, I assert, there is also an "uncommunity" (p. xxv). This uncommunity comes about through the polarizing effect of communication. As Fowler (1995) states some individuals see the reign of traditions like religion to have a tyrannical effect for those who did not choose to worship. Stemming from this example, Hart states that when one group or tradition communicates its community, there are those that may reject it and will not adhere to the hailing of this community. This uncommunity, Hart argues, is the darkside of what is so often positively cast. What Bellah et. al (1985) put forth as a genuine spiritual community of memory takes into account people’s history, and people’s common link. In the practices of negation of community, however, those who do not possess the same history or common link are cast out as the other. This otherness, in some cases, creates a differentiation and the fragmentation between communities and also between communities and individuals (Hart, 1998).

In the findings of their studies, Bellah et al state, "The erosion of meaning and coherence in our lives is not something Americans desire. Indeed , the profound yearning for the idealized small town that we found among most of the people we talked to is a yearning for just such meaning and coherence. But although the yearning for the small town is nostalgia for the irretrievably lost, it is worth considering whether the biblical and republican traditions that small town once embodied can be reappropriated in ways that respond to our present need" (pp. 282-283). I find in my own research that activist organizations (voluntary associations) operationalize these traditions in their everyday discourse but with somewhat of a twist. "Reclaim democracy" they shout, "Support local business." Within the same breath, this group mixes the messages of democracy--a tradition of equality of voice, group decision making and power--with consumerism--the talk of lifestyle enclaves--as a way to save community. In our postmodern era, where tradition and stability have flown out the door, people "in search" of meaning in life through their narcissistic ambitions, self indulgence and buying patterns, trial and error career and romantic interests have come up empty handed, dissatisfied and still yearning for meaning that can only be found in the company of others (Bellah et al., 1985).

The Dialogic Community

A notion of community that can combat this community/uncommunity juxtaposition as I demonstrated above as well as the self-centered monologue of individualism is that of a dialogue. A dialogic community was first theorized in the work of philosopher Martin Buber. The attention he placed on the need for the nourishment of community points to the overall importance of this concept to Buber as well as to other scholars. Community must be present in order "for life to be ultimately worth living" (Arnett, 1986). Much of his work has been revisited and extended upon by several scholars. Arnett (1986), for one, reviews Buber’s concept of dialogue and looks at the implications of applying this dialogic model to the context of community. Whereas Buber characterizes dialogue as taking place between "I" and "thou", he points to the space "between" these two concepts to be that of the true sphere of community. Buber states "Community is the overcoming of otherness in living unity...community is no union of the like-minded, but a genuine living together of men of similar or of complementary natures but of differing minds" (Buber as cited in Arnett, 1986, p. xi). Arnett (1986), in Communication and Community (1986), advocates for pushing people in their daily interactions, groups, and organizations to "go beyond association and begin to permit a sense of commitment to both the people and the ideals of the organization" (p. 7). Having this commitment to others as well as to self leads to a concept put forth by fellow communication scholar Friedman.

Also extending upon the work of Buber and his definition of community, Friedman (1983) theorizes a distinction between community of affinity and community of otherness. This community of otherness, according to Friedman, exists in constant creative tension between self and other--Buber’s space between the "I" and "thou". These tensions are inherent in our everyday interaction and must be confronted. In Adelman & Frey’s (1997) study of a Chicago AIDS hospice, the two researchers joined this community of co-researchers to look at the everyday dialectics at play within this "fragile community". This case study and others imply that we must also find a space within dialogic communities for open communication, that which displays both sides of a message. For Adelman & Frey (1997), one of the major oppositions was that of life and death as well as salvation and despair. As Arnett (1986) states, "the narrow-ridge embracing of contradictions and opposites implies a picture of a dialogic community" (p. 159). Goodall (1999) also demonstrates this openness when he acknowledges his first lesson learned in his search for community within the academy. "Our behavior in personal relationships is like our behavior in communities. Each is dependent on a dialogic foundation of honesty and disclosure, and out of these evolving conversations emerge shared values and rituals, visions and desires, actions , spirit and meanings" (p. 479).

