Ellen van Holstein

I am a postdoctoral research fellow at RMIT University. My research explores how community groups function in contemporary cities and how this is influenced by interventions such as funding regimes, participatory citizenship mechanisms, digital technologies and grassroots place-making initiatives. I approach communities as constantly emerging and changing configurations that are co-constituted by the material environment, discourse, social practice and non-human others and objects. My aim is to emphasize both the exclusionary and inclusive potential of community groups, and to reveal how and when the discourses and policies of ‘community’ serve select groups.