This introduction outlines the focus and scope of the study, explaining its motivation, remit, and overall aim. It offers brief thoughts on relevant interpretive issues, explains the structure of the book, and provides brief summaries of each of the subsequent chapters.

I argue that through his account of the meaning of, and need for, solidarity, Rorty offers a non-juridical vision of liberal community built upon a political ethos of hope. This political ethos of hope is necessary to combat the threat posed by pathological individualism to contemporary liberal democratic societies. This ethos is characterised by attention to the cruelty that we inadvertently cause to others through the exercise of our private freedoms. It involves an explicit commitment to curiosity and an implicit demand for humility in our interactions with our fellows. These values have radical and far-reaching implications for Rorty’s account of political conversation – how we approach our dialogues with others, and the language that we use therein – in his idealised liberal community. I contrast these implications with deliberative democratic norms and put distance between Rorty’s view of political conversation and J. S. Mill’s account of free expression in a liberal society and the accounts of epistemic injustice offered by Fricker and Medina. I attempt a nuanced interpretation of Rorty’s understanding of the relevance of identity to politics.

As co-management often involves resource-using community participation, understanding of what is meant and understood by the concept of community is critical. The chapter therefore begins by recognising the contested nature of the concept of ‘community’, noting critique of assumptions regarding shared interests and priorities, and reflects on different forms of community, how communities may emerge over time and recognition of ‘delocalisation’ of communities in relation to natural resource governance. Different bases of social cohesion are then considered and forms of the related concept of social capital reviewed. Insights from research into how cohesion and social capital influence co-management emphasise the centrality of relationships. Given that co-management may involve multiple and diverse communities, representation of actors is generally necessary. The section on representation considers what representation implies and what bases of representation have been found within the experience of co-management.

I begin here to articulate Rorty’s alternative understanding of hope. Rorty’s understanding has been ignored both by those scholars interested in hope and by those concerned with his intellectual legacy and political identity. I argue that hope, for Rorty, involves the yearning for a future that is contingent and the commitment to redescribing – and thereby contesting – the identity of a fragile social world and political inheritance in the name of its betterment. I suggest that Rorty’s understanding of hope stems from his reading of Hegel’s account of philosophy in The Philosophy of Right. I then unpack Rorty’s enigmatic claim – advanced in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity – that ‘common hopes’ are necessary for sustaining liberal community, which I suggest is given revealing illustration in his infamous Achieving Our Country. I argue that Achieving Our Country is a much-misunderstood text and suggest that we should not regard it as a kind of prediction, but rather as the articulation of hope for his own community and a contestation of its political future through a narrative of redemption.

The political failure of community is the background against which a range of post-Marxist European philosophers have sought to rethink what community could be. This chapter focuses in particular on Jean-Luc Nancy, Roberto Esposito, and Giorgio Agamben, who have made substantial contributions to what we might call a new philosophy of community. Nancy, Esposito, and Agamben ask how community, not least because of its promise of solidarity, can continue to serve a political purpose, despite the violence of the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft, which appears to be the logical endpoint of any conception of community. But Nancy, Esposito, and Agamben also respond to the failure of community’s presumed revolutionary potential to become a site of resistance against both capitalism and the modern state. Should community be conceived in the plural (Nancy), as a gift economy (Esposito), or as a coming community of stateless refugees (Agamben)? Such attempts to save community come at a considerable cost, both philosophically and politically, since they make community irrelevant for a normative theory of democracy.

Appeals to “community” and to “the common” have become increasingly frequent in political thought. In this chapter, I focus on some of the reasons for the appearance of such appeals in the landscape of contemporary political thought. This chapter also highlights some of the uncanny intellectual links across the entire political spectrum, from European post-Marxist and American communitarian philosophers to the public intellectuals of the neofascist “New Right.” These links emerge and play out in a broader intellectual field that is shaped both by the political economy of Western Europe and North America after 1945 and by the failure to address the obvious shortcomings and negative effects of this political economy. Against this broader background, current appeals to community in political thought can be seen as a response to the lived experience of neoliberal capitalism, which has led to a legitimation crisis of liberal constitutional democracy. But I am also going to suggest that appeals to community invariably tend to drift into an antidemocratic direction.

This Introduction provides an overview of the main themes of the book and questions the democratic potential we often attach to “community” and to “the common.” Community might be what we desire from political life, and it is tempting to hope that a return to community can correct much of the current disillusionment with liberal constitutional democracy and the state of civil society. Instead, I argue that, as models for the normative organization of political life as a whole, neither community nor the common are compatible with the normative demands of democracy. The communitarian desire of much political thought often stands in sharp contrast to the pluralism of democracy.

What lurks behind appeals to “community” and a “democracy of the common” as models for the organization of political life is the desire for an existential authenticity that has overcome the contradictions and antagonisms that are part of normal political life under the conditions of democratic pluralism. Placing our hopes in community and the common as alternative, and somehow more authentic, models for the organization of political life always comes at the cost of preparing the ground for abandoning democracy altogether. Real democracy, counterintuitively, does not require community, but it involves distance among those who are represented, those who represent, and those who govern. We might experience this distance as alienating, or as inauthentic, but it allows for what we might call the self-control of self-government. In contrast to appeals to “community” and “the common,” the task of democracy is to negotiate the irreducible pluralism of political life through a normative organization that can be justified to, and is also justifiable by, all those who are subject to such norms.

