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| "Who is the Community?/What is the Community?" |
| by: Phil Brown, Brown University (2005) |
| Published on: 4/1/2004 |
Community-based participatory research (CBPR) has been one of the most exciting developments in public health and social science research, while becoming an important practical feature for people facing environmental hazards. CBPR has highlighted the importance of community-based knowledge, community rights to control data and research, and community participation (Israel et al 1998; Quigley et al. 2000; Shepard et al. 2003; Minkler and Wallerstein 2003). Researchers in this field are aware of conflicting definitions of community (MacQueen et al. 2001), though much of the literature focuses on the identification of stakeholders and the protection of community rights in the research process. Far less has been written about the definition and nature of communities.
Our widespread use of the term “community” often masks a multiple reality in which there are diverse types of communities, as well as differences within communities. By exploring different meanings of community, we can develop a fuller approach to this growing CBPR movement, with a focus on environmental justice and environmental health activism. For example, some definitions of community involve a geographic area, such as a neighborhood or a city, while others involve a group of people united by racial/ethnic/tribal identity, by a common social or political goal, or by a shared disease experience. These other, transgeographic, communities are central to much identity, awareness, and activism.
This paper examine issues in both geographic and transgeographic communities. I am not discussing the benefits and drawbacks of geographic measures used in studying environmental inequality, since this is adequately discussed elsewhere (Greenberg 1993; Szasz and Meuser 1997; Krieg 1998; Mohai and Saha 2003), though I will discuss some recent work that points to historical differences as sometimes being more important than present geographic boundary differences.
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