In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Introduction
  • Jacqueline Ellis and Ellen Gruber Garvey

In Keywords, Raymond Williams summarizes his definition of the word “community” as:

the warmly persuasive word to describe an existing set of relationships, or the warmly persuasive word to describe an alternative set of relationships. What is most important, perhaps, is that unlike all other terms of social organization (state, nation, society, etc.) it seems never to be used unfavourably, and never to be given any positive opposing or distinguishing term.

(76)

Williams’s juxtaposition is made evident in that the “unfavorable” terms he identifies have been consistently used to advance political, social, and economic policies that undermine communities. In 1987, for instance, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher famously claimed that “there is no such thing as society”—a comment that is usually removed from its context:

too many people have been given to understand that if they have a problem, it’s the government’s job to cope with it. “I have a problem, I’ll get a grant.” “I’m homeless, the government must house me.” They’re casting their problem on society. And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first. It’s our duty to look after ourselves and then, also to look after our neighbor.

(Thatcher)

Thatcher’s rejection of “society” is predicated on the reification of individualism, on the “individual men and women” who “look after [themselves]” and thus depends on a related disavowal of collective responsibility, of the notion of community.

The idea of “community” was similarly disparaged in 2008 when vice-presidential candidate and then mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, Sarah Palin, compared [End Page 125] her political experience with Barack Obama’s in her speech to the Republican National Convention: “I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities,” she noted, to rapturous applause from the delegates (Weeks). Palin’s remarks were criticized outside the convention by grassroots activist organizations from across the political spectrum; nevertheless, her political deployment of “community” echoes Thatcher’s and complicates Williams’s binary notion of community as simply a “warmly persuasive word”—the opposite of potentially more pernicious terms like “state, nation [or] society.”

As our guest editors note in their introduction to this special issue of Transformations, Teaching Community, in recent months, politics in the United States and globally have galvanized communities of resistance. At the same time, however, notions of community that were not necessarily “warmly favorable” were also significant. The Brexit campaign in the United Kingdom and the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States depended not only on notions of nationalism and state sovereignty built on xenophobia, racism, and militarism, but also on discourses about ideas of community—deindustrialized communities, communities “left behind” by globalization, communities ignored by corrupt politicians, communities ravaged by drug addiction, religious communities, rural communities, communities threatened by terrorists or by “illegal immigrants.” Consider, for example, candidate Trump’s racist vision of African American communities as “absolutely in the worst shape they’ve ever been in before. Ever. Ever. Ever. . . . You take a look at the inner cities. You’ve got no education. You’ve got no jobs. You get shot walking down the street” (Jacobson). Trump’s comments imagined a degraded community—detached from facts and history—as a way to appeal to communities of white voters.

The essays collected in this issue of Transformations address community as a site for organization, resistance, contestation, and education. The authors explore the various ways in which teachers can build community in their classrooms and in spaces outside it and, in the process, complicate our own and our students’ understanding of what community is. This issue offers insights into the complexity of “teaching community” in different regions of the United States and extends to Hyderabad, India; Buenos Aires, Argentina; Oaxaca, Mexico; and The Hague, the Netherlands.

Kate Culkin in “Doing Historian Business: Local History, Student Historians, and the Hall of Fame for Great Americans” and Juilee Decker, in “Beyond Cul-de-Sac Pedagogy...

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