| Community economies, transformation pathways and the social and solidarity economy When the United Nations (UN) proposes that it is the social and solidarity economy (SSE) that will lead the way towards a well-functioning, prosperous and inclusive economy, it is time to identify the bold steps needed to normalize all forms of economic activity that put people and the planet before private profit making. Through a critique of capitalocentrism, this chapter counters certain perceptions of the SSE's capacity for radical leadership and transformation as limited. Drawing on Diverse Economies scholarship and my action research to build Community Economies, I argue that the SSE could join forces with movements focused on decommodifying basic needs and commoning access to what supports livelihoods. Using the example of community food provisioning, I speculate on how to create durable assemblages that might enable food to circulate as a use value and not as a vehicle for corporate profit making and an agent of further environmental degradation. |
| Researching Postcapitalist Possibilities: Pedagogy as Resubjectivation The paper reflects on the pedagogical practices of the Community Economies Institute Summer/Winter School on the theme of Researching Postcapitalist Possibilities. It is based on three years (2022, 2023, 2024) of having run the ten-day program with 120 participants. We argue that even though the school’s curriculum covers the distinctive Community Economies approach what is perhaps more important are the pedagogical exercises and principles that we use to help transform how participants think of themselves as activists, artists, practitioners, and researchers, and how they understand their role in making other economies possible. We discuss how the school uses appreciative, experimental, and collaborative modes of working to provide participants with a taste of what it might mean to step aside from the critical mode that characterizes much academic training, and to adopt the stance of a researcher oriented towards engendering possibility in the world. |
| Strengthening Agricultural Resilience in Western Province: Scoping Study Executive Summary Our research responds to the need for a different approach to improving agricultural livelihoods in Western Province, Papua New Guinea, and is intended to guide an alternative approach to development – one that emphasises assets rather than needs. This report synthesises key findings and recommendations from the scoping study ‘Strengthening Agricultural Resilience in Western Province’ and is intended to inform future research and development investments in the region. The overall study encompasses two projects: FIS/2021/122 ‘Mapping place-based strengths and assets’, and FIS/2021/113 ‘Developing methods for strengths-based livelihoods’. FIS/2021/122 set out to map (conceptually and geographically) the place-based strengths and assets of Western Province, thus producing a knowledge base to inform agricultural development programming strategies. The project aimed to better understand what people in the Western Province currently do in relation to economic activity and market engagement and to contribute to widening the understanding of what PNG communities have to offer the process of locally-led development, including, for example, women’s leadership abilities, Indigenous cultural and ecological knowledge and the untapped potential of young people. FIS/2021/113 aimed to identify locally appropriate livelihood development practices for the agricultural development sector working across the diverse regions of Western Province. The study aimed to identify suitable tools and methods for participatory livelihood development activities that are tailored to the different geographic, ecological and social contexts across Western Province. The tools and methods identified in the study are important resources (‘tools of the trade’) to enable practitioners to improve their practice. These projects were commissioned by ACIAR and DFAT to inform future programming in Western Province of Papua New Guinea. Commencing during the travel restrictions of the Covid-19 pandemic, the projects were designed as desktop studies. The findings rest upon a comprehensive literature review of the last decade's research and development programs in Western Province, discussions within our Stakeholder Reference Group, and 41 interviews with 37 expert informants. Respondents provided valuable reflections on their programmatic experiences, sharing success and failure stories along with insights into Western Province's various assets and strengths. Download the whole document to read more about the project findings and recommendations. Read associated final reports here: FIS/2021/122 https://www.aciar.gov.au/project/fis-2021-122 FIS/2021/113 https://www.aciar.gov.au/project/fis-2021-113 |
| Review of "Concrete Cities: Why We Need to Build Differently" Read our book review here. |
| Letter to Julie Letter to Julie was written especially for Antònia Casellas's collection, J.K. Gibson-Graham. Hacia una economía postcapitalista o cómo retomar el control de lo cotidiano [J.K. Gibson-Graham. Towards a post-capitalist economy or how to regain control of everyday life], published by Editorial Icaria, Barcelona. The English translation of the Letter is provided here. In the Letter, written in 2020, Katherine updates Julie on what has happened in the area of diverse and community economies scholarship in the ten years since Julie's death, and on recent events including the climate emergency, COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter. In June 2024, Katherine held a conversation with CERN EU (Community Economies Research Network, Europe) about the Letter to Julie. Click here to access the Zoom recording. |
| The Diverse Economies Approach This chapter, written for the Handbook of Alternative Theories of Political Economy, introduces the two primary theoretical traditions that have shaped diverse and community economies research and practice: anti-essentialist Marxian political economy and feminist poststructuralism. The chapter discusses the contribution of these two traditions highlighted how they have shaped the diverse economies and community economies approach. The chapter also includes a discussion of the ever-evolving practice of making community economies and some research directions for a political economy of possibility. |
