"Adelman and Frey take advantage of every opportunity to leave
their audience with a splendid reading experience that will prompt
one to think about community and communication in new and exciting
ways. And as it should be, the reader also will not soon forget the
echoes of the voices of the ordinary, but remarkable, men and women
who inspired the work -- the residents who live and have lived in
the fragile community at BH". -- Journal of Health Communication
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 f 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,
thisbook 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 very 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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