Institute of International Studies; University of California Berkeley
The complexity of community thus relates to the difficult interaction between tendencies originally distinguished in ... historical development: on the one hand the sense of direct common concerns; on the other the materialization of various forms of common organization, which may or may not adequately express this.
Raymond Williams, Keywords (1973, p. 76)
The purpose of Community in Contention is to explore the prospects for and meanings of community in the new millennium's irreducibly global world. It is indisputable that the community, the fulfillment of E.M. Forster's injunction to "only connect," figures centrally in much contemporary public debate and academic scholarship. The "revival of community" as Adrian Oldfield calls it in Citizenship and Community (1990) is seen in the lively dialogue between liberals and communitarians on the American political stage, but its reach and appeal stretches far wider. In the field of development theory and practice, the much-touted call for decentralized participation turns on the purported powers of self-governing communities, what Bardhan (1997, p.45) cryptically calls "anarcho-communitarianism." Community-based management has become the rallying call of green politics, indeed is held as a prerequisite for environmental sustainability. And, not least, the profusion of multicultural politics has placed community membership and identity at the center of wide-ranging reflections on the role of civil society in relation to democracy and citizenship, what Michael Walzer (1991) has dubbed "critical associationalism." It is equally indisputable, of course, that community as a "keyword" whose meaning turns on questions of membership, shared meanings and identity, has a long and checkered history. American history is punctuated by moments in which the demise of community is lamented or the call for community revitalization is energetically preached.1 What distinguishes the current revivalism, however, is its rootedness in the realities of global capital flows, transnational movements of people, ideas and information, and in the complex forms of political fragmentation, centralization, and violence which have accompanied the end of the Cold War.
The notion of community encompasses an enormous swath of intellectual territory. It includes scholarship, activism and practice on the one hand, and spans several disciplines and professional fields on the other. Community in Contention proposes to focus on three themes which invite conversations across fields in novel and exciting ways, linking, for example, minority rights activists with human ecologists, and philosophers with human rights practitioners. Community also entertains the notion of a "politics of scale" (Smith 1992) in which questions of membership and meaning can be explored at a number of differing levels from the diasporic to the gated urban community. The goal is not to replicate what in some cases are substantial and complex bodies of scholarship -- for example on communitarianism or on community and universal rights -- but to emphasize relatively understudied fields, and uncharted connections, in the ferment over community, all of which can be productively interrogated through the proposed forms of scholarly cross-fertilization. The program envisages three year-long themes. The first theme addresses communities in crisis in post-genocidal, war torn and environmentally calamitous circumstances. Here the focus is on reconstruction, the rebuilding of trust and cultures of tolerance. The second theme, communities in exile, speaks to various forms of community displacement and the conditions which surround what Edward Said (1994) has called the "exilic condition." The final theme, community, democracy, governance, examines the relations between community and new and emerging notions of citizenship, social forms of co-ordination of activity, and the very meanings and practices of democracy itself.
Community in Contention has a unique institutional setting in which dialogues between humanities, social sciences and practitioners/professionals can be nourished. The program, under the auspices of the Institute of International Studies (IIS), links three free-standing, and hitherto relatively autonomous, entities on the Berkeley campus: the Human Rights Center (HRC) , the Townsend Humanities Center (THC), and the IIS. HRC's mission combines research and advocacy in the protection and promotion of international rights and humanitarian law. The THC has a substantial presence on the Berkeley campus linking arts and humanities around a number of important and long standing themes, most importantly memory and identity, social suffering and rights talk. And IIS has at its core a concern with cross-regional and transnational phenomena constructed around four major programs: multilateral governance, the politics of cultural identity, environmental politics, comparative modernities, and globalization, risk and economic inequality. Through a series of working groups, workshops, seminars and postdoctoral residencies, Community in Contention will inspire intellectual and scholarly new synergies between diverse and prominent constituencies. Crossing boundaries is an appropriate metaphor for the program not only because of the desired mutual trespassing across humanities and social sciences, but also because boundaries are central to the idea of community itself. Community is a simultaneously symbolic, institutional , and practical project; it is necessarily a political and economic enterprise, but one which demands what Paul Willis (1990) calls "necessary cultural work." There is no better vehicle for sustaining a dialogue between humanities, social science and practitioners.
See the full proposal to the Rockefeller Foundation [~100k pdf], or read more at the links below:
The program is funded by the Rockefeller Foundation.
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