C

Summary

Community

The concept of community in education may refer to a wide range of formal and informal arrangements or collective movements, from classrooms, parent forums and management groups to professional, discursive and epistemic groupings that embody multiple histories and contexts. These collectives may be grounded in culture, policy making, science, nation-states or economic systems. In addition to communities being thought of as entities spanning scales from the local to the global, they may also be empirically studied as arrangements that are subject to multiple national and transnational influences. Increasingly, researchers have turned their attention to critical questions about which communities are acknowledged and made visible in research and which ones remain invisible or even marginalised. This includes a related focus on which communities influence agenda-setting and policy and how. The critique of human-centrism (anthropocentrism) in education research, for example, demonstrates how nonhuman communities affect and are affected by policy.

One of the most popular definitions of community can be traced to the seminal work of Anderson (1991) and his historical investigations of the emergence of nationalism and nation-states. Anderson (1991) describes the nation as an imagined horizontal comradeship irrespective of inequality and exploitation experienced by its members. Here, Anderson (1991) examines the different historical processes (including education) that create the conditions of possibility for these imagined communities to take shape. The nation as a community can be considered anonymous in the sense that its members will never meet all other members. Yet, according to Anderson (1991), these members imagine the nation as something confined to a finite space known as the sovereign state. This notion of ‘imagined communities’ has emerged within empirical studies beyond any singular interest in nationalism, following Anderson's (1991) claim that communities can be ‘distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined’ (p 7) and that many communities will be defined by imagination because they are temporally and spatially unfixed. Stables (2003), for example, characterises the school as an imagined discursive community, one that is mobilised by students and teachers but also by those who are not directly connected to it, such as politicians.