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There is no literature to guide mental health nursing in bushfire‐affected communities. Using autoethnographic methods, the author reflects on his experience of mental health nursing during the Australian bushfires of 2019–20 and the challenges of identifying existing practice guidance. Applying an existing nursing model and insights from gestalt, he analyses his field notes to identify and describe practices which he found important and useful for working with bushfire‐affected persons and communities. Eight suggestions are provided to assist mental health nurses to practise in an informed way and promote recovery. This paper makes a contribution to a small body of existing mental health nursing research using autoethnographic methods, and it is the first contribution to the mental health nursing literature about working with bushfire‐affected persons and communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Health promotion researchers and practitioners have increasingly turned to community-based approaches. Although there has been much work around the diverse understandings of the term in areas such as community psychology and sociology, I am concerned with how such understandings relate directly to community health research and practice. From a discursive perspective ‘community’ is seen as a socially constructed representation that is used variously and pragmatically. However, from a wider view, community can be seen as a matter of embodied practice. This paper draws on social representations theory to examine the shifting constructions of ‘community’, the functional use of those understandings in social life, and the practices that suggest that it is important to attend to their use in particular contexts. Accordingly, the paper argues that meanings of community in the health promotion or public health context must be seen as representations used for specific purposes in particular situations. Furthermore, the broader notion of embodied practice in social life has implications for community participation in health promotion. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ideas of community and social capital have received much attention in the last decade, but are plagued by a multitude of conceptualizations, definitions, and operationalizations. This confusion is problematic for both researchers and policymakers trying to use these concepts. While numerous efforts have been made to clarify “social capital” and “community,” too often the two are simply conflated. This paper attempts to distinguish between them by looking at the various ways they are related in concrete examples. Drawn largely from the literature, five examples are offered that together describe the complex interactions of place-based communities and social capital networks. These examples also demonstrate distinctions between community and social capital with regard to boundaries, the qualities of social relations and trust in each, instrumentality, the consequences of one for the other, and issues related to multiple communities in a single place. It is hoped that these distinctions will inform the ongoing efforts to develop unique and useful conceptualizations of these two terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the contribution that 'interpretative' research might make to rural sociology. Most research in rural sociology has had a heavy quantitative bias, and it is suggested that this bias has often made an understanding of the processes of social change more difficult. One way in which 'interpretative' sociology might prove of value is in bringing together the analysis of changes at the local 'community' level, and more widespread structural changes. The analysis of social transactions between peasants and cattle-dealers in the Spanish Pyrenees, undertaken by the author, focuses attention on the process of social change through the use of 'interpretative' rather than positivistic research methods. It is argued that changes at the 'community' level are only one example of the behaviour which rural sociologists might investigate using a more 'interpretative' approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on interviews and participant observation, this paper presents a narrative account of the reactions of people in a small, Arkansas community to the religious claims of prophecy and divine mission made by an individual who temporarily comes to reside in the community. Public interpretation and evaluation of the prophecy is conducted informally through the rumor construction process. Naturalistic interpretations of fraud or delusion are mostly suspended as supernatural interpretations by community members become ascendent. People are eventually forced to rationalize their reactions when events fail to materialize in the manner originally prophesied. The unfolding of events is viewed from a sociology of knowledge perspective and treated as a case study of the social construction of reality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What do we mean by progress and cumulation in the social and human sciences? Recent thinking in the philosophy and history of science has led to an abandonment of some versions of logical positivism and of verificationism that had a strong deductive and theory testing orientation. What is to replace them is less clear. This paper argues that progress and cumulation can be seen as a process of evaluation and retention within an epistemic community. Scholarly disciplines differ in their social structure and in their epistemic and normative commitments. Since sociology is a fragmented discipline, progress and cumulation differ within its multiple subdisciplines, which to varying extents represent epistemic communities. Brief sketches of progress (advance) and cumulation in several subdisciplines are offered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The debate over the "community question" has generated several perspectives on the sources of ties to the territorial community in modern society. This paper attempts to empirically assess the utility of each model for predicting the number of ties to the local community and extra-local area, using data on voluntary association memberships in Seattle. Results indicate that the "community of limited liability" perspective is most accurate in predicting the importance of social, economic, and temporal investments for local memberships, and social position for extra-local memberships.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Expanding traditional sociological conceptions of community to include environmental considerations in community research, this paper stresses the importance of documenting both subjective and objective environmental concerns, as well as reconciling such differences as are presented and details precedence. Some recent data on the nature of social contact in high-rise ‘communities’ illustrate this approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years numerous discussion of urban communities have given great weight to themes of disorganization and disorder. This paper critically examines several important conceptual, procedural, and substantive issues inherent in most treatments of community disorganization. To illustrate such fundamental problems as ‘overgeneralization’ and dominant group bias five specific topics—migration, disasters, slums, ghettos, and collective violence—were selected for intensive analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reading the article, “Community psychology at the crossroads: Prospects for interdisciplinary research” (), there is a sense that community psychology is at a crossroad with regard to being an interdisciplinary field. This paper aims to offer insight and guidance to proponents of interdisciplinary research in the community psychology field by drawing on experiences in urban studies, which shares similar origins and interdisciplinary claims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]