Juxtaposition, encounter and drift: transformative social innovation through culture and the arts

Dr. Aviv Kruglanski

This paper aims to tentatively explore the benefits of placing art’s knowledge-building tradition, with its capacity to disrupt and reframe, at the centre of how we look at alternative organizing and alternative economic spaces, positioning lived experience, its uncertainties intact, at the heart of researching and practicing social enterprise (SE). The paper explores indeterminacy through two case-study narratives, one of an academic arts-based research project and the other of a unique organization it encountered.

The Diverse Economies Approach

Jenny Cameron
J.K. Gibson-Graham

This chapter, written for the Handbook of Alternative Theories of Political Economy, introduces the two primary theoretical traditions that have shaped diverse and community economies research and practice: anti-essentialist Marxian political economy and feminist poststructuralism. The chapter discusses the contribution of these two traditions highlighted how they have shaped the diverse economies and community economies approach.

Letter to Julie

JK Gibson-Graham

Letter to Julie was written especially for Antònia Casellas's collection, J.K. Gibson-Graham. Hacia una economía postcapitalista o cómo retomar el control de lo cotidiano [J.K. Gibson-Graham. Towards a post-capitalist economy or how to regain control of everyday life], published by Editorial Icaria, Barcelona.

Between paranoia and possibility: Diverse economies and the decolonial imperative

Lindsay Naylor and Nathan Thayer

Here we reflect on diverse economies scholarship following Gibson-Graham’s call to adopt performative practices for other worlds. Urging scholars to move from paranoia to possibility through weak theory methodology, their call provided momentum for work on economic difference that sustained critiques of capitalocentrism launched in 1996. In this clarion call to read for difference and possibility, a diverse economies framing facilitated a wholesale rejection of strong theory and paranoia.

Diverse infrastructures of care: community food provisioning in Sydney

Miriam Williams and Lillian Tait

There is burgeoning interest in the role of infrastructures as performative socio-technical systems that shape urban life. In this paper, we make visible an often-hidden and diverse infrastructure of care, the Community Food Provisioning Initiative (CFPI) sector. We discuss CFPIs as often hidden, yet vital infrastructures of care. Drawing on research on the CFPI sector in Sydney, Australia, we attend to the diverse ways in which CFPIs are governed, the materialities that constitute them and the diverse economic practices that support them.

Food for people in place

Kelly Dombroski, Gradon Diprose, Emma Sharp, Rebekah Graham, Louise Lee, Matthew Scobie, Sophie Richardson, Alison Watkins, Rosemarie Martin-Nueninger

The COVID-19 pandemic and associated response have brought food security into sharp focus for many New Zealanders. The requirement to “shelter in place” for eight weeks nationwide, with only “essential services” operating, affected all parts of the New Zealand food system. The nationwide full lockdown highlighted existing inequities and created new challenges to food access, availability, affordability, distribution, transportation, and waste management.

Critical Gibson-Graham: Reading Capitalocentrism for Trouble

Tuomo Alhojärvi

J.K. Gibson-Graham’s postcapitalist approach to diverse economies has unleashed a flourishing of research and activism for other worlds. One reason for its successes is found in the intricate links between a feminist and antiessentialist critique of political economy and an experimental, enabling, and affirmative practice of economy. While initially powered by explicitly critical and negating energies, diverse-economies scholars have increasingly accentuated an affirmative, “post/critical” register. This essay explores what has happened to “capitalocentrism” in this process.

For Postcapitalist Studies: Inheriting Futures of Space and Economy

Tuomo Alhojärvi
For Postcapitalist Studies

The worldwide social and ecological unravelling of the 21st century presents an unprecedented challenge for thinking and practising liveable economies. As life support systems are annihilated in view of the sustainable accumulation of capital, social and economic alternatives are rapidly emerging to shelter possibilities for life amidst the ruins. Postcapitalism has gained increasing attention as an invitation to amplify existing alternatives to systemic scale.

Redrawing the Economy: Summary Report

Katherine Gibson
Stephen Healy
Jenny Cameron
Redrawing the Economy Workshop

This is the summary report on Phase 1 of the Redrawing the Economy project. The report was prepared for the for the Scholar-Activist Project Award from the Antipode Foundation.

Following this phase of the project, the Redrawing the Economy website was produced by Kathrin Böhm. More information about the project is also available by clicking here.