ICPR Abstracts: Session 17

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Session 17: Special Session

The Fragile Community: Living Together with AIDS

Lawrence R. Frey, Loyola University Chicago
Mara Adelman, Seattle University

New and diverse configurations for community, based on 
common concerns not blood ties, are emerging.  This 
session examines how communicative practices help 
create and sustain everyday life within the new-style 
community of a residential setting for people with AIDS 
(PWAs). Understanding how collective communicative 
practices help forge community amidst the fragility of 
living together with AIDS may help us forge community in 
more stable environments.
        For six years, we have been 
researchers/volunteers at Bonaventure House (BH), an 
award-winning PWA residence. Participant observation, 
in-depth interviews with residents/staff, four 
questionnaires over two years, and informal conversations 
have produced many publications and a 24-minute 
ethnographic videotape (shown on PBS, which will be 
shown).
        This session overviews this research, focusing on 
communication as the medium for creating communal 
interpersonal relationships.  The session uncovers ongoing 
oppositional forces of community life and how 
communicative practices massage these tensions.
        We start with the "fragility of place," exploring 
how shared identity about BH is constructed for 
newcomers via strategic symbolic management.  The 
"fragility of relationship"  reference social support and 
power/control practices that enable and constrain 
communal life.  The "fragility of loss" explores coping 
with death/bereavement, where paradoxes/binds are 
mediated by mythic conceptions and innovative rituals that 
symbolically reverse sad occasions into celebrations of 
relief/release.
        We conclude with three critical features of 
community:  (1) embracing dialectics that emerge from a 
multiplicity of voices; (2) creating communicative 
practices to encourage conflicting viewpoints; and (3) 
recognizing community as processual.  We also examine 
significant symbols from a dialectical perspective for 
grasping the problematics/meanings of research as 
"conversation."
        We believe BH can inspire the strengthening of 
precarious interpersonal relationships/communities in our 
more enduring environments.  For amidst the chaos of this 
fragile experience, strangers come together to create and 
sustain stable community--a lesson for us all.