Critical Issues: Circles of Kinship,Friendship,Position,and Power: Examining the Community in Community-Based Literacy Research 1

Abstract

Literacy research conducted in communities of practice outside classrooms and schools has proliferated in the last decade with little attention given to what it means to talk about literacy in “the community.” This article explores issues surrounding community-based literacy research and suggests that, although well intentioned, literacy researchers risk overdetermining, essentializing, and romanticizing what it means to engage in community-based literacy if we do not define and question what is meant by community. The need to define and complicate community as a construct is important, because communities are becoming more complex, and sometimes less communal, with the diversity and rapid change of new times and fast capitalism (Hall, 1995; Lankshear, 1997; Luke & Luke, 1999, in press). This piece examines various definitions of community that have framed community-based literacy studies to date and argues for concerted efforts to define and complicate perspectives on community in future research.