Community Economies Institute - A History
The Early Days
In the early 1990s, as the careers of Katherine Gibson and Julie Graham develop they gather a group of PhD and Masters students whose work is influenced by Katherine and Julie’s emerging thinking and integration of poststructural feminism and anti-essentialist Marxism.
Image: 1992, Julie and Kath after Julie’s presentation of “Waiting for the revolution: How to smash capitalism while working at home in your spare time” at the Gala Conference “Marxism and the New World Order” at University of Massachusetts-Amherst. This was the first airing of J.K. Gibson-Graham’s work. The presentation was published in Rethinking Marxism in 1993, and a version was published in 1996 as the final chapter in The End of Capitalism (as we knew it): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy, click here.
Katherine and Julie nurture this emerging group through initiatives such as the Workshop on Class (held in June 1996 at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst). One outcome of this workshop is the edited collection, Class and Its Others (2000, University of Minnesota Press), click here.
Katherine and Julie start to secure grant funding for Participatory Action Research (PAR) projects, such as the Katherine’s work in the coalfields of Central Queensland, Australia (1992-93) and the Latrobe Valley, Australia (1997-2000) (with Jenny Cameron); and Julie’s work with a cluster of students (including Stephen Healy) in the Pioneer Valley of Western Massachusetts (1999-2000).
The first Community Economies website was designed and launched in 1998, based at Monash University (Melbourne, Australia) where Katherine and Jenny were working.
Image: 1999, Katherine Gibson and Jenny Cameron at the official launch of the Latrobe Valley Community Partnering Project (note the streamlined laptop that Kath and Jenny are working on!).
The PAR work culminates with the publication ‘Imagining and Enacting Noncapitalist Futures’ (2001, in Socialist Review), click here. The paper was authored by the Community Economies Collective (CEC), a collective identity that emerged through the combination of a bus trip by the Pioneer Valley group to Cape Breton in June 2000 and a subsequent visit by Katherine and Jenny to the Pioneer Valley in September 2000.
Image: September 2000, the Pioneer Valley Group meet with Katherine and Jenny.
The closing words of the 2001 paper are as pertinent today as they were 25 years ago:
We’re in the middle of our project now. Where are we going? We still don’t know. But we have a future and planning it together is one way we constitute ourselves as a hopeful collectivity.
The 2000s: The Community Economies Collective (CEC)
The collective expands as more PhD and Masters students are drawn to work with Katherine and Julie. There is no formal membership requirement, other than the supervision connection with Katherine or Julie. As the first generation of J.K. Gibson-Graham's students (e.g., Jenny Cameron and Kevin St. Martin) gain academic employment their PhD and Masters students also start to join.
At this stage, the group provides an informal but important source of nourishment and support. Members read drafts of each other’s work, share readings, visit each other’s institutions, meet up at conferences, and enjoy informal time together.
Experimenting with CEC Authorship, Katherine brought a group from the Philippines to ANU (Australian National University) Coastal Campus at Kioloa (Australia) to work with a group of PhD students to write accounts of the social enterprises from the Philippines action research project. These accounts provide the basis for the CEC and Katherine Gibson co-authored book chapter, ‘Building community-based social enterprises in the Philippines’ in Ash Amin’s edited collection, The Social Economy (2009). This material was also incorporated into the Community Partnering for Local Development website.
Image: 2008, Co-writing retreat, ANU Coastal Campus, Kioloa. From L-R Jayne Curnow (ANU), May-an Villalba Unlad Kabayan Migrant Services Foundation Inc.), Katherine Gibson (ANU), Amanda Cahill (ANU), Benilda Flores-Rom (Unlad Kabayan), Michelle Carnegie(ANU), Maureen Balaba (Unlad Kabayan) and Gerda Roelvink (ANU).
The Early 2010s: Consolidating the CEC and CERN
For the CEC, the start of the 2010s is marked by Julie’s death in April 2010 (just a few weeks before her 65th birthday).
Image: July 2009. Julie in the grounds of her house in Cooleyville, Massachusetts.
In the wake of Julie’s death, the CEC in the US and Australia continue to meet, and provide support and sustenance for each other.
At this stage, membership of the CEC is ‘kin-based’ in the sense that it is comprised of those who are in the supervision orbit of Katherine and Julie.
As interest in Community Economies work spreads more and more people ask to be kept ‘in the loop.’ In 2013, a decision is made to establish the Community Economies Research Network (CERN) for this wider network of people who have a general interest in Community Economies (CE) work. The Community Economies Collective is comprised of a smaller group who are active CE knowledge producers and willing to contribute to the work of being on a collective. At the time the CEC was described in the following way:
it is increasingly clear that the CEC is a commons that we are making and sharing, and that the ‘work’ of commoning involves sharing the load of taking responsibility for and maintaining the commons (as well as benefiting from it).
The Late 2010s: From the CEC to the CEI
In the mid-2010s, the CEC starts investigating whether to formalise as a legal entity in Australia. In March 2018, all 42 members of the Community Economies Collective (CEC) vote unanimously to establish the Community Economies Institute (CEI).
On 26 November 2018, the CEI is formally registered as a non-profit company. On 28 November 2024, the CEI is recognised as a charity by the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission.
The activities of the CEI are documented in the Annual Reports, click here (and scroll down to find all annual reports).
During this time the experiment with CEC authorship has continued, with two CEC co-authored papers:
- 2017, Cultivating Community Economies, paper commissioned by the Next System Project (co-chaired by Gar Alperovitz and by Gus Speth), which details community economies thinking. Paper by J.K. Gibson-Graham, Jenny Cameron, Kelly Dombroski, Stephen Healy, Ethan Miller and Community Economies Collective
- 2019, Community Economy, keyword essay published online by the Antipode Foundation to celebrate 50 years of the radical geography journal, Antipode. Essay by Oona Morrow, Kevin St Martin, Nate Gabriel, Ana Inés Heras and Community Economies Collective.
During this time, the broader Community Economies Research Network (CERN) continues to be supported by the Community Economies Institute (CEI). It has gone from strength to strength, with over 400 members across the globe, with LIVIANA as a regular annual event, with regionally based groups meeting regularly, and with a publications bulletin that is updated biannually.