Outreach, Education, and Political Engagement: Exploring How Two Intentional Communities Promote Their Visions for Social Change

Recent empirical scholarship on intentional communities (ICs) suggests that more research needs to be done on how they function as forms of political engagement. The focus of this existing scholarship has been primarily on how ICs contribute to protest events and mobilizations that originate outside the community through the production of activist subjectivities, reworking the conventional divide between direct political action and lifestyle activism, and maintaining “reservoirs” of collective action for future protest events. This research has challenged orthodox assumptions in political theory that—since at least Marx and Engels’ critique of utopian socialist experiments—reject ICs as sites of political engagement and meaningful societal transformation. In this paper, I build on this this research by exploring how ICs also engage in politics through their promotion and mobilization of particular community-born visions and programs for social change. To do so, I draw on original ethnographic and interview data from two ICs—one in North America and one in Europe—including participant observations spanning the course of two years; participation in both communities’ outreach and educational activities; and semi-formal interviews with community members on the topic of political engagement. In the first section I trace the narratives of community members who describe their community work of outreach and education as a form of political engagement. The second part analyzes and compares how these two communities use outreach and educational activities to promote community-born political visions. Particular attention is paid to the effect the COVID-19 pandemic has had on these activities and ways they have evolved in response. The third and final part reflects on the extent that IC outreach and educational activities can be called “political engagement” in any meaningful, mainstream sense. The paper seeks to contribute to ongoing discussions in communal studies, social movement studies, and political theory about the role ICs may play in a critical and transformative politics.