Rethinking Community through Transdisciplinary Research

This book offers the first interdisciplinary survey of community research in the humanities and social sciences to consider such diverse disciplines as philosophy, religious studies, anthropology, sociology, disabilities studies, linguistics, communication studies, and film studies. Bringing together leading international experts, the collection of essays critically maps and explores the state of the art in community research, while also developing future perspectives for a cross-disciplinary rethinking of community.

Pursuing such a critical, transdisciplinary approach to community, the book argues, can counteract reductive appropriations of the term ‘community’ and, instead, pave the way for a novel assessment of the concept’s complexity. Since community is, above all, a lived practice that shapes people’s everyday lives, the essays also suggest ways of redoing community; they discuss concrete examples of community practice, thereby bridging the gap between scholars and activists working in the field.

Bettina Jansen, Ph.D., is a research assistant and lecturer at the Department of English Literature, TU Dresden, Germany. She is the author of Narratives of Community in the Black British Short Story (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) and has published several articles on literary negotiations of community in black British short fiction in academic journals and essay collections. Bettina is also the co-editor of the first German-language handbook on masculinity studies, Männlichkeit: Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch (2016, with Stefan Horlacher and Wieland Schwanebeck).