Community Studies Course

I'm an academic who lived for eight years in an intentional community called the Findhorn Bay
Community (seen here on its 30th birthday in November 1992), on the banks of the Moray Firth in northeast Scotland. Previously, I have lived in large cities, small rural villages and a university town. When I was growing up in Newcastle upon Tyne in the 1950s and 60s, I had a feeling of belonging to a community. The grown ups used to get together in each other's homes, the church, the pub and in the community centre. We kids went to the local school, roamed around the streets and nearby fields. People's doors were usually open - we knew and were known by lots of people. Later, when I moved to London, there was a big difference.

People mixed less, locked up their homes more and travelled further, usually by car, for work or leisure. That sense of community I had known as a youngster had all but gone.
One of the reasons I have put this course together is to provide a resource for people
who want to build a feeling of community, wherever you are. I was also inspired by several visits to Hawai'i and meeting with native Hawaiians, including the profound and knowledgeable cultural historian, Charles Ka'upu. It seemed to me that, despite all our advances in medecine, science, technology, engineering and so on, we in western society are poor in some important ways that peoples such as the native Hawaiians, are rich. These areas include caring for each other, sustaining friendship, support and social cohesion, tapping into the strength of extended families, and developing sustainable communities. I hope that this course, in some small way, can contribute to a rebalancing of our society through a better understanding of the forces that hold communities together or push them apart.

Who is it for?
The sort of people I had in mind as I wrote this were social science students, particularly
those involved with sociology, social anthropology and social psychology. However, I
think that anyone with an interest in communities - understanding them, creating, developing and maintaining them - will find something useful here. Although this is a social science course and Community Studies is an academic discipline, it is also about the fabric of our lives. It is about the way we raise children, how we connect with each other, how we handle disagreement and conflict. It is about how much of ourselves we share with others, how we make friends and who with, who we consider to be family. It is also about how leaders emerge, what we consider to be crimes and how we handle those who transgress. Finally, it is about how we relate to the environment, to other forms of life, and about how buildings structure and shape our interactions with each other and with the environment.
This course grew out of another course I designed, with colleagues Ben Fuchs and
Dan Greenburg, which I then organised and ran for a while at the Findhorn Foundation (one of the organisations within the Findhorn Bay Community). It was called originally the Study
Programme in Community Living. The picture on the left is of Brian, Brian, Marijke (co-organiser) and Sydney, from the first course, while we were on a visit to Urquhart Castle, next to Loch Ness. It was, in fact it still is, a semester-long university-accredited course for undergraduates who want to both understand and experience life in a close-knit community. In setting down part of that course here, most of the experiential aspect of the SPCL has been lost, but it becomes possible for more people to take part. Perhaps also, you will be inspired to visit or study other communities more closely, as a result of reading this.

Content of the course
If you take part in this course, you will learn why many academics regard Intentional
Communities (ICs) as, "... the research and development centres of society." The specific
topics to be covered include:

  • Types of Intentional Community , including Kibbutzim, Cohousing schemes and Eco-
    Villages, and who lives in them
  • Varieties of experience - the advantages and disadvantages of living in ICs
  • What is a 'successful' community - how can we evaluate them?
  • Leadership and authority - Gurus and anarchists
  • Intimate relationships - Variations on the 'nuclear family'
  • Is there a communal personality type?
  • How to build communities and is it worth the effort?
  • There is also an Appendix on the subject of Virtual Communities, which consists of an
    interview with Howard Rheingold.
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