Our intention is to look at a very old theme in sociology from the vantage of current debates about social changes that are occurring with a rapidity, expansiveness, and depth that have led some to concur with Anthony Giddens that we live in a “runaway world.” The word “community” has been part of the English language since at least the fourteenth century, referring since that time to a sense of a people’s common shared identity and to feelings of mutuality and belonging. In Keywords, British cultural theorist Raymond Williams observed that it would appear that the term “seems never to be used unfavorably.” It often does seem to have a halo over it, despite the fact that people often leave particular communities—including small towns, monasteries, and religious sects—because they are experienced as being too restrictive and parochial. Our stress is on communities, not community, for we believe that it is essential for sociology to come to terms with the varied ways and reasons that people bind themselves to others. As sociologists, we continue to be interested in the fate of traditional communities, while at the same time we turn our attention to new community types that have emerged in recent decades. We seek to use the sociological tools at our disposal to make sense of the external factors that serve to promote or inhibit communities. Likewise, we are interested in advancing the sociological understanding of the motives that are at play when people commit to binding themselves to particular communities. Finally, we want to revisit the long tradition of focusing our sociological vision on the form and content of social interaction within particular communities. Among the kinds of communities we want to focus on during this conference are the following:

•Communities of place—including neighborhoods, local friendship networks, and ethnic enclaves
•Communities of space—which includes transnational communities and translocal friendship networks
•Elective communities based on shared beliefs—including religious communities, political organizations, and social movements
•Imagined communities—most significantly being, as Benedict Anderson’s work attests, the product of nationalism
•Virtual communities—which include the fantasy worlds of multi-user domains, chat rooms, and civic networks

We have defined the focus of the 2010 meeting with the broadest of strokes. Indeed, a person would be hardpressed to find any topic of interest to sociologists that cannot be linked to the idea of community. At the same time, we would note that by framing sociological topics in terms of community, it raises one of the most fundamental questions in sociology: What are the bases of social solidarity? This question, in turn, gets at an even more fundamental question driving sociological inquiry, even if it is an undercurrent. We refer to the question Georg Simmel posed a century ago: How is society possible?