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Eric Sarmiento
Department of Geography
Texas State University
ers89@txstate.edu
| Becoming genealogical: Power and diverse economies The community-economies approach eschews explanatory frameworks premised on structural analysis, arguing that such approaches prematurely foreclose the progressive potential of existing ethically oriented economic practices and enterprises. Several scholars have argued, however, that to activate the political potential and broader significance of noncapitalisms, it is necessary to trace their articulations with far-reaching political assemblages. To explore this point, this essay examines the genealogical orientation of some diverse- and community-economies research in conversation with the Nietzschean tradition of critical, constructive analysis and the notion of power as ontogenetic. It encourages a reinvigoration of the genealogical approach to diverse and community economies, emphasizing an assemblage-inflected understanding of genealogy as an ethos or mode of becoming rather than an analytic. This can enable diverse-economies research to confront power in all its forms without falling victim to the melancholic narrative of capitalist domination that such a focus too often engenders. |
| Troubling power: An introduction to a special issue on power in community economies In this introduction, we briefly frame the impetus behind this special issue focused on theorizations of power in diverse- and community-economies research. Catalyzed by a panel session at the 2017 Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers, this collection of essays reflects broader, ongoing discussions about how to grapple analytically and practically with power—in all of its forms—as a feature of economic formations. We outline here how each of the contributors to this issue, unsatisfied with a division of labor between theorists concerned with power’s constraining force and those focused on its enabling or generative force, offers new paths for critique that neither reify existing power relations nor turn away from them. |
| On power and the uses of genealogy for building community economies This chapter explores how analysing the formation of economic assemblages from a Nietzschean/Foucauldian genealogical perspective has allowed diverse economies researchers to account for power in its many forms, without falling victim to the melancholic narrative of capitalist domination that a focus on power too often engenders. The goal of genealogy is to cast the taken-for-granted as contingent, contested, and often fraught with instability. This approach enables other ways of being in the world and a methodology for what Foucault called the ‘ethical cultivation of the self’. Applying these ideas to economic discourse and practice, the authors examine the ways in which a genealogical analytic runs through each of the phases of diverse and community economies research: the deconstruction of the hegemony of capitalism to open up a discursive space for non-capitalisms and facilitate an expanded, differentiated economic imaginary; the cultivation of non-capitalist subjectivities; and the construction of community economies. |
| Synergies in alternative food network research: embodiment, diverse economies, and more-than-human food geographies As ecologically and socially oriented food initiatives proliferate, the significance of these initiatives with respect to conventional food systems remains unclear. This paper addresses the transformative potential of alternative food networks (AFNs) by drawing on insights from recent research on food and embodiment, diverse food economies, and more-than-human food geographies. I identify several synergies between these literatures, including an emphasis on the pedagogic capacities of AFNs; the role of the researcher; and the analytical and political value of using assemblage and actor-network thinking to understand the far-reaching forces and power disparities confronting proponents of more ethical and sustainable food futures. |
