Community

This notion is about the concept of community in its most inclusive post-anthropocentric form.

Refer to the concept of Interspecies for different type of relations, relations in the community are necessarily heterogenous.

Key Issues

The anthropocentric bias
Speciesism
Exclusion of non-animal members
Exclusion of abiotic members

Definitions

Community is an ecological network of social systems. It occupies an ecological field. Cf. socio-political ecology perspective.

From disaster research, a much-used text:

Peacock, Walter Gillis, and A. Kathleen Ragsdale. “Social Systems, Ecological Networks and Disasters: Toward a Socio-Political Ecology of Disasters.” In Hurricane Andrew: Ethnicity, Gender, and the Sociology of Disasters, edited by Walter Gillis Peacock, Hugh Gladwin, and Betty Hearn Morrow, 20–35. New York: Routledge, 1997.

Plant Communities

There are positive interactions in plant communities.
This leads to interdependence in plant communities.
It is possible to say that the function of trees (or their value to the community) is to be dead.

Callaway, Ragan M. Positive Interactions and Interdependence in Plant Communities. Dordrecht: Springer, 2007.

Lortie, Christopher J., Rob W. Brooker, Phillipe Choler, Zaal Kikvidze, Richard Michalet, Francisco I. Pugnaire, and Ragan M. Callaway. ‘Rethinking Plant Community Theory’. Oikos 107, no. 2 (2004): 433–38. https://doi.org/10/cksmz8.

Communities in Ecology

Communities of Practice

A human concept. Can it apply to more-than-human communities?

McDonald, Jaquelin. ‘Communities of Practice’. In International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, edited by James D. Wright, 2nd ed., 328–31. 2001. Reprint, Amsterdam: Elsevier Science, 2015.

Definition

Humans participate in many communities:

professional associations
community or neighbourhood watch
religious groups
hobbies

Not all communities are communities of practice.

A community of practice combines:

a ‘domain’ of activity or knowledge that creates a sense of common identity
the ‘community’ who are the members who care about the domain
the shared ‘practice’ the community members develop to be effective in the domain

Commons

The notion of community relates to the notion of Commons.

Imagined Community

"from lindenmayer: '"Temperate eucalypt woodland landscapes are iconic ecosystems that have featured frequently in Australian Indigenous and European history. They were a source of inspiration for great artists such as Tom Roberts, Arthur Streeton and Hans Heysen (Fig. 8.1). Indeed, for Australia’s largely urban population, temperate woodlands have become the quintessential image of the Australian bush"

Lindenmayer, David, Suzanne Prober, Mason Crane, Damian Michael, Sachiko Okada, Geoff Kay, David Keith, Rebecca Montague-Drake, and Emma Burns. “Temperate Eucalypt Woodlands.” In Biodiversity and Environmental Change: Monitoring, Challenges and Direction, edited by David B. Lindenmayer, Emma; Burns, Nicole Thurgate, and Andrew Lowe, 283–334. Colingwood: CSIRO, 2014.

Design and Imagination

See the note on Community-Driven Design, also Imagination

Subnotes