| Accomodate diverse livelihoods This short essay is part of the last volume in the Future Cities Laboratory Indicia Series. It contributes to the principle of 'Stimulating Diverse Economies' in designing sustainable future cities. The paper is an invitation for various social and institutional actors to accommodate diverse livelihoods. It suggests that for cities to become genuinely resilient, their design and development need to pay attention to the plural and entangled forms of work that are crucial in creating a sustainable condition for both human and earth others to flourish. |
| Living with flux in the Philippines: Negotiating collective well-being and disaster recovery This paper presents three stories of communities in the Philippines. Each story reveals how local people and environments, in their own unique way, negotiate collective well-being in the face of climate uncertainty. |
| Making a living in the diverse economy of concrete: Commoning in a contested quarry Abstract: The rapid expansion of urban development in Asia over the last 50 years has seen a rise in demand for building materials. From large construction companies to squatter settlers seeking to improve their housing, concrete is the building material of choice. In the Philippines there is plentiful supply of the limestone and aggregate (sand and gravel) required for concrete production. Alongside the large quarries owned by major corporations are small, often illegal quarries, supplying aggregate to the construction industry. In these shadow places informal miners scratch out a precarious livelihood. They are members of a vast artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) workforce that is global in extent. This paper situates informal aggregate mining in the diverse economy of concrete in the Philippines and within the context of global ASM studies. With a detailed study of one quarry on the edges of Metro Manila, it reveals how mining contributes to the survival portfolio of poor households. Without romanticising the lives of quarry labourers, we identify a range of negotiations by which informal miners create a community of commoners in a contested quarry site. This research provides insight into the capacities that informal miners could bring to designing more sustainable development pathways within and beyond the extractive industry. |
| Cooling the Commons pattern deck The Cooling the Commons pattern deck is a website comprising 41 illustrated patterns of ‘cool commons’. Cool commons are publicly accessible cool urban environments that offer an alternative to airconditioned private spaces in cities where heat is compromising liveability. The website is designed as an open resource to facilitate design decisions that defend, protect, and enhance the presence of cool commons. The pattern deck builds upon the research report Cooling Common Spaces in Densifying Urban Environments which explored cool commons of relevance to Landcom’s urban renewal sites and included 5 prototype patterns. The Cooling the Commons pattern deck expands upon that study to offer 5 revised and 36 new patterns for cool commons. As a work of commons-based design it offers an alternative to and makes an intervention into the technical approach to design that dominates urban heat adaptation via for example air-conditioning, green infrastructure and ‘cool roads’. Funded by both UTS and Western Sydney University, the deck demonstrates the importance of collegial, collaboratively partnered research. 
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| Cooling Common Spaces in Densifying Urban Environments: A Review of Best Practice and Guide for Western Sydney Renewal In answering the following research question: What design features allow for both comfort and mobility in the hot city, and what design features detract from this? What climate-resilient social practices are these features enabling and disabling? this report develops a new approach to understanding and designing cool cities: cool commons. The report sets out the new conceptual approach of Cool Commons. It moves beyond current technocentric approaches to cool urban futures, recognising that a combination of material, social and institutional strategies are required to support climate adaptation, including community-led adaptive practices. ‘Cool commons’ view the city not as a collection of private spaces, but as an environment for convivial social life. The design challenge is thus to integrate opportunities for respite or coolth across the city, for example, in public spaces that are accessible to all. The report also sets out a methodology for analysing and reporting on the extent of Cool Commons, drawing on the pattern language of architect and mathematician Chris Alexander. It provides a series of sample patterns for Cool Commons that are the foundation for the ‘Cool Commons Pattern Deck’.  |
| Calculating the Value of the Commons: Generating Resilient Urban Futures In this paper we present a method for valuing the multidimensional aspects of urban commons. This method draws from and contributes to a broader conception of social or community returns on investment, using the case and data of a vibrant project, strategy, and model of ecological resilience, R-Urban, on the outskirts of Paris. R-Urban is based on networks of urban commons and collective hubs supporting civic resilience practices. We use data from 2015, the year before one of the hubs was evicted from its site by a municipal administration that could not see the value of an ‘urban farm’ compared to a parking lot. We combine estimates of the direct revenues generated for a host of activities that took place in R-Urban, including an urban farm, community recycling centre, a greenhouse, community kitchen, compost school, café, a teaching space, and a mini-market. We then estimate the market value of volunteer labour put into running the sites, in addition to the value of training and education conducted through formal and informal channels, and the new jobs and earnings that were generated due to R-Urban activity. Finally, we estimate the monetary value of the savings made by an environmentally conscious design that focused on water recycling, soil and biodiversity improvement, and social and health benefits, breaking them down by savings to the organization, participants and households involved in R-Urban itself, as well as savings to the state and the planet. Although our paper is built on specific quantities from a concrete project, the method has wide applicability to urban commons of many types seeking to demonstrate the worth and value of all their many facets and activities.
