My research explores how community groups function in contemporary cities and how this is influenced by interventions such as funding regimes, participatory citizenship mechanisms, digital technologies and grassroots place-making initiatives. I approach communities as constantly emerging and changing configurations that are co-constituted by the material environment, discourse, social practice and non-human others and objects. My aim is to emphasize both the exclusionary and inclusive potential of community groups, and to reveal how and when the discourses and policies of ‘community’ serve select groups. I obtained my PhD from the University of Wollongong with a thesis on the practices of community gardening. I have since worked on understanding the politics of community inclusion by researching disability access to community services, digital inclusion, and inclusion in climate change activism. I am currently working with neighbourhood centres (also called neighbourhood houses or community centres) across Australia to analyse how policy and funding changes are impacting on the ways these organisations do their work and how centres’ changing ways of working affect different user groups.