Conceptualising Community

Keynote speakers: Gerald Taylor Aiken (Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research), Dilar Dirik (University of Oxford), and Bonnie Honig (Brown University)

Practical information & schedule: The conference will take place at the University of Aberdeen New King’s building on Monday 30th and Tuesday 31st May, from 9am-5pm. The full schedule is available here, along with the book of abstracts. The keynote lecture times are listed below.

  • Monday 30th May 9.30am – 11am: Keynote lecture by Gerald Taylor Aiken (room NK06)
  • Monday 30th May 3.30pm – 5pm: Keynote lecture by Bonnie Honig (room NK06)
  • Tuesday 31st May 9.30am – 11am: Keynote lecture by Dilar Dirik (room NK06)

The conference is open for external participants to attend. Please contact the organisers at conceptualisingcommunity@abdn.ac.uk to register your attendance. We strongly encourage everyone to take lateral flow tests before attending the event; if you are unable to source these please get in touch.

Community is among the foremost political concepts. Coexistence, human or otherwise, inevitably raises questions about how this togetherness should be conceptualised and how the politics of community is or should be carried out. 

Questions regarding the ways in which communities are formed, who is included or excluded by them, and what rights or access this allows or curtails, remain central to many of the experiences and struggles that dominate today’s social and political landscape. Indeed, political struggles are often if not always concerned with communities who share experiences of oppression, contesting exclusion from a wider dominant community, or pushing for the creation or recognition of alternate communities. Given the centrality of community to politics across the world and throughout history, the concept is in continual need of critical analysis, reflection, and (re)thinking. 

This event aims to bring together scholars from a wide variety of disciplines to critically explore, question, and interrogate ‘community’ as a political concept, including how it is used by people all over the world in structuring their lives. How, on what basis, and to what effect do different understandings of community inform politics and contemporary social and political struggles? Are communities always constituted by exclusion, and to what extent is this justified? What role has community played in current global experiences including the COVID-19 pandemic and climate and ecological crises? What role does or should community play in every facet of social and political life, including education, media, religion, law, and social movements? And vice versa, how do these aspects inform and create new forms of community and new ways of sharing coexistence? With this in mind, this event aims to explore not only political communities, but also other forms of community, including but not limited to religious and moral communities, as well as how these interrelate. 

We also intend to explore the concept of community on a more abstract theoretical level. What does ‘community’ mean in the first place? To what extent does the concept of community presuppose sameness, and what degree of difference can it accommodate? How did contemporary philosophical understandings emerge historically, and to what extent is community still a useful concept for contemporary politics? How does community relate to, or oppose, other concepts (for example, society)? To what degree are mainstream understandings of community Eurocentric?

We welcome conceptual and empirical submissions from a multitude of disciplines, including but not limited to philosophy, sociology, politics, international relations, anthropology, law, de- and postcolonial studies, feminism, critical theory, education, and media studies.

View the Facebook event here. Images © Elise Boyle Espinosa

This event is organised by Maxim van Asseldonk and Elise Boyle Espinosa (contact: conceptualisingcommunity@abdn.ac.uk). It is hosted by the Centre for Citizenship, Civil Society, and Rule of Law at the University of Aberdeen, as part of the European Union Horizon 2020 Research & Innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 754326. Previous CISRUL conferences include ‘Conceptualising Difference’ (2021), ‘Decolonising Political Concepts’ (2019), and ‘Conceptualising Political’ (2019).