ABSTRACT
Concepts of 'society' are not often formally taught in schools, apart from on sociology courses, and incidentally on vocational courses, such as those related to health and social care. Ideas about how society should be organised, or thought about, always depend on ideas about what society is already like: the kinds of relationship that are important, the kinds of responsibilities that individuals have to one another, the ways in which states should try to shape these. Functionalism has frequently been criticised for covering up the extent of disagreements within societies about the aims and values of a society. Paul Gilroy points to the positive ways that 'the different translocal solidarities that have been constituted by diaspora, dispersal and estrangement' can remake our ideas of where societies begin and end — away from closed and jealous models of race or nation and towards more open-hearted visions of a society rooted in 'local conviviality' and 'planetary humanism'.
