Engaged Theory and Social Mapping

Researching communities has long been beset with difficulties that are still being debated. How is it possible to delimit the spatial boundaries of a research locale? What determines the temporal frames of a study? How are the different standpoints of the researcher and the researched to be understood and related? What are the different kinds of power engendered by a research relationship? In relation to the spatial frame of a study, for example, the classical presumptions of studies of community, with their focus on bounded and stable social settings, were profoundly disrupted by intensifying social change. Direct pressures for new