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ABSTRACT
How are the boundary and ground of community produced and negotiated in mundane practices of interaction and language use in urban space? The article explores how claims of belonging and legitimate presence are formulated, communicated, and contested and what kind of daily collisions emerge between people in multilingual and multicultural urban contexts. By so doing, it contributes to critical scholarship that discusses connections between community-making and everyday citizenship. Empirically, we draw on data collected in the suburb of Hervanta in Tampere, Finland, where various and internally diverse social groups engage every day in dialogues and negotiate the community’s boundary. We suggest that, ultimately, these negotiations regard the norms, habits, and values upon which the idea of community is founded. The article uses Rancièrian notions of consensus and dissensus to understand tensional community dynamics in diversifying environments and to pave the way for an emergent understanding of community.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank the members of the Tampere Centre for Societal Sustainability (TaSSu), Reiko Shindo, Angharad Closs Stephens, and Anitta Kynsilehto for their comments on our text. All mistakes remain our own. We would also like to thank all the participants in the study. In addition to the authors, Salome Tuomaala-Özdemir, Khalid Imran, Vadim Romashov, Anne Savitie and Imran Adan have participated in the collection of the data used in this article.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. All names are pseudonyms
Additional information
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Notes on contributors
Eeva Puumala
Dr. Eeva Puumalais a senior researcher at the Tampere Peace Research Institute at Tampere University. Her research focuses on community, coexistence, the body, and political agency. She is particularly interested in the practices through which communities are produced, enacted and their boundaries contested in the context of everyday encounters.
Karim Maïche
Dr. Karim Maïche, postdoctoral research fellow at Tampere University, is an interdisciplinary explorer with a firm ground on peace and conflict research. His work addresses questions of agency, participation, and community relations. Methodologically his research draws on ethnography and participatory action research.