Spaces for inclusive communities : reflections on contemporary society

Abstract

Locating the debates around community is no easy task. The main discourses around community are countless (Mills, 2006). This chapter will weave what I consider to be some of the most significant, focal and complex debates that will contribute to the problematizing of discourses around community and its development. Naturally, an ‘inclusive community’ does not entail erasing variety that society is endowed with, more so, it implies that all groups within the community and all individuals gather around a critical notion, namely inclusiveness. There are some important initial questions we need to engage with to further examine community, explicitly: – How do we conceptualise community? – What are useful concepts in trying to understand communities? – How is the term community used in every day dealings? – Writings on community are in abundance, but are we strengthening our understanding of such a complex, mostly unpacked thesis? Whereas there are a number of compound discourses that are associated with the idea of community, a particularly important premise is that communities are interconnected. Others claim that community in its own right is a value. The qualities we think construct communities are brought together by treatises ranging from membership to proprietorship, from reliability to citizen’s interaction in multiple and mutually reinforcing contexts.