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Abstract

Community is elusive, desirable, rhetorical; something lost and something to be built; a relationship, a concept, a synonym, a place (real or imagined). This article explores the roles that the complexity of community’s conceptualisation has played in the development of political identities, goals and rationales for action. Drawing on the ways in which it has been conceptualised and utilised in sociological, historical and political understandings of social change, and a series of interviews with members of British socialist organisations, the article examines the relationship and equation between ‘community’, and ‘location’, ‘local’ and ‘place’ that develop as these terms become drawn into a wider project for social transformation. It is argued that ideas of location have not only framed how community is operationalised to imagine and enact this transformation, but that location itself is conceptualised in multiple, equally complex ways through this association. Social change becomes relatable, an articulable experience of large-scale processes, of social problems, of power and resistance. Community is reified, and change is made possible through a sense of locality.

Keywords

activism community local location memory place political goals projection social change socialism

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Community,locality and social(ist) transformation

Abstract

Keywords

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