Introduction

In our teaching of community development we have noticed that some students want to be able to define and name ‘the community’. They talk about ‘the community’ as an entity or thing that is somehow knowable. Similarly, many students also express a desire to ‘do the right thing’ when it comes to working with communities. Most want to act ethically, and some even want a kind of ethical rule-book that they can use to help guide their actions in different situations. These kinds of desires are completely understandable. They reflect teaching materials on community development that emphasise the importance of understanding the demographics, histories and aspirations of communities one might work with. The desire to know how to act ethically and manage uncertainty also makes complete sense when navigating the often complex negotiations and uneven power relations within and between communities, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), funders, state agencies and the private sector.

While these desires to know and act are understandable, they are also sometimes at odds with anti-essentialist or post-structural understandings which suggest that any notion of ‘the community’ is a fiction or myth (see for instance Nancy, 1991; Bond, 2011; Diprose, 2016). Similar to this idea that a notion of ‘the community’ is a fiction or myth, post-structural thinking has also queried what it means to be a human subject. So rather than human subjects being understood as individual, stable, autonomous and rational, post-structural understandings frame human subjectivity as always in a process of becoming (see, for instance, Cameron and Gibson, 2005a). This process of becoming is constructed and understood through relationship, what Nancy (1991) calls ‘being-with’, which as Popke (2010: 442) writes, is essentially ‘the sharing of being with co-present others in space and time’. A post-structural understanding of both community and human subjectivity therefore opens us to the possibility that every encounter and relationship carries the potential for an ‘agonistic negotiation over the meaning and contours of what we hold in-common with others’ (Popke, 2010: 442). For Negri (2003), this is essentially the crux of ethics. He writes that ‘ethics is the responsibility for the common’ (Negri, 2003: 183).