Community Embeddedness
topic
Community embeddedness as creative input involves the sustained, participatory engagement with specific communities — neighborhood, religious, professional, recreational, or activist communities — as a source of the grounded, particular, human-specific knowledge of how actual people in actual contexts think, feel, speak, organize, and create meaning that no amount of abstract study replicates.
Role
The failure of much contemporary creative work to connect with audiences reflects the loss of community embeddedness — the progressive disconnection of creative practitioners from the specific, local, particular human communities they are ostensibly creating for. The creator who lives deeply embedded in real human communities has access to a human specificity and authenticity that the creator who orbits abstract creative networks of similar professionals lacks. Community embeddedness is the grounding that prevents creative work from floating into the abstract generic.