This event is part of the School of Education's 'Bristol Conversations in Education' seminar series.

Speaker: Dr Bradon Smith

“…community is denied contemporary being-ness, always deferred, lost, projected into the future, the past” (Studdert 2006)

This work-in-progress seminar will focus on a current project looking at the research projects which comprised the Connected Communities programme – a major UK research council funded programme of research with and about communities. This project aims to address the question of how academic knowledge about ‘community’ has been developed through the programme. To focus this very broad question, I take the position that a distinctive contribution of the Connected Communities programme has been, among other contributions, to place ‘community’ in time.

I will ask: how have the projects of the Connected Communities programme framed the relationship between communities and temporality? Taking a set of projects explicitly engaging with temporality, or predominantly concerned with the pasts or futures of communities, I will argue that projects within the programme have resisted an ontology of community which frames it as a static ‘thing in the world’, an easily identifiable and locatable object, and instead have insisted on the various and dynamic temporalities of communities.