The loss of community is often seen as one of the reasons for the alienating experience of modernity. Community seems to allow for a civic-minded solidarity that counteracts the legitimation crisis of democracy by returning agency to citizens. Such a demand for a communitarian correction to liberal constitutional democracy is not without dangers, even when this demand is intended to stand in the service of a more democratic life. This chapter traces the fate of this communitarian desire in a broader transatlantic field, highlighting the uncanny connections among the philosophical debate about communitarianism, the antidemocratic and authoritarian drift in American conservative political and legal thought, and central aspects of European neofascism. These connections should make us suspicious about the democratic potential often ascribed to community. The ease with which arguments for a communitarian correction of democracy can be used against democracy suggests that community lacks an intrinsically democratic and emancipatory potential.

This chapter turns to the forces of unity that drove patients’ publishing projects, focusing on the role of asylum periodicals in construing and maintaining real and imagined communities within and beyond the asylum. Producing and consuming periodicals brought together various actors with distinct skill sets, enabling, to a degree, transgression of the institutional boundaries that otherwise kept different groups of patients separated. This transgression fed into the representation of the asylum community as a family on the pages of asylum periodicals, reenforcing the institutionally imposed family model, according to which patients were ascribed the role of children under the care and protection of a father-like superintendent and a motherly matron. However, asylum periodicals show not only the manifestation of this framework’s application but patients’ active engagement with these symbols. Finally, the chapter explores former inmates’ continuous involvement in asylum periodicals, suggesting that some patients formed lasting and meaningful connections during their stay in mental institutions and relied on the asylum for support during their reintegration into society.

This chapter brings social context and social structure into the story of crime hot spots. We begin by examining why criminologists have, for the most part, ignored micro geographic study of crime until the late twentieth century. This was, in part, the result of not having data available at the micro geographic level, but also related to the overriding interests of sociologists in the study of spatial criminology with micro geographic units, such as neighborhoods and communities. We then turn to the importance of new theoretical innovations that focused interest on hot spots of crime, but led criminologists to largely ignore the social context of these places. Having placed the study of crime hot spots in historical perspective, we bring social context into the study of crime and place by examining variability of measures of social disadvantage and social disorganization across hot spots and non-hot spot streets in our study. We pay particular attention to informal social control as measured by collective efficacy in communities (Sampson et al., 1997). We also examine characteristics of hot spots that are often seen as tightly linked to crime, such as social and physical disorder and fear of crime.

At the heart of effective inclusive education lies a shared understanding among all stakeholders. When early childhood communities develop collective commitment to inclusive philosophies, they establish the essential groundwork for sustainable change. This shared vision recognises that inclusion extends beyond physical placement to encompass full participation, valued contribution and authentic belonging. The It takes a village approach acknowledges that inclusion cannot be the responsibility of individual educators working in isolation; rather, it requires coordinated effort across the entire early childhood community. When staff, families and community co-design inclusive principles together, they develop ownership and commitment that withstands the inevitable challenges of implementation.

You may have thought that as an early childhood education and care (ECEC) provider, your unifying focus will be centred around on the children in your setting. Supporting children’s learning and wellbeing may indeed be the priority, but this cannot be achieved without the positive involvement of children’s family members. Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems model describes the layered systems of support that children can be influenced by, acknowledging that no individual child exists in a vacuum (See chapters 1 and 2 for further details). The resources and wellbeing of the family as a whole will have an impact on children’s development, behaviour and engagement in ECEC settings, as well as at home and other community settings.

Chapter 13 explores the concept of mathematical identity and how both students and teachers come to see themselves in relation to mathematics. It examines the impact of maths anxiety – particularly in the early years of teaching – and how identity is influenced by community, context, and experience. The chapter highlights the importance of understanding and responding to diverse school settings, including rural, regional, and remote communities. You will also consider how to meaningfully embed the Australian Curriculum cross-curriculum priorities – Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures, Asia and Australia’s engagement with Asia, and sustainability – within mathematics lessons.

This chapter interrogates two misconceptions about Ngũgĩs early life and shows how his early years informed Ngũgĩ’s early writing. Ngũgĩ’s parents were not ahoi (tenants-at-will), as he once claimed. Drawing upon his recent memoirs and the ‘autobiographical moments’ in his later essay collections, I foreground Ngũgĩs birth ‘in a large peasant family’ and parse their diminishing property rights, from peasants with reasonably large land-holding to land-poor peasants who hired out their labour. I parse the family dynamics that inform Ngũgĩ’s investment in equity and communitarian values, and his emerging interest in oral storytelling and performance, coupled with a motivation to escape the trap of poverty through Western education. While Kamĩrĩĩthũ defined much of Ngũgĩ’s later work, it was not his birthplace. The dislocation to Kamĩrĩĩthũ during the Emergency (1955–9) anchored him in the primal scene of postcolonial Gĩkũyũ identity, but also nurtured an interest in theatre as a tool for community-building and carceral institutions more generally. Both the colonial school and the Emergency village became major settings for his early works. Ironically the recursive image of the train station at Limuru in A Grain of Wheat occurred to Ngũgĩ while on a train ride from Leeds to Scotland, uniting two planes of coloniality.

This chapter characterizes the five central themes that emerged from and unite the contributions to this book. It clarifies how the contributors characterized a defining conundrum of Black poetry, traces its intellectual interventions and its communal sensibilites, identifies its innovative origins and emphasis on syncretism, and captures its artistic beauties. And it clarifies how the contributors characterize the growing influence of African American poets in determining the terms of literary value in US literary culture. It verifies the expertise by which these essays validate African American poetry as a distincitve tradition and as an aspect of a US national tradition which it both critiques and enhances.

This chapter proposes ways of becoming more aligned with the aspirations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students and community members through pre-service and professional experiences. It also outlines a range of strategies and opportunities that seeks to make sense of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories, cultures and education studies for participants in Initial Teacher Education (ITE) programs through corequisite, experiential learning opportunities in educational and community settings. The chapter also discusses some of the challenges and dilemmas that may be encountered in the process of developing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander professional experience frameworks within teacher education programs.