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Where
Are You Comin' From, Where Are You Goin' To:
Conclusion This review of the literature has attempted to identify different approaches to community, as well as key concepts relevant to this project, including ideology as it operates within the Black community. Several other issues important to this research are discussed in this concluding section. First, it is clear that the research on community must explore how community is created, reproduced, and contested in a material context (Fuoss, 1995; Hall, 1993; Hummon, 1990; Kingsolver, 1992; Pred, 1990; Whitt & Slack, 1994). Radical geographer Allen Pred (1990) writes that "any reduction of social processes to abstract categories independent of the situated materiality of social life, independent of concrete space-time specific practices and social relations, is futile" (p. 229). Sometimes, the scholarly discussion of community can become caught up in abstractions. While "community is a concept whose definition continues to engage scholars in debate," argues Fuoss (1995), "concrete human beings acting in specific contexts nevertheless continue to think through and act according to their conceptions of community" (p. 81; see also Cohen, 1985). Add Ono and Sloop (1995):
Attention must be paid to how individuals draw upon different community memberships in "placing" themselves ideologically. Individuals have multiple community memberships, and which one(s) they choose to articulate in a given context may offer insight into how ideologies are produced, maintained and contested. The act of placing oneself in a community or in a particular position within a community can be the means through which people resist or consent to hegemonic systems of representation. Why is one community membership articulated over another? Is the membership that is articulated actually a mask, a façade put up in consent to dominant re-presentations? The community memberships individuals mask in particular contexts must be made visible rather than ignored. Through a critical approach to community as constituted in vernacular discourse, I will describe the dialogical process of placing through which community memberships are negotiated and ideologies emerge. Accordingly, the focus of this study is placing: A communication form of the vernacular through which community memberships are claimed (or never articulated), and through which ideologies are created and contested. Placing is examined as embodied in the material, discursive context of the Black student community at California State University, Northridge. How does placing operate as a microprocess of consent or resistance to being "placed" in a particular community? When people respond to the question, "Where are you from?" -- how and where do they place themselves? Why are certain community memberships and ideologies articulated in one context but not in another? How do community members use placing as a means to articulate subjectivities and ideologies? As critical research, the goal of this project is to examine
the community in a way that does not essentialize it, but that instead,
views community members -- and the researcher -- as "always in negotiation,
not with a single set of oppositions that place us always in the same
relation to others, but with a series of different positionalities"
(Hall, 1993, p. 112). Next: CHAPTER 2: How We Get There
Placing and Black Students' Discursive Construction of Community Copyright (c) 1996, Corinna J. Moebius |