Traversing the swampy terrain of postmodern communities: Towards theoretical revisionings of community development

This paper engages with recent theoretical explorations of 'community' and situates community development within a futures framework which emphasizes creative possibilities for traversing the often contested, paradoxical terrain of postmodernism. Such an engagement is posited as important given that practice traditions such as community development have continued to rely predominantly on modernist reference points, which are increasingly showing signs of inadequacy in relation to contemporary issues and contexts. Some recent arguments have suggested that the material base of 'community' (and therefore of 'community practice') is under attack from both political and ideological processes such as globalization and postmodernism. Paradoxically, in social theory more generally, there is a simultaneous renewed interest in notions of 'community', and potentials for the development of new local sites of resistance in relation to these very same processes. Primarily a theoretical contribution to the creation of possibilities for re-visioning community development under conditions of globalization and postmodernity, this paper presents and explores three signposts which signal a range of challenges for the futures of community development: interpreting 'community' as a VERB--not a NOUN--and thereby bringing meaning, context and relationality to the centre; integrating the personal, the local and the global and thereby placing community development in a wholistic framework; and, accepting different ways of knowing, doing and being in community development, and thereby opening spaces for difference and mystery in praxis.