Publications

Community food initiatives (CFIs) bring people together to reconfigure their relations with food, place, and one another. Such initiatives are driven by the specific needs, values, and concerns of people in different places who take collective action to re-design and challenge systems of food provisioning. They span the rural and urban, consumption and production, alternative and mainstream, charity, mutual aid, and (social) entrepreneurship. While agri-food scholars use different theoretical lenses, concepts, and ways of knowing as entry points to study CFIs, such initiatives have largely been described in terms of their hopes and possibilities or troubles and failures.

This commentary is part of a series initially presented at the Waste/Economies/Ecology hybrid international symposium at the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University, Australia in February 2023. The symposium was part of the research project ‘Investigating Innovative Waste Economies: Redrawing the Circular Economy’funded by the Australian Research Council. The symposium brought together academics and artists from around the world who are thinking with waste to enable novel responses to its ethical and political challenges. We thank all our contributors to this special commentary section for their participation and thinking.

This commentary is part of a series initially presented at the Waste/Economy/Ecology hybrid international symposium at the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University, Australia in February 2023. The symposium was part of the research project ‘Investigating Innovative Waste Economies: Redrawing the Circular Economy’funded by the Australian Research Council. The symposium brought together academics and artists from around the world who are thinking with waste to enable novel responses to its ethical and political challenges. We thank all our contributors to this special commentary section for their participation and thinking.

Calls to transform food systems along more ethical and sustainable lines are mounting alongside debates about what constitutes transformative change and strategies needed to achieve it. Civil society organizations (CSOs) have argued that transforming food systems requires transforming the governance of food systems, as dominant “productivist” approaches to governance have narrowly invested in corporate priorities while marginalizing the many small-scale food workers that animate our food system. In this paper, we examine the possibilities and unexpected pathways of food system transformation through the case of the Voluntary Guidelines for Securing Sustainable Small-Scale Fisheries (SSF Guidelines).

Reseña del libro: Casellas Antònia. J.K. Gibson-Graham: Hacia una economía postcapitalista o cómo retomar el control de lo cotidiano. 2022. España. Icaria Editorial

En este artículo analizamos las situaciones de acceso al lugar de emplazamiento actual de varios grupos pre-cooperativos que encuadran en la denominación de “cooperativas sociales” que se nuclean en un entramado más amplio, el de una Asociación Civil denominada Integración Comunitaria por la Salud Mental Una Movida de Locos (MdL), situada en la Ciudad de La Plata, Provincia de Buenos Aires, Argentina. En este texto proponemos

Community Economies (CE) is a key term in the growing interdisciplinary subfield of diverse economies (DE) scholarship, a perspective that continually grew from the pioneering feminist political economy and economic geography scholarship of J.K. Gibson-Graham (2006). It defines ‘community’ as a space where humans negotiate the terms of our shared coexistence and in which ‘solidarity’ is one possible disposition.

In my commentary, I take up the challenge of finding an academically fuelled strategy to make the necessary deep inroads into the Sustainable Development Goals by looking at lessons learnt from the struggles of the transnational feminist movement involved in UN multilateral debates and the transformative work of feminist political ecology on the ethics of care and caring-with others, including more-than-human others. I propose these feminist strategies offer some insights in how to shift dominant knowledge systems.

We build a rationale for a nuanced approach to raising public awareness of ecological threats through interweaving art, science, and Mātauranga Māori (Indigenous Māori knowledge). The thinking we present emerges from the first phase of a transdisciplinary project, Toi Taiao Whakatairanga, which explores the ways the arts can raise public awareness of two pathogens that are ravaging native trees in Aotearoa New Zealand: Phytopthora agathidicida (kauri dieback) and Austropuccinia psidii (myrtle rust). One of our first steps in the project was to explore understandings of "public” and “awareness” and their relevance to Aotearoa’s ecological, cultural, and political context.

Mainstream biodiversity conservation continues to emphasise the rapid disappearance of charismatic megafauna. Fungi are ignored, partially because many are invisible. However, their conservation is of growing concern because their decline signals a decrease in overall biodiversity and losses in ecosystem integrity and function. Social science engagement with microbes is of growing interest because the diverse characteristics of fungal bodies create new entry points for conservation. Using data collected over three years from literature review, lab ethnography, and interviews, this paper develops two new concepts intended to operate at the intersection of these discussions. A review of the fungal conservation literature finds mainstream species conservation an ill fit for fungi.

Participation of Indigenous peoples and local communities is encouraged in calls for sustainable transitions and transformations. The term ‘community’ is widely used yet nebulously defined. Conservation that removes people from their communities of land invokes epistemological authority and displaced relationships. We relate our work to the articles in this special issue to rethink the relationship between humans and nature in conservation. We propose expanding the term ‘local communities’ to include more than just humans. By decentring the human subject, we rethink what it means to participate in community and place-making, further unpacking the ethical motivations of emplacement.

