Social poetics as a relational practice – Creating resourceful communities

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Our overall interest here, is in those kinds of things that people can only do together that they cannot possibly do apart, in isolation from each other. Our interests resonate with the themes and topics expressed in the epigraph quotes above. In particular, we are especially interested in how a group of people, with very different interests, who usually live in very different worlds, can nonetheless come together to create between them, a community with its own shared world, not of material resources, but of social resources. And in how such a set of very different participants can all draw on these resources to interweave their different activities and interests together to the mutual benefit of each. In short, we are interested in the relational practices involved in the construction of “resourceful communities.” We have called the relational practices involved in the creation of such communities (for reasons which will become clear later), a “social poetics”. We can appreciate the workings of a “social poetics,” and the nature of the socially useful and usable resources that can be created in people’s relations with the different others around them, from the following remarks made by a young geriatrics resident after having participated in a ‘consultation’ with a Council of Elders established by one of us.

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