We utilize the novella In Watermelon Sugar by Richard Brautigan as an expressive medium for understanding existential and community-based research. We analyze the story to reveal a phenomenological description of community as a lived experience and then demonstrate how the existentially shared experiences of finitude, alterity, and supplementarity can help inform the work community researchers do. We note the maintaining of community through the processes of mimesis, victimization, and scapegoating, and ask: How do we extricate ourselves from this cycle of violence? As community researchers, where can we ethically stand when intervening with and on behalf of others? In answer to these questions, we relate the moment of augenblick and the ethics of the Levinasian face-to-face encounter to a distinctly communal experience called communitas. Communitas is envisioned as a methodology supporting community based, participatory research and aligned with contemporary humanistic, feminist, critical, and intersectional theories.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.