News

Community Economies scholars Bhavya Chitranshi and Stephen Healy recently participated in a day-long event at the University of Sydney entitled 'Economies after Anthropocene Capitalism'.

A major focus of the event was a dialogue focused on economic transformation and the role that multi-species justice might play in generating a response to the Anthropocene. 

Bhavya Chitranshi presented on her sustained engagement with Eka Nari Sanghathan (or Single Women’s Collective) in India and how their farming practices allow them to be attuned to the possibilities of farming differently. 

The first Community Economies Institute Summer School was held in Bolsena, Italy June 1-7 and taught by Katherine Gibson, Katharine McKinnon, Tuomo Alhojärvi and Sabrina Aguiari.

It was hosted at a 16th century Convento S. Maria del Giglio, now managed and maintained by the social enterprise Punti di Vista.

Over five days, participants affiliated with institutions in Canada, Finland, Italy, Sweden, the UK and the USA learnt about the foundational concepts of diverse economies and explored how these are put into practice drawing on the tools in Take Back the Economy: An Ethical Guide for Transforming our Communities.

Katherine Gibson, Kathrin Böhm, and Bina Choi recently participated in The Art of the Cooperative curated by Kuba Szreda for the 2019 Warsaw Biennale.

The theme of the Biennale is “Let’s Organize Our Future” and it brings artists and activist and activist/artists together.

In a day-long workshop held in the gardens of the Center for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, artists and organizers mapped out the economies above and below the waterline that they are involved in and traced the networks of interdependence that their organizations are enmeshed in.

Every two years the EMES research network holds an international conference and, building on Professor Katherine Gibson’s plenary session in 2017, ‘Decentering the Enterprise, Recentering the Social’, this year there is a half-day workshop on Community Economies Research and Practice as part of the opening Interdisciplinary Forum on Monday 24 June.

In March, Dr Luke Drake took eleven students to Port Vila, the capital of the South Pacific Nation of Vanuatu, to work with the Hango Hango Community Association to identify suitable locations for new urban gardens, and then build thirteen gardens across the city.

The project also involved Ambae chiefs based in Port Vila and community members from Walaha village who were compulsorily evacuated from Ambae Island following the second eruption of the Manaro Voui volcano in mid-2018.

Researchers Professor Katherine Gibson and Dr Joanne McNeill recently accompanied Australian Senator Dr Mehreen Saeed Faruqi on a visit to the social enterprise Soft Landing.

This was the second meeting with Senator Faruqi (the first female Muslim senator in Australian history) following the release of a Public Declaration on just and sustainable manufacturing in Australia.

In March, Stephen Healy (Western Sydney University) and Boone Shear (University of Massachusetts) attended the Annual Meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology in Portland, Oregon. 

The meeting theme was "Engaging Change in Turbulent Times", and they presented in a session on "Designs for Teaching Other Worlds".

Dr Ann Hill and Professor Katherine Gibson have been at the "Seeds of Change: Gender Equality Through Agricultural Research for Development" conference in Canberra (Australia) this week.

They jointly ran a workshop on "Community Partnering for Local Development" based around the website they had developed as part of their action research in the Philippines.

Ann reports that there were 25 participants from all continents and that they "went away excited about using the website and other resources for assets mapping and diverse economies mapping".

A new short essay on the topic of Community Economy has just been published as one of 50 keyword essays celebrating 50 years of the radical geography journal, Antipode.

The essay was written by Oona Morrow, Kevin St Martin, Nate Gabriel and Ana Inés Heras on behalf of the Community Economies Collective.

The essay overviews the idea of community + economy and outlines various ways that community economies might be further activated.

This essay joins an earlier one, Cultivating Community Economies, published online in 2017 as part of the Next System Project.

A commemoration of the life of Deborah Bird Rose was held on Saturday March 25th on the banks of the Georges River in Sydney.

Deb was an anthropologist, a philosopher, a storyteller, and a passionate advocate for social and environmental justice.

She made major contributions in a range of fields, from the environmental humanities, and the anthropology of Indigenous Australia, to extinction studies, animal and multispecies studies, and philosophies of ethics, justice, religion, temporality, and place.

Her award winning books include: Dingo Makes Us Human (1992), Reports from a Wild Country (2004), and Wild Dog Dreaming (2011). She completed the manuscript of Shimmer just before she died on December 22nd 2018.

At the forthcoming Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting in Washington DC, author of Reimagining Livelihoods: Life beyond Economy, Society, and Environment meets a group of readers.

In his book, Ethan Miller argues that thinking of the world in terms of the categories of economy, society and environment not only fails to describe the actual world around us but poses a tremendous obstacle to enacting truly sustainable futures.

The Community Economies Institute is running a summer school in Bolsena (Italy) from 1 to 6 June, 2019.

The theme of the summer school is Postcapitalist Politics in Practice, and the school is aimed at students interested in learning more about action-oriented research and activists who would like to deepen their engagement with applied community economic thinking.

The course will use Take Back the Economy: An Ethical Guide for Transforming Our Communities (2013) by J.K. Gibson-Graham, Jenny Cameron and Stephen Healy as the key text.