Home and border: the contradictions of community

If community is the theory and locale for much of nursing in the 21st century, complex thinking about community is required. In creating unified identities to form community, differences are suppressed and border communities are built. This article examines the contradictory, complicated, and unending processes of producing home (a space of comfort and commonality) and border (a space of discomfort and difference) communities. The construction of border communities in terms of class and race/ethnicity are considered through exemplars from research on the meaning of community. A deeper understanding of community calls for us to live with uncertainty and unfamiliarity.