Community, Self and Identity
Vivienne Bozalek
University of the Western Cape
South Africa
I am going to first talk about the concept of community and the different ways in
which it can be seen. I will then go on to discuss how ‘community’ was defined by
students in South Africa, by referring to a course entitled ‘Community, Self and
Identity’ that we have been running across two universities in the Western Cape,
South Africa. The two universities are Stellenbosch University which is an
historically white Afrikaans institution, with a conservative nationalist history, with a
predominant affluent white Afrikaans student population and the University of the
Western Cape, which is a historically black or disadvantaged institution, has a
leftwing tradition, servicing a largely black working class student population.
We as lecturers from social work, psychology and occupational therapy, as well as
teaching and learning experts and NGO practitioners got together to construct this
course where students could think about the notions of community, self and identity
and where they could discuss these notions in interaction with each other, both faceto-face and in a virtual environment. As practitioners and educators, we were keen to
get students together across these very different contexts, as they had had little contact
with each other in the past due to the social divisions in South African society. We
wanted students to become more conscious of their differences and similarities and
their positioning in relation to societal resources and to each other as future
professionals, who may be required to work together in the future. In this presentation
I am going to explain one of the tasks we used to achieve these goals for students and
to give you some examples of how students responded to these tasks and what they
said about community. Perhaps in this community work course, you will have the
opportunity to come together and do some similar exercises, looking at how you
construct community.
So I will now discuss in general terms the Concept of ‘Community’
Rather than seeing community as a thing which exists ‘out there’ to objectively study,
(this is what can be termed reification or essentialising the notion ‘community’), we
believe that community is a concept which is actively constructed in the discourses
and practices of everyday life. Community is a contested term and has been seen in
different ways during different time periods. What it is possible or permissible to
think about in a particular context or era, may not be possible to do so in another
context or era.
For example, in the 1980s, rather than seeing the notion of ‘community’ in an
altogether positive light, it became to be seen in more critical way by feminist
scholars such as Janet Finch in the United Kingdom especially with regard to who
was held responsible for care giving in a way in which people who did the care giving
work were not acknowledged. These feminist researchers alerted us to the rhetoric
implicit in the notion of ‘community care’ which in effect really meant the
withdrawal of state care and institutional care to care by women in the family (Finch
& Groves,1983, Finch 1989, Jagger and Wright, 1999). This also became known as a
familiarization of care, where family and community were used as codes for each
other – with community care actually meaning family care. When there is talk about
1
family and community it is actually another way of talking or a code for talk about
gender – in relation to the respective roles of men and women.
Communities have also been perceived as communities of place or geographical
locations and as communities of choice – the communities we choose to belong to
through common goals and visions or through common identities (Friedman, 1995 in
Lugones, 1998). We may not necessarily identify with the communities from which
we originate and in some cases we may be seen as resisters or as deviants from a
particular community.
In recent times, community has been seen as a relational concept referring to the
formation of social and mutual network relationships around particular issues.
Etienne Wenger (1998) has referred to the term ‘communities of practice’ by which
he means social relationships between people where there are negotiations of shared
meanings, mutual engagement and joint participation and enterprise. Wenger was
interested in examining how we learn in communities, where we get to construct our
own identities through active participation with others in social relationships. You
may have experienced this form of identification and been involved in a mutual and
collective effort to understand issues with virtual groups of students in the e-learning
courses that you have done so far, or perhaps you are involved socially in
communities of practice such as interest groups through facebook. According to
Wenger (1998) we all belong to communities of practice, and you can belong to a
number of different communities of practice at the same time, where you find value in
interacting and sharing knowledge about a concern and where your identities are
shaped and negotiated by discourse. So this notion of community stresses what we
have in common, rather than how we are the same. It can be seen as what we can
possibly become through the process of practicing community, rather than a static and
fixed notion of what we are and where both differences and linkages can be
accommodated (Phelan, 1998)
Constructions of Community in South Africa
In the Community, Self and Identity course that we ran in South Africa, we analysed
the different ways in which students talked and wrote to each other about notions of
community. We noted that students spoke about communities as geographical places,
they also spoke about their communities in a political sense, of sharing a common
political ideology, or a shared identity or belonging, as Colombo and Senatore (2005)
describe it, a we-group that is used to contrast ourselves from other groups and
identities regarded as ‘they’ or the other. We have also noted that when people use
the term ‘the community’ they are referring to those who are black and are
economically and socially marginalized rather than those who are privileged. White
students find it difficult to identify themselves as being part of a community or having
a community.
South Africa is a very unequal and still divided society. Even the apparently
politically neutral notion of community as geographical location is politically charged
in South Africa, because of the legacy of forced removals and enforced segregation
along racial and class lines. Previously mono racial neighbourhoods have remained
so in South Africa, with a minority of more middle class blacks moving into suburbs
2
which were previously inhabited only by whites. In addition to this, people of
different racial groups continue to practice forms of informal segregation in private
and public spaces. In this particular project, we provided the opportunity for students
to get to know each other across racial and class divides by bringing together students
from different higher education institutions and providing learning opportunities for
them to engage with each other.