A small but potent set of ideas, exercises, and resources that might be used as a starting point for thinking more about space and place. It is for anyone interested in learning more about the places where people live, work,

As the Covid pandemic and unprecedented ecological change unsettle our lives, the growing public awareness of care is reshaping economic thinking and practice as we emerge from the pandemic but find ourselves in deepening social reproduction crises and the ongoing climate crisis. Feminist economists have long identified that unpaid care work forms the basis for social reproduction or the unseen work through which capitalist economies and societies are reproduced. Even if the act of care is central to relationships and fundamental to our survival and wellbeing, it is too often taken for granted, invisible, not counted as productive or profitable, and carried out mostly by women, people of colour, immigrants, or other marginalised groups.

This paper investigates food system resilience—conceptualized through the four dimensions of agency, buffering, connectivity, and diversification—from the perspective of rural–urban relations. We consider three cases that capture distinct actor and policy foci in the wider literature on urban–rural interactions. These are secondary cities and their development potential as central nodes in urban–rural food systems, the role of digital infrastructure in shaping food systems resilience, and finally, street food vendors as a particularly vulnerable yet crucial group of actors linking rural food supply with urban demand. We review existing literature within these themes, with a particular focus on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the food systems in middle- and low-income countries.

Aotearoa New Zealand is at a critical juncture in reducing and managing organic waste. Research has highlighted the significant proportion of organic waste sent to landfills and associated adverse effects such as greenhouse gas emissions and loss of valuable organic matter. There is current debate about what practices and infrastructure to invest in to better manage and use organic waste. We highlight the diversity of existing organic waste practices and infrastructures, focusing on Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch. We show how debates about organic waste practices and infrastructure connect across three themes: waste subjectivities, collective action in place and language.

Social and solidarity-oriented and self-governed processes of organizing economic life have existed since humans have collaborated to survive. However, the conscious demand and conceptual realization of the social aspects of the economy only arose in Western thought with the emergence of a primarily market-based exploitative economy and the enclosed commons, forcing working people into capitalism’s system of production and exchange (McMurtry, 2010; Polanyi, 2001 [1944]).

This article is an interview with four researchers about the role of community and community-based initiatives in climate adaptation in urban contexts

This paper explores the multisensory dimension of urban manufacturing to interrogate the spatial possibilities for production in a small town in Switzerland. Together with a group of graduate students, we apply sensory methods to explore how production shapes urban sensescapes and how these sensescapes affect our relation to production. Our study sparks critical questions about mixed-use zoning and tentatively advances the concept of sensible production: a production that not only is perceptible and can actively be engaged with, but that also shows good sense, makes sense, and focuses on what we need. 

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. It describes the way juxtaposition, encounter and drift value indeterminacy as central to generative processes, challenging the control central tomanagement and its research.

The term “solidarity economy” is most commonly deployed to describe altruistic and socially beneficial ways of doingbusiness, often in opposition to ones that are less so. Drawing on a year and a half of ethnographic fieldwork among Danish minority gangs, this article seeks to open the discussion on solidarity economies beyond these traditional understandings by addingthe perspective of gangs. It explores the more exclusive and violent aspects of solidarity economies, drawing on the analytical lenses of reciprocity and pooling. These dimensions afford the tracing of the conditions of solidarity within that group, rather than the mere verification of its absence orpresence.

This report outlines two approaches to assessing the intentions and outcomes of the non-governmental organisation, Life in Vacant Spaces (LiVS), in Ōtautahi Christchurch. Ōtautahi Christchurch presents a useful case study for wellbeing as it continues to recover from the physical and psychological trauma of earthquakes. 

(Open access article)

The article presents an exploratory study of the equub, a form of community-based finance in the Ethiopian diaspora in Germany. Equubs exemplify how People of African Descent in Germany organize against financial exclusion. Grounded in the theory of diverse economies and the method of "reading for difference", the article analyzes the characteristics of the equub as a nonmarket financial institution that contributes to building community economies. Processes of decommodification, collective governance, and ethical decision making around financial needs are discussed alongside the linkages to the diverse economy at large. 

This chapter draws on two initiatives situated in Thailand and Cambodia, inspired by strength-based capacity building approaches known as ‘asset-based community development’ (ABCD) and ‘Appreciative inquiry’ (Ai). Our approach challenges western-centric conceptions of equality in participatory design and novelty in creative process. In Cambodia, a failed experiment with bamboo furniture led to the re-evaluation of welfare safety nets and sustainable social arrangements.