Community development ‘yet-to-come’ during and post the COVID-19 pandemic: from Derrida to Zuboff

The contours of this article, written as a dialogue between two authors, one in Australia (Westoby) and one in South Africa (Harris), outline a Derridean deconstruction of community development ‘yet-to-come’ during and post coronavirus disease 2019. Reflecting on our two countries’ experiences, drawing on theorists such as Zuboff (surveillance capitalism), Freire (critical literacy), Foucault (biopower), Escobar (pluriversality) and Berardi (semio-capitalism), we argue for transformational critical digital literacy work that enables greater community awareness of the consequences of digital lives and also transformative praxis. Riffing off many experiences that readers will be familiar with (lockdown, social distancing, tracing apps, virtual meetings and so on), the dialogue also suggests a soulful community development yet-to-come, foregrounding embodied lives, slowness, place, relationality and connection.