9780805818444-0805818448-The Fragile Community (Everyday Communication Series)

The Fragile Community (Everyday Communication Series)

ISBN-13: 9780805818444
ISBN-10: 0805818448
Edition: 1
Author: Mara B. Adelman
Publication date: 1996
Publisher: Routledge
Format: Paperback 142 pages
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Book details

ISBN-13: 9780805818444
ISBN-10: 0805818448
Edition: 1
Author: Mara B. Adelman
Publication date: 1996
Publisher: Routledge
Format: Paperback 142 pages

Summary

The Fragile Community (Everyday Communication Series) (ISBN-13: 9780805818444 and ISBN-10: 0805818448), written by authors Mara B. Adelman, was published by Routledge in 1996. With an overall rating of 3.6 stars, it's a notable title among other AIDS (Diseases & Physical Ailments, State & Local, United States History, Communication, Words, Language & Grammar , Pure Mathematics, Mathematics, Communication & Media Studies, Social Sciences, Sociology) books. You can easily purchase or rent The Fragile Community (Everyday Communication Series) (Paperback) from BooksRun, along with many other new and used AIDS books and textbooks. And, if you're looking to sell your copy, our current buyback offer is $0.3.

Description

This book examines the concept of "community," focusing on how communication practices help manage the tensions of creating and sustaining everyday communal life amidst the crisis of human loss. While acknowledging how the contradictory and inconsistent nature of human relationships inevitably affects community, this intimate and compelling text shows how community is created and sustained in concrete communication practices.

The authors explore these ideas at Bonaventure House, an award-winning residential facility for people with AIDS, where the web of social relationships and the demands of a life-threatening illness intersect in complex ways. Facing a life-threatening illness can defy meaningful social connections, but it can also inspire such ties, sometimes in ways that elude us in the course of daily life. By understanding how collective communication practices help residents forge a sense of community out of the fragility and chaos of living together with AIDS, we are able to better understand how communication is inexorably intertwined with the formation of community in other environments.

Based on seven years of ethnographic research including participant-observation, in-depth interviews, and questionnaires, this book weaves together narratives and visual images with conceptual analysis to uncover the ongoing oppositional forces of community life, and to show how both mundane and profound communication processes ameliorate these tensions, and thereby sustain this fragile community. Because the average length of stay for a resident is seven months -- in which time he or she moves from being a newcomer to a community member to someone the community remembers -- the text reflects this short, but crystallized life, starting with the day a new resident opens the door to the day he or she passes away.

The writing is rich -- intimate, engaging, personal, compelling, and vivid. The stories told discuss such deeply personal topics as the dilemmas of romantic relationships in a context fraught with many perils; issues of power, authority, and control that enable and constrain social life; and communicative practices that help residents cope with bereavement over the loss of others as well as their own impending deaths. The text concludes by examining the lessons learned from Bonaventure House about creating and sustaining a health community, and serves as an inspiration for strengthening interpersonal relationships and communities in other environments.

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