Stretching and Shrinking Commoning: The Relation Between Familiar Engagement and Place in Community Research

This article explores how processes of commoning unfolds in local community organising, focusing on cross-sector collaborations between public and private actors. Building on French pragmatic sociology, we introduce engagement regimes as a conceptual lens to understand how people coordinate action, relate to others, and create meanings of place. While commoning is often seen as a relational and place-based practice, we argue that different forms of engagement entail different place meanings and coordination dynamics, helping us to better understand the relation between place and social relations. Drawing on a case study of STEM education partnerships between schools and private companies, we identify three key dynamics: the anchoring effect of familiar engagement, the role of exploratory engagement in negotiating new relations, and the limitation of engagement caused by clashes between engagement regimes. Our findings show that commoning is a fragile and dynamic process. We contribute to studies of local communities by presenting a new vocabulary of the dynamic stretching and shrinking processes of commoning.