Community mapping
At the initial workshop, students were asked to make drawings of their own
communities after which they shared and spoke about their drawings within small
diverse groups with students from different professions and institutions and differing
historically advantaged and disadvantaged backgrounds. This gave them the
opportunity to explore and interrogate their own constructions and ideas of
‘community’ and those of students who may be perceived as different from them in
terms of their racial, class and gender identities. The community mapping was both
explained by the facilitators in the following way to students:
Figure 1: Community Mapping Exercise
Community Mapping
Step 1
Draw a picture/map of your home and neighbourhood including the resources that are
there.
Step 2
Identify and label three things that you would like to change (these could be physical
things or relate to attitudes or social issues).
Step 3
Share in your group, explaining your picture/map and the reasons for wanting things
to change.
Examples of Student’s Drawings
Community Maps
Figure 1: Urban community UWC student 2007
3
4
Figure 2: Rural community UWC student 2007
5
Figure 3: Urban community SUN student 2006
Figures 1, 2 and 3 are maps of three very different communities and the challenges
faced by people living in them. Figure 1 drawn by a coloured student at UWC shows
a typical urban working class community with poor overcrowded services, high
unemployment leading to many people on the streets, shebeens (small informal
businesses that sell alcohol) which contribute to crime and a lack of safety, a lack of
recreational facilities, and exposure at school to substance abuse and other peer
pressures. In contrast Figure 2, Ikhaya Lam (My home), drawn by an African student
from a rural area shows a community lacking basic infrastructure, such as clean water
and sanitation, having to fetch wood for fuel and vast distances to basic services such
as the clinic, police services, school and to church. This isolated rural environment is
one in which children play safely together. Figure 3 depicts the affluent university
town of Stellenbosch where facilities and resources are abundant, as are part-time
work opportunities. The student’s chief concerns were for her personal safety on
account of crime, and that her family support system is far away.
These community mapping techniques were designed to provide students with
adequate space to be able to express themselves in relation to their experiences of
marginalisation and privilege. The goal was to provide an opportunity for students to
6
externalise issues – in other words to regard them in the complexity of their sociopolitical context rather than seeing them solely as personally or internally generated.
In their writing on the workshop experiences students gave many examples of how
community mapping foregrounded inequities of power and resources and at the same
time several students, indicated their own feelings of marginalisation and feelings of
shame and inferiority because of their impoverished backgrounds.
Reflections on differences in access to resources indicate that privileged students were
shocked by their ignorance of the vast discrepancies between communities while
others felt challenged to address the root causes of these imbalances.
“Generally one does know that not all communities have available running
hygienic water. Group discussion made me aware that people in my group
don’t even have running water at home. This made me aware of the fact that I
was once again taking privileges for granted.”
“The discrepancies in the distribution of resources among various
geographical communities were highlighted. Some group members regarded
this state of affairs as natural and not necessarily problematic, while others
were plagued [by] this injustice. The first-world/third-world dichotomy urged
us all to consider the roots of this issue as well as contemplate whether and
how these imbalances may be rectified”.
In discussing these experiences and making them visible in these small collaborative
learning communities, community mapping provides the opportunity for students to
consider both the impact of the local socio-political context, and their agency in
relation to this context, and so to generate alternative stories that could be useful for
them in their personal lives and in their practice as human service professionals.
Change Agents
In relation to commitment to action and change, the mapping of students’
communities and sharing of these appeared to be a powerful stimulus for them
thinking about themselves as change agents both for students from poorly resourced
communities and for privileged students who were humbled by their privilege and felt
a sense of responsibility and social justice.
Conclusion
Community mapping provided an effective tool for students to examine how they
were positioned in relation to their own resources and trajectories, and evaluate this
against those of their peers.
By sharing their drawings and stories, students were able to acquire a richer
understanding of privilege and deprivation on both an experiential and conceptual
level and were able to gain access to knowledge that had previously been hidden due
to apartheid geography and its subsequent effects. Learners were also able to begin to
interrogate notions of community that were hitherto taken for granted, through
interaction with each other and through accessing literature on different notions of
community.
7
In South Africa geographical spaces are imprinted with the legacy of race relations
under apartheid, so what is depicted in students’ drawings are tangible markers of the
continuation of this legacy of privilege and deprivation across race and class.
I am interested to know how you would depict your own communities, and how you
would interact across geographical contexts in communities of practice to discuss
your own socio-political contexts and their affects on your lives as future social work
practitioners. You could perhaps also use these techniques as beginning points in your
own practice as community workers where you get people to collaboratively look at
the sorts of issues they would like to change in their living situations.
References
Colombo, M. & Senatore, A. (2005). The discursive construction of community
identity. Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology, 15, 48-62.
Finch J and Groves D (eds) (1983), A Labour of Love: Women, Work and Caring ,
London: Routledge Kegan Paul Press.
Finch J. (1989), Family Obligations and Social Change , London: Polity Press
Jagger, Gill & Wright, Caroline (1999) ‘End of Century, End of Family? Shifting
Discourses of Family ‘Crisis’’ In G. Jagger & C. Wright, Changing Family Values.
London: Routledge
Lugones, M. (1998). Community. In A. M. Jaggar & I. M. Young (eds.), A
companion to feminist philosophy. Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers.
Phelan, Shane (1996). All the Comforts of Home: The Genealogy of Community. In
N. J. Hirschmann & C. Di Stefano (eds.) Revisioning the Political: Feminist
Reconstructions of Traditional Concepts in Western Political Theory. Colorado:
Westview Press
Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning and identity.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
8