Turning to community in times of crisis: globally derived insights on local community formation

Towards the end of the 20th century, a range of western sociologists and cultural theorists were arguing that the word 'community' had outlived its usefulness, yet use of the word has certainly not diminished in either popular or academic discourse. Indeed, this paper follows writers such as Bauman (2001) and Delanty (2003) in suggesting that there has been a 'turn' to community in the conditions of global flux and uncertainty. However, western conceptions of community are often inadequate for describing dynamic social formations in societies of the global south and this paper takes a dynamic and multilayered conception of community that has been developed by the Globalism Research Centre at RMIT in Melbourne to apply to community formation in Ecuador and Malaysia. The paper compares this way of thinking about local communities in Australia with very different local contexts in Malaysia and Ecuador. The paper adds to Delanty's conception of community (2003) and adds a new typology of contemporary communities.