Authors: Ioana Viscrianu, Johannes Kronenberg, Ruth Fiona Roever
Publisher: Verlag am Goetheanum & Athena Verlag 2024 [Currently only available in German]
This book, published by a research team from the Youth Section of the Goetheanum, is dedicated to the idea of community living. It focuses on the complex subject of community-building – a highly topical debate, particularly in light of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UN-CRPD). The UN-CRPD perspective emphasizes the anthropological foundation of individualism, as well as the importance of personal development, and sees community life as a potential threat to the principles of self-realization, participation and integration. In this context, the authors introduce three different life-sharing communities and explore their practices in daily home and work life. It should be noted that the study deliberately refrains from assessing the extent to which the legal requirements for integration are or should be met, as the focus is rather on the communities themselves. The research team visited each community for several days. These visits were an opportunity to observe the communities as ‹laboratories› or ‹experiments›, in which new forms of social communal life are explored and practiced. During the visits, the researchers conducted interviews with community members both with and without disabilities, and organized topic-based discussion groups. Participatory observation was an essential part of the research method. A common feature of the three communities is that people with and without disabilities live together in ‹expanded family› households. This prompted the question of whether a possible overemphasis on proximity and belonging affects everyday life for members of the community by possibly pushing participatory organization and individual responsibility into the background. The results show that those interviewed consciously choose this form of communal living. They are aware of both the opportunities and risks that proximity and belonging can bring with them, and are open to necessary reflection on their processes, including consideration of external perspectives. I highly recommend this book, as it not only provides fascinating insights into life within these communities, but also encourages us to question the current paradigms of social work from a broader perspective.
Translation from German by Tascha Babitch
