It seems to me that whether the notion of community is useful or problematic
depends on what you're trying to do. If you have a bunch of individuals
with similar relations to power hierarchies and you want to help them form
relations with each other that might improve their lives, then the notion of
community is rhetorically useful. This might be the case if you were trying
to help daycare workers become more reflective and professionalized, or if
you were organizing parents to oppose testing, or if you were trying to make
classrooms be more humane places for students. Then "community" picks out a
set of diverse horizontal relations, roles, and responsibilities. In trying
to form communities where only groups exist, it might not be helpful to add
critique of the notion of community to one's language and thinking.
If you are trying to improve existing communities, to make them more
receptive to difference, more able to interact with other communities, more
democratic in their internal relations, then seeing "communities" as
problematic is useful. Still, though, I don't think one can accomplish much
by doing away with the idea entirely, not if one's trying to do anything in
the world other than publish critical papers.
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