Summary

In this section, I looked at the many ways in which scholars have theorized community and the relationship between community and communication within these conceptualizations. Based on this review, we can see that the relation between these two vastly ambiguous terms is a strong link. Within the community as place discussion, the emphasis was on face-to-face communication and its political implications. The argument I put forth in my discussion of virtual community is that we lose some of this face-to-face intimacy through computer-mediated communication and other technological developments. In looking at the genuine community, or what Bellah et al. (1985) term the community of memory, the importance is on reclaiming a language to discuss and nourish our historical traditions, a language surpassing our present-day language of individualism. And finally, we saw how communication must be open to the tensions between self and other in order to create the community of otherness or dialogic community. The intention is not to decide what conceptualization is the correct one, only to now have a better understanding of these different notions of community and the meaning that we, as scholars apply to them. In order to understand another facet of community and its connection to communication and to understand its given meaning within practical discourse, it is also necessary to address the empirical research of community as put forth by communication scholars.

Community Construction: Advancing a Sociocultural Tradition

I have found community is daily constructed for, and from, the personal experiences and dialectical practices of an evolving narrative self in dialogue with, and teaching and writing for, others". ~ Goodall, 1999, p. 492

Many communication scholars look at the construction of community in their empirical research (Aden et al., 1995; Johnson, 1994) particularly in organizations (Della-Pianna & Anderson, 1995; Ruud, 1995) and places or geographical locations (Rogers et al., 1995; Simpson, 1995). These studies typically look at the primary role of communicative practices and performances in this construction. Because meaning is "created and sustained by interaction in the social group" (Littlejohn, 1999, p. 155), in this section I pay close attention to the processual formation and social construction of community in organizations and everyday interaction.

Community as Web: My, How We Weave

In a personal communication between Lawrence Frey and H.L Goodall, Jr., Frey states with regard to the importance of everyday talk "that spirit is embedded and woven even more tightly in everyday, even mundane, gestures, including the griping, gossiping, and fighting that challenge people and, in the process, bind them firmly together" (as cited in Goodall, 1999, p. 491). All of these examples of everyday communication practices assign meaning to and weave our communities together. Penman (1996) states, "We bring about the idea of what a conversation and what community can mean in talking about them" (p. 16). Therefore, the thread that builds the webs of communities is the thread of vernacular and everyday discourse. But just as we learned in looking at the theories of community as place, we cannot assume that the discursively constructed community is permanent. In fact, as Rogers et al. (1995) explain, the only permanent feature of community is change. "At every level, it remains a community made out of the stuff of discourse, that it relies on a commonplace, collective energy, and that it requires the work of imagination and a willingness to sacrifice--these are constants. That it will remain as we built it, or that we should try to recapture what we once had--these are follies" (Goodall, 1999, p. 492). Webs can be respun too.

Socially constructed community. According to Rogers et al. (1995) "Social construction is the process through which meanings are given to objects and events by individuals through communication with other individuals" (p. 665). In their study of San Francisco’s Gay community response to the AIDS epidemic in the mid-80s, Rogers et al. (1985) operationalize community as a social system and an open one at that. In responding to this threat, the community reconstructs its meaning. Rogers et al (1995) state "When a major event threatens the stability of a system, it forces members of the systems to construct new and changing meanings of their community" (p. 676). Originally, San Francisco’s Gay community constructed four distinct meanings for four different social systems/geographic areas that catered to the Gay lifestyle. But in the face of this threat, the community respun this meaning and constructed a collective conceptualization of community, instead of these stand-alone social systems. For them, the threat of AIDS and the impacts on each of the distinct communities provided the collective community with a shared experience and history as well as the shared language of AIDS. I would argue that this serves as an example in everyday interaction of Bellah et al.’s (1985) community of memory, although not as "traditional" in nature.

