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Community Economies

[This website will be remodelled in the coming months, look out for a fresh Community Economies Website in April, 2009]

The Community Economies project is a place where new visions of community and economy can be theorized, discussed, represented and enacted. The project grew out of J.K. Gibson-Graham's feminist critique of political economy that focused upon the limiting effects of representing economies as dominantly capitalist. Central to the project is the idea that economies are always diverse and always in the process of becoming. This project developed as a way of documenting the multiple ways in which people are making economies of difference and in the process building new forms of community.

The project involves an ongoing collaboration between academic and community researchers and activists in Australia, North America, and South East Asia.

Our work aims to

  • produce a more inclusive understanding of economy
  • highlight the extent and contribution of hidden and alternative economies
  • build sustainable non-capitalist economic alternatives
  • foster community within and around economic organizations
  • engender collaborations between activists, academics and communities

This website includes information on how we are thinking the economy outside of a capitalocentric discourse that situates all non-capitalist activities as ultimately the same as, a complement to, the opposite of, or contained within capitalism.

Nunawading Community Garden, Australia
Nunawading Community Garden, Australia



Discussing community economies in the Philippines
Discussing community economies in the Philippines
Rethinking economy in the Pioneer Valley, USA
Rethinking economy in the Pioneer
Valley, USA
Participants in the Mama Lus Frut scheme PNG
Participants in the Mama Lus Frut
scheme, PNG

The website also includes accounts of practical interventions in particular places by people in communities who are involved in revisioning their economic futures. And it includes training exercises that we have found useful in our action research projects.

The Community Economies website is our contribution to an ongoing conversation about economic futures that put justice and sustainability first.

This could be what a conversation is--simply the outline of a becoming
Deleuze, Dialogues, p.2

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For more information please contact: ceweb@anu.edu.au
Department of Human Geography, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, ANU
Copyright © Community Economies Project, 2003. This page last modified on 01 January 1970
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