News

The Banker Ladies is a new documentary that provides insights into the crucial role that savings groups and credit associations can play in the lives of women as they provide for their families and themselves.

Filmed in Toronto, the documentary introduces us to three ‘banker ladies,’ Mabinty Bangura, Asha Mohamed and Ginelle Skerritt.

Skerritt recalls how her grandmother used funds from susu (as the schemes are known in the Caribbean) to secure a deposit on a house, and to then furnish the house and pay for things such as her children’s school uniforms.

In a recently published paper, a group of ‘postcapitalist accountants’ demonstrate the value of the urban commons by applying the Community Economy Return on Investment (CEROI) tool from Take Back the Economy.

Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt, Professor in the Resource, Environment and Development Program at Crawford School of Public Policy (The Australian National University) and member of the Community Economies Research Network (CERN), is using a new method to help track women’s experiences of COVID-19 and its impact on their lives and livelihoods in one of the most remote villages in India.

Pete North, professor of alternative economies in the Department of Geography and Planning at the University of Liverpool and member of the Community Economies Institute, has prepared a policy briefing on post-COVID-19 economic recovery in Liverpool City Region.

Associate Professor Caroline Shenaz Hossein reports that the National Conference of Black Political Scientists has released a statement about about Police and Vigilante Killings and Policing in the Covid-19 Era. The statement is included below.

Making and Being: Embodiment, Collaboration, and Circulation in the Visual Arts is a new interactive workbook by Susan Jahoda and CERN-member Caroline Woolard that offers a framework for teaching art that emphasises contemplation, collaboration and political economy.

It is based on teaching strategies that Susan and Caroline have adapted to spaces of learning which range from self-organised workshops for professional artists to college-level Bachelor and Master of Fine Arts programs.

The third 'Post-capitalist Possibilities' Summer School, led by Katherine Gibson and Stephen Healy, was recently held at Western Sydney University.

A research report on just and sustainable manufacturing in Australia, Beyond Business as Usual: A 21st Century Culture of Manufacturing in Australia, by Katherine Gibson, Jenny Cameron, Stephen Healy and Joanne McNeill was launched on Thursday 23 February.

Katharine McKinnon’s recently published book Birthing Work: The Collective Labour of Childbirth explores the highly contested terrain of child birth, and how what happens during a birth is the result of a collective process involving what people do and what things do.

These people and things include the mother and the birthing team, and the technologies and institutions, the furniture in the birth space, and the biophysical processes and chemicals such as the hormones that regulate labour and the blood that transports oxygen and chemical signals to the baby.

The Free the Seeds campaign of OpenSourceSeeds was recently launched in Berlin featuring bread made of an open-source wheat variety called Convento C..

Convento C. is an organically bred population of wheat which means that there is a high level of genetic diversity within the plants making the wheat particularly robust against diseases and extreme weather conditions. Convento C. was bred by Dr Hartmut Spieß of the Dottenfelderhof, Bad Vilbel, Germany.

Lindsay Naylor’s recently published book Fair Trade Rebels: Coffee Production and Struggles for Autonomy in Chiapas focuses on the everyday experiences of people who self-identify as peasants (as campesinos and campesinas) and engage in multiple agricultural strategies to maintain their livelihoods as subsistence cultivators while simultaneously engaging in the 500-year struggle of an Indigenous people against oppression.

The Community Economies Institute, with Punti Di Vista, is holding its second summer school, 'Methods for a Postcapitalist Politics', 6 to 12 June 2020, in Bolsena, Italy.

The week long program is an opportunity to engage with the methods and practice of community economies research.

The week includes an in-depth look at the founding concepts and tools of community economies approaches, and an exploration of examples of how these ideas are being put into practice by artists, activists, community groups and scholars. There will be opportunities to experiment with community economies methods.

A new teaching resource is now available on the Community Economies website.

Dr Istvan Rado from Thammasat University, Thailand, has written a guide that provides a step-by-step process for teaching undergraduates about diverse economies and action research.

On Thursday October 31 2019, the CERN Latin American Regional held a meeting to discuss the work of Alison Guzman, Ignacio Krell and Fernando Quilaqueo from MAPLE CHILE. 

This was a zoom-supported meeting in which people participated from Chiapas, México; Villarrica, Chile; Berlin,Germany; and Buenos Aires, Argentina. 

Two researchers from Uruguay were expected to join but last minute difficulties with technologies did not allow it. 

On October 22, The Bamboo Bridge, had its world premiere screening at the Antenna Documentary Film Festival in Sydney, and was awarded a Special Mention in the category of Best Australian Documentary.

The film was directed by Juan Francisco Salazar, Katherine Gibson was Executive Producer, and Isaac Lyne was Location Producer and conducted much of the background research.

Every dry season, a 1.5km bamboo bridge is built across the Mekong River in Cambodia and then dismantled after the monsoonal tides, but in 2017 the bamboo bridge was built for the last time, when a massive new government-funded concrete bridge was inaugurated.

A recently released report, Delivering Urban Wellbeing through Transformative Community Enterprise, summarises how the Community Economy Return on Investment tool was used to test its potential for documenting the non-monetary impact of Cultivate, a social enterprise in post-quake Christchurch, Aotearoa New Zealand.

Within the framework of the Collaborative Research Programme Learning from and about Self-Management coordinated by Community Economies Institute member Ana Heras, and in collaboration with the Institute for Social Inclusion and Human Development (INCLUIR), a meeting took place on September 27 at the University of San Martín, Buenos Aires, Argentina in conversation with the former Public Protector of Montevideo (Defensora de Vecinas y Vecinos de Montevideo, Uruguay)

From January 5 to 10, 2020, a Boot Camp Winter Workshop entitled Decolonial Methods in Social, Solidarity and Non-Hierarchical Economies is being run by El Cambalache in San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico.

The workshop will explore questions such as how to move from theory to practice; how to start a non-capitalist economic project in a collective; and how to use participatory action research to create a small social and/or solidarity economy initiative.

The Handbook of Diverse Economies has entered the production process with the editors, J.K. Gibson-Graham and Kelly Dombroski, sending the almost 300 page manuscript to the publisher Edward Elgar.

The Handbook comprises 58 chapters, organised around seven parts, Enterprise, Labour, Transactions, Property, Finance, Subjectivity and Methodology, with each part being introduced by a Framing Essay.

The editors said, "We are delighted with the Handbook, and especially with the range of topics that are covered by authors from across the globe".