Community meetings have been a key element in the conduct of Yeoville Studio. As a former activist in Yeoville, and as the director of Yeoville Studio, Claire was committed to attend, sometimes with students and colleagues, as many public meetings as possible: as a means to communicate what the Studio was, what it did, its progress, its findings, and as a means to shape or reshape its direction, as a form of accountability. In the process, attendance at meetings became intriguing as an investigative end in itself: what was happening in those meetings? What was at stake, why did people continue to participate, even though the discussions might sound empty – mere shop talk, repetitive and ritualistic, as some members of the Studio commented (Katsaura 2015)? Claire decided to take these meetings seriously, and frame them beyond their use as a means to inform the community about the Studio, and a means to gauge neighbourhood atmosphere and concerns, framing them instead as an object of enquiry on the making of local democracy and the construction of a ‘community’. This became the focus of Eulenda's research (Mkwanazi 2010).

‘Community’ is not taken as a given, implying shared values and identities existing purely out of living in the same local area, or deriving from residents’ supposedly essential characteristics; it is understood as a social construct, based on the incremental and contested definition of shared values as well as of boundaries. Tapping into our long participant observation of Yeoville community meetings,2 and following Norbert Elias and John Lloyd Scotson's (1994/1965) attention to how the categories ‘insiders and outsiders’ are co-constructed in the public realm, and become consolidated and rigidified over time, we excavate some of the processes at work in building a ‘Yeoville community’ and negotiating its boundaries over time.

In this chapter, we chose to focus our analysis on how xenophobia, and foreigners in general, are publicly and openly constructed as issues and categories, in processes involving the definition of the self as much as the definition of the other. It is important to mention that during every single public meeting, the issue of foreigners and xenophobia came up.