Della-Pianna and Anderson (1995) argue that "Meaning-in-context is positioned as central to gaining an understanding of the practices and discourse of organizational life" (p. 188). To look at this meaning-in-context, the researchers conduct an ethnographic study to answer how everyday practices make meaningful and are made meaningful by the term community. What they uncover is how organizational actors deal with the dialogic tensions between meeting their own individual needs of performing community service and the organization’s commitment to social responsibility. These tensions in their talk point to the ambiguity of community and the open struggle among members to construct any single meaning.

Community as performance. Social construction as we learned above demonstrates the ways in which people give meaning to a concept through their interaction, specifically talk. Another research approach for discovering the meaning of community is to focus on performance or enactment of community (Simpson, 1995). Building off of Buber’s dialogic approach to community (Arnett, 1986), Simpson (1995) incorporates dialogue into his research. "Instead of looking at the city as a set of frozen images, I prefer to hear it as a site of conflicting and contested voices that articulate respective memoirs of Ybor City’s past and hopes for its future" (p. 704). Simpson’s emphasis then is on the performative and active nature of community. "Community is a site of active conflict--not something we have, not something that is written into the buildings but something we do" (p. 705).

"People actively occupy, struggle over and use such urban space" (p. 701). For Simpson the link between community and place is clear but, he claims, it is not the buildings or the physical that actually give that community meaning nor can that community be a stable, static site. Rather, community meaning derives from the actively intertwining discourses of race, ethnicity, food, the past, present, renewal, language and culture. Yet another web we weave.

Narratives within the construction of community. Along with the importance of everyday communication practices perfomances in the construction of community, a community’s narratives also formulate and construct meaning. As Bellah et al (1985) explain, communities of memory retell their histories in its constitutive narrative. Here the intention of these scholars is not to draw on grand narratives of a community of memory but to pay particularly close attention to the honesty, not only exposing the "heroes" of a group but also the "villains". "The communities of memory...are concerned in a variety of ways to give a qualitative meaning to the living of life, to time and space, to persons and groups" (p. 282). Bellah et al. (1985) focus on the mores, including the daily practices of life, to uncover their influence on the coherence of society and the viability of society’s future.

Aden, Rahoi, & Beck’s (1995) study of the film location of the popular Kevin Costner movie, Field of Dreams, relies heavily on the narratives of their co-researchers. In their development of a theory of interpretive community, the look at how people construct a individual and community meaning of an experience.

Fragmented community. As Goodall (1999) notes, it only takes three symbolic activities to kill a community--silence, lack of honestdialogue, and privileging only bureaucratic tasks. In Ruud’s (1995) study of a regional symphony, he demonstrates how difficult community is to achieve. He finds that different organizational subcultures each with their own identity and interests actually prohibit the formation of a cohesive community. Drawing from Burke’s notion of identification, Ruud (1995) points to his juxtaposing term, division, to describe the tensions between the subcultures. Ruud’s study is not the killing of community, as Goodall (1999) states above, but the fragmentation of community. He concludes that even fragmented communities can still achieve success as an organization despite differences of identity, values and interests.

Conclusion

In this paper, I offered a review of the social science literature, both theoretical and empirical, that addresses the highly contested notion of community. In the onset of this paper, I argued that a significant relation exists between community and communication. What I demonstrated in the first section is the role communication plays in each of these conceptualizations. I then moved to the second section where I addressed through the community research how communication—both practices and performances—construct the meanings of community for the members within them, whether singular in meaning—community solidarity—or multiple in meaning—community fragmentation.

This paper implies that the theories of the sociocultural tradition can prove highly useful in the study of community. As the above discussion demonstrates, community is performatively, symbolically and narratively constructed. A second implication is that community is not an "it" that we can find in our searches. "We don’t so much live within them as we make within them a space for our evolving, complex, often conflicted selves, which is to say that I (and probably you) need a community to be who I am" (Goodall, 1999, p. 488).

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