Bordering Community

Abstract

Critically investigating the concept of community, this article explores some of the ideological and epistemological frameworks that have defined both the potentialities and the limitations of community as a liberatory and/or liberated space. This article sheds light on how ambiguously identified, bodied, and placed people are affected by cultures and systems of oppression in ways that create unique tensions with community and generate knowledge of the meaning of community itself. The major foci include the transgression, occupation, and policing of racial, gendered, and sexualized borders. In the final section, emerging questions, reflections, and implications for the field of social welfare are discussed.

British-LatinX writers: Self-representation of the new Latin American diaspora in the UK

“…Kimberly D. Hudson draws on Iris M. Yung’s idea of ‘community’ to affirm that “when ‘community’ is perceived as static, apolitical, homogeneous, and lacking ambiguity, it can become a totalizing mechanism that suppresses difference” (2012: 167). The perception of the Latin American community is often flawed in a similar way because, in reality, it is multidimensional and transcultural.…”

Claiming expertise from betwixt and between: Digital humanities librarians, emotional labor, and genre theory

“…Feminist theory frequently foregrounds the personal, lived experience as essential to understanding. Hudson (2012) highlights this embodiment in Chicana feminism and transnational feminisms when she discusses how later feminists such as Aida Hurtado built upon the work of Moraga and Anzaldúa to develop an "endarkened epistemology … in other words, a feminists-of-color way of knowing. This endarkened epistemology calls for multidisciplinarity, a bricolage of theories and methods, and a politics of urgency for scholarship to achieve social justice-related ends" (170).…”