Towards a Social Psychology of Community: A Social Representations Perspective

Communities impinge into people's lives: they orient the social construction of knowledge; they ground the negotiation of common identities; they marginalise and stigmatise certain social groups; they provide the tools for empowerment and social inclusion. For these reasons, I argue that communities are central to the social psychology of humankind. They have not, to date, been given the attention they deserve in the academic discipline of social psychology. A short account of the history of this discipline demonstrates that need for a paradigmatic shift and for a dialectical approach to community. I suggest that the theory of social representations offers the tools to explore the concept of community as a source of social knowledge, as a basis of common identities, and as a means in marginalisation and social exclusion. This reveals the potential of social representations to construct, delimit and empower the everyday experience of community, highlighting the status of community as a social creation that has acquired reality.