Potential Futures for a Healthy City Community, Knowledge, and Hope for the Sciences of Life

This paper is a community-based case study that is used to explore the potentialities of community knowledge for understanding human well-being. Examining how local expertise is mobilized to transform social inequities of health, I clarify the relationship between the potential and potency of community knowledge, the former oriented toward the future and the latter toward an actionable present. Readers are first introduced to a community-based health initiative in which I now work and play. This is followed by a discussion of the definitions of the two key constructs of this paper, community and knowledge. I conclude by assessing the ways community knowledge is an organic epistemological criticism that counters dystopic characterizations of resource-poor settings while releasing the potentialities for the making of healthful lifeworlds now and in the future.