Care-full Community Economies

Kelly Dombroski
Stephen Healy
Katharine McKinnon
Image of book cover, feminist political ecology and the politics of care

In this era of human-induced environmental crisis, it is widely recognized that we need to foster better ways to sustain life for people and planet. For us – and other scholars drawing on the Community Economies tradition – better worlds begin in recognising the diverse and interconnected ways human communities secure our livelihoods. Community Economies scholarship is a body of theory that evolved from the writings of geographers J.K. Gibson-Graham, which, for more than thirty years, has inspired others (including the three of us) to rethink economy as a space of political possibility.

Community economies in Monsoon Asia: Keywords and key reflections

Katherine Gibson
Rini Astuti
Michelle Carnegie
Alanya Chalernphon
Kelly Dombroski
Agnes Ririn Haryani
Ann Hill
B Kehi
Lisa Law
Isaac Lyne
Andrew McGregor
Katharine McKinnon
Andrew McWilliam
Fiona Miller
C Ngin
Darlene Occeña‐Gutierrez
Lisa Palmer
Pryor Placino
Mercy Rampengan
L Than Wynn
I Wianti Nur
Sarah Wright

The paper has been collaboratively written with co‐researchers across Southeast Asia and represents an experimental mode of scholarship that aims to advance a post‐development agenda.This paper introduces the project of documenting keywords of place‐based community economies in Monsoon Asia. It extends Raymond William’s cultural analysis of keywords into a non‐western context and situates this discursive approach within a material semiotic framing. For Open Access, click here.

Hybrid Activist Collectives: Reframing mothers' environmental and caring labour

Kelly Dombroski

Part of a special issue 'Activists with(out) organisation' edited by Richard White and Patricia Wood, this article argues that the environmental and caring labour of mothers within the home is a kind of collective economic and environmental activism, where the collective is hybrid human and more than human. I connect the work mothers do in the home with the kinds of shared concerns community economies activists gather around.

Radical equality, care and labour in a community economy

Gradon Diprose

The reproductive and care work predominantly undertaken by women has historically been undervalued in traditional measures of the economy. However, calls for more work, or better work for women (and men) doesn’t necessarily solve the issues surrounding waged labour such as zero hour contracts, the ‘double work day’, and other forms of increasing precarity and competition. In this article I explore how alternative forms of labour exchange in the Wellington Timebank provide one way in which subjects can partially operate outside the waged economy.

Negotiating interdependence and anxiety in community economies

Gradon Diprose

The burgeoning literature on diverse and community economies has been relatively hopeful, exploring how people learn, enact new and reclaim other ways of meeting their needs outside of capitalist practices. For good reasons, much of this work has sought to avoid a conventional critical-leftist orientation, instead adopting what Gibson-Graham call a ‘weak theory’ approach ‘that welcomes surprise, entertains hope, makes connection, tolerates coexistence and offers care for the new’.

Community Economies: Responding to questions of scale, agency, and Indigenous connections in Aotearoa New Zealand

Gradon Diprose
Kelly Dombroski
Stephen Healy
Waitoa, Joanne

This commentary was invited by the special editors of this issue and is partly based on the Community Economies session that the four authors organised at the Social Movements Conference III: Resistance and Social Change in Wellington, 2016. During the session, a number of questions were asked by participants. Some of these questions were new for us, while others have been asked of Community Economy scholars before.

Radical Openings: Hegemony and the Everyday Politics of Community Economies

Rhyall Gordon

What might an alliance between Gibson-Graham’s concept of community economy and Laclau
and Mouffe’s concept of hegemony generate for theories and practices of everyday postcapitalist
politics? This essay theorizes a shared space between these concepts, opening up new ground for
politics. It provides an illustration of the dynamic of hegemony within a community economy
through empirical work carried out with food-sovereignty collectives in the Asturias region of
northern Spain. These collectives demonstrate economic practices that foreground our

Toward a Cartography of the Commons: Constituting the Political and Economic Possibilities of Place

Kevin St. Martin

Competing with the cartography of capitalism, undermining its power to fix resources as open to capitalist appropriation and space as enclosed, will require a cartography of the commons that makes visible community and commons processes; it will require a shift in strategy from explicating and defending existing commons to mapping spaces into which a commons future might be projected. The Buffalo Commons and a map-based project in New England fisheries link new spatial imaginaries with desires for and enactments of alternative economic initiatives.