Rethinking the common from spatialized differences: New interpellations for community psychology

Although community psychology (CP) regards diversity as inherent in community processes and warns about the risks of its invisibilization, its composition and its place in what is common in communities, has received little attention. This paper is a critical review of the focus on the common in CP, based on the notion of sense of community, to locate the problem of community and the problem of difference as expressions of the forms of sociability. The analysis of various approaches to differences leads to a conception of common which places them at the center and involves an ethical-political perspective of alterity. The idea that in community psychologists work with territorial communities' geographic space has been predominantly thought of as a substratum of social relationships and practices, highlights the power of this dimension in the construction of other forms of the common and different. The conclusion is the inseparability of commonality and differences, the implications of conceiving difference as multiplicity in approaching the communal, and an interpellation of the ourselves of community psychologists, as well as our role in the construction of otherness and our involvement in multiplicities that do not disregard inequalities.