Publications

When financial resources are scarce and uncertain, youth performance organisations find ways to ‘hold it together’: to carry on no matter what. Engaging critically with theories of organisational resilience, this article examines how two youth performance companies in Auckland experience and respond to a precarious funding environment. The local policy and funding context compels organisations to ‘shape up’; to become more effective in the competitive system. Within this environment, however, the promise of sustainability remains ever-elusive. An alternative response, then, is found in the different ways organisations experiment with localised, culturally responsive community and solidarity economies.

This article uses kindness as a lens through which to analyse examples of giving to and through the arts in Aotearoa during the first year of COVID-19. We consider whether the exceptional conditions created by COVID-19 caused reconsideration of the way the arts look after society and why and how societies need to look after the arts. We do so by critically examining state and private giving to the arts in Aotearoa New Zealand, from March 2020-March 2021, alongside large- and small-scale artistic gestures of giving. It appears that a ‘kinder’ economy for the arts emerged during this time.

Background

This paper synthesises findings from two research projects with organisations involved in arts for youth well-being. Since 2017, Aotearoa New Zealand’s government has recognised the importance of the arts for well-being. However, the sector in Aotearoa has historically lacked recognition and support and this paper identifies a number of challenges that remain entrenched in the funding system.

Methods

Study One used an online survey to understand the approaches, aspirations and challenges of 19 organisations involved in youth arts for well-being. Study Two used ethnographic methods with three youth arts organisations to explore their experiences of the funding and policy context.

Using diverse economies and relational poverty insights, we examine the place-making practices of the cooperatively owned and democratically structured financial institutions – credit unions. In the U.S., they represent the rarely recognized but widely spread local banking systems that prioritize interests of communities over profit-maximization for outside investors. Their mission to a large degree aligns with anti-poverty and anti-racist social justice struggles and with the ethics of “solidarity” economy, a growing international movement. Our research begins a geographic inquiry into distinct non-capitalist place-making practices of credit unions while also acknowledging that they are a heterogeneous group themselves.

This study contributes to research proposing the ethics of care framework as a way of imagining a food system that cares for Others. We expand this exploration to the everyday practice of home gardening and the related social relationships and material flows. This area complements current scholarship, which mostly focuses on food-related care as a form of activism driven by intentionality and knowledge about the effects of consumption choices.

This paper considers how and to what ends commoning practices can take shape in direct response to the spectres and/or realities of eroding resources (we focus especially on public resources) within iterations of what we term “salvage commoning”. We show how, in such contexts, commoning practices may potentially alleviate but also potentially (re)produce inequities, exclusions, and resource retractions. To illustrate, we draw upon two examples: parent‐teacher organisations in Washington, DC, and block associations in New York City. In both instances, people have cooperatively built new relations, coordinated voluntary labour, and stewarded resources in connection with specific commons (public schools and urban spaces) threatened by disinvestment and crisis.

The breast/chestfeeding body is a site of intense politics and power relations in the United States. Hardly a week passes without an incident in the news of a person being publically shamed, or unlawfully asked to change their behavior while using their body to feed their infant in public. Lactating bodies are deemed out-of-place. Simultaneously, birth-parents are judged on their infant feeding practices, with those who do not nurse cast outside of the biologically deterministic ‘good mother’ role. This framing causes the nursing or not-nursing body to become a site of debate. These takes, which point to governance, surveillance, and sexualization of bodies are limiting and have brought these debates to an impasse.

Recent research into waste has moved beyond focusing on individual behaviour change to the wider practices, systems, and social norms that construct and perpetuate waste. Running alongside this work on waste, community economy scholars have been exploring how communities form around and care for commons. In this paper we draw on social practice theory and community economy thinking to illustrate how a food rescue organisation, Kaibosh, based in Wellington, New Zealand, has created practices and mobilised meanings that enable people to collectively manage surplus food, address food poverty, and reduce waste. We show how these food rescue and distribution practices push back against individualised despair, moralism, or guilt, and connect people across food systems.

Greenfield Community College’s (GCC) faculty and staff are predominantly white (93%) and though most espouse progressive politics and have the best of intentions, conversations on campus focused on race or racism are still difficult. In an attempt to address this challenge, we created a book group based on Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility: Why it’s so Hard for White People to Talk About Racism.

PAR is a methodology that democratizes research by transforming the relationship of researcher and participants to where they are working together to actively learn about and create change in the world. In the context of student success for Black, Indigenous and other people of color (BIPOC) and other underserved students, the best place to learn about this is by recruiting students to become co-researchers and engaging students to help analyze the data and collaborate in finding ways to improve student success.

Purporting that particular manifestations of social enterprises are conditioned, at least in part, by the cultural context in which they are enacted (Peredo & McLean 2006), the chapter seeks to unveil the ethnocentrism inherent in dominant renditions of social enterprise by zooming in on a United Nations project geared toward promoting entrepreneurial activity in and, ultimately, the livelihood of indigenous Cambodian forested communities. This research explores the everydayness of social enterprise among an indegenous resin tapper community in two adjacent villages, in Rovieng District which lies to the south of Preah Vihear Province in northern Cambodia.

