Abstract: How is communal participation sustained in the face of change? I draw on the case of a collegiate religious fellowship that moved online during the COVID-19 pandemic to examine how individuals’ participation patterns evolve their community undergoes a collective shift.
Members’ participation trajectories were puzzling: core members moved on while periphery members moved in, often becoming core members. I explain this puzzle through the process of reframing, wherein individuals craft working lenses that answer the question “what does this community mean to me now?” This temporal focus reveals that those with the most positive frames (of the community as “beautiful”) before the shift struggled most to adapt, reframing the group as “not what it once was.”
By contrast, periphery members with ambivalent frames prior to the shift came to reframe the group as beautiful, leading them to deepen their engagement. These findings have relevance for member participation in a variety of communal contexts as well as theorizing on framing more broadly.
Krystal Laryea
My research interests include culture, organizations, higher education, religion, and civil society.