Dominated by conflict, Turkey’s Kurdish Question has transformed over time, opening up new areas of inquiry. Under the Democratic Autonomy project ongoing since the mid-2000s, Turkey’s Kurdish Movement has promoted cooperatives and communes—a post-capitalist marketization project—in Northern Kurdistan. Drawing upon economization studies and diverse and community economies studies’ engagement with assemblage thinking, this article scrutinizes the retailers’ cooperative model the Movement experimented with and explains the practices linked to post-capitalist marketization: creating inclusive platforms for debate, incorporating ordinary actors as experts, and upscaling post-capitalist marketization through building relations with other cooperatives.

This article advances a framework for the study of community economies as assemblages constituted and shaped by three primary dynamics: relations, resources and constraints, and processes of stabilization and destabilization. Drawing on diverse and community economies scholarship, assemblage theory and actor-network theory, we develop a framework that will contribute significantly to understandings of the emergence of community economies and the strategies that make them more resilient and sustainable. The conceptual framework is illustrated through a case study from Turkey’s Kurdish region – a women’s cooperative that remained resilient in the face of armed conflict and political violence.

Increasing small-scale vegetable production is a key target for growing a more sustainable food system. At first glance, meeting this target seems straightforward. On closer inspection, particularly in contexts experiencing the on-going effects of climate uncertainty and economic uncertainty, it can be hard to achieve. Community education has a vital role to play.

Invasive Tourism and Mapuche Tourism: indigenous territory and entrepreneurship with identity in Lake Icalma, Higher Biobio - This qualitative research explores the economic agency of Mapuche tourism entrepreneurs at the intersection between Development with Identity discourse and the touristification of Mapuche-Pewenche territory in Southern Chile.

This chapter explores how people wishing to develop creative alternatives to money-as-usual issued by states have experimented with a range of diverse alternative forms of currency such as LETS schemes, time banks, local paper currencies, electronic forms of payment, and more recently, cryptocurrencies. Sometimes these are small, local schemes. Sometimes, such as in Argentina after December 2001, millions use them to survive an economic crisis. These different models of grassroots currency suggest, support and enable very different futures: libertarian, communitarian, hyper capitalist, ecological, inclusive. For diverse economies advocates, they enable people to live ethically, sustainably, prosperously, and with dignity and justice in the Anthropocene.

This chapter discusses the contribution of 99 per cent of businesses – independent, small or medium enterprises (SME) – to the project of building just, sustainable and dignified economies for the Anthropocene. Recognizing that place matters in understanding who is likely to be an independent trader or an SME owner, the chapter develops a broader and more inclusive understanding of entrepreneurship as something performed by a wide range of people who see small independent, community-based businesses as vehicles for living as they want to – not just the special, ‘heroic’ entrepreneurs that we all rely on to employ us, as lauded by business schools. It recognizes that many independent traders struggle to get by, and may be reluctant entrepreneurs who have no other choice.

This essay offers conceptual development for thinking diverse economies in terms of their relationship to antagonism. Rather than seeing antagonism as unhelpfully fueling capitalocentric thinking, the essay argues that antagonism can usefully recognize and engage with problematic forms of power and domination. Building on calls for a closer engagement of community-economies thinking with wider anticapitalist praxis, the essay explores how social and solidarity economy (SSE) practices sometimes reproduce, sometimes challenge, and sometimes build alternatives to forms of power that attempt to shape, obstruct, and obliterate attempts to create better worlds.

The chapter proposes a critical and practical approach towards acknowledging that most artists not only support their practices through a diverse range of incomes and support systems, but that an increasing number of artists conceptualize and enact artistic practices which resist the extreme commodification of mainstream arts, and are creating new plausible art worlds based on the concept of usership versus the conventional and dominant model of spectatorship. These new art worlds reorganize the relationships between art and everyday cultures, and are thus reorganizing their economic underpinnings and interrelationships.

Finance is a word for trouble. Activists often recognize its strategic and game-changing potential. Yet control over finance often feels out of reach. Exploitative and unsustainable financialization seems to continue relatively uncontested at large while the socialization of risks and spread of debt are well-recognized problems. Capitalist finance seems to determine and to escape being determined (otherwise). This chapter examines two hacking initiatives that have burst this capitalocentric bubble by exploring, learning from and rebuilding financial relations otherwise: the activist hedge fund Robin Hood Cooperative and the crypto-technological start-up Economic Space Agency.

Reclaiming and resignifying economic language is a strategy for constructing sites for ethical and political possibility in the diverse economies framework. As the framework travels across geographical boundaries and evolves in different contexts, the question of language increasingly concerns also translation and differences between languages. Fostering linguistic diversity alongside economic and ecological diversity is especially relevant regarding the current hegemony of English language in research and activism and its historical expansion hand in hand with modernization, the development of capitalist relations and the prevalence of capitalocentric economic language. This chapter draws from experiences of a project translating Take Back the Economy (J.K.

Modern-day mining is now highly mechanized and provides regular employment to highly paid workers in many parts of the world. However, there also exist millions of individuals who gain a livelihood from informal, artisanal and small-scale mining. From a diverse economies point of view, mining is as much non-capitalist as it is capitalist. The chapter aims to depart from the binary framing of informality and formality which situates informal mining labour only as ‘other’ to formal work in the capitalist mining industry. The author positions informal mining labour as part of the survival portfolio of poor and landless households to argue for a more dynamic view that opens up different possibilities for livelihood-making.