This paper is freely accessible on the journal webpage. |
| Collectively performed reciprocal labour: reading for possibility Collectively performed reciprocal labour involves a non-monetized exchange of group work done by community members for the benefit usually of one community member or household. In this chapter I shed light on the ubiquity of collectively performed reciprocal labour exchange, thereby establishing its legitimacy in a diverse economy. |
| Reading for economic difference This chapter in the Methodology Part VI of The Handbook of Diverse Economies discusses reading as a practice of knowledge production. It introduces 'critical reading' as a reading for dominance and lays out techniques of deconstruction and queering to show what reading for difference might entail. |
| The Handbook of Diverse Economies Economic diversity abounds in a more-than-capitalist world, from worker-recuperated cooperatives and anti-mafia social enterprises to caring labour and the work of Earth Others; from fair trade and social procurement to community land trusts, free universities and Islamic finance. The Handbook of Diverse Economies presents research that inventories economic difference as a prelude to building ethical ways of living on our dangerously degraded planet. Organized into thematic sections, the Handbook moves from looking at diverse forms of enterprise, to labour, transactions, property, and finance as well as decentred subjectivity and diverse economies methodology. The contributing authors from twenty countries are all members of the Community Economies Research Network (CERN) and the cover artwork is by CERN member Ailie Rutherford. ‘Let us forget, just for a moment, “capitalism” and instead investigate the diversity of new forms of economic activities that are flourishing everywhere: this is the essential, energizing, message of J. K. Gibson-Graham, Kelly Dombroski and their colleagues. This innovative book must be absolutely put into all hands. It takes us on a long and rewarding journey around the world to explore ongoing experiences that all attempt to invent new ways of living together.’
– Michel Callon, Centre de Socologie de l'Innnovation, Mines ParisTech, France
The introduction is available free-of-charge, click here. Pre-publication versions of the following chapters (in alphabetical order) are currently available on this website: 
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| Action Research for Diverse Economies This chapter discusses how research can be part of a social action agenda to build new economies. This research is based on collaborations between researchers and research participants, and involves three interwoven strategies. The first focuses on developing new languages of economy; the second, on decentring economic subjectivity; and the third, on collective actions to consolidate and build economic initiatives. The chapter illustrates how these strategies feature in three research projects. The first project was based in the Philippines and involved working with an NGO and two municipalities to pilot pathways for endogenous economic development. The second project was based in the US Northeast and used participatory mapping techniques to reveal the use and stewardship of marine resources. The third project was based in Australia and focused on environmentally sustainable and socially and economically just forms of manufacturing. These projects resulted in collective actions that created new economic options. |
| Reading for difference in the archives of Tropical Geography: Imagining an(other) Economic Geography for beyond the Anthropocene This paper is based on the 2016 Neil Smith lecture presented at St Andrews University. It honours the work of a geographer whose pioneering work on uneven development and the complex relations between capitalism and nature shaped late 20th century thinking inside and beyond the discipline of Geography. Today the collision of earth system dynamics with socio-economic dynamics is shaking apart Enlightenment knowledge systems, forcing questions of what it means to be a responsible inhabitant on planet earth and how, indeed, to go onwards ‘in a different mode of humanity’ (to quote eco-feminist philosopher Val Plumwood). ‘The Great Acceleration’ since the 1950s of trends in key aspects of earth system health and socio-economic change highlights powerful dynamics that have shaped a new geological epoch, contentiously named the Anthropocene—or more perhaps to Neil’s liking, the Capitalocene. In this paper I ask how might we do geographic research in these times? I reflect on this question by drawing on the feminist anti-essentialist thinking strategy of reading for difference developed by J.K. Gibson-Graham. I attempt to open up new ways of working with uncertain possibilities. I do so with reference to field research into place-based knowledges of resilience in Monsoon Asia—a region that is experiencing increasingly uncertain and extreme ‘natural’ events that signal Anthropogenic climate change. I return to ‘area studies’ scholarship of Monsoon Asia conducted in the 1950s when the engines of economic change were starting to rev, fuelled by dire predictions of population explosion and the fear of communism. Like Neil, I am interested in the genealogy of geographical scholarship and the institutional contexts in which it developed and was influential. I look back to see how local knowledge was described and appreciated by two of our geographic forefathers and I consider how reading against the grain of capitalocentrism might play a role in making other worlds possible.
This article is freely accessible from the publisher's website. |
| Beyond Business as Usual: A 21st Century Culture of Manufacturing in Australia This report is based on in-depth research with ten manufacturers. It finds that along with operating dynamic and viable businesses these manufacturers are fostering a culture of just and sustainable manufacturing that is helping to tackle the social and environmental challenges of the 21st century.
The manufacturers include public corporations and cooperatives, and range from the privately-owned engineering firm, Varley Group, which is headquartered in the Hunter region and has been operating since 1886 to the not-for-profit social enterprise and clothing manufacturer, The Social Outfit, which was established in Newtown in Sydney in 2014. 
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| Creating community-based indicators of gender equity: A Methodology It appears that an almost unquestioned development pathway for achieving gender equity and women’s empowerment has taken centre stage in mainstream development. This pathway focuses on economic outcomes that are assumed to be achieved by increasing women’s access to material things, including cash income, loans, physical assets, and to markets. Gender equity indicators, which measure progress toward these outcomes, cannot escape reinforcing them. We argue that far from being neutral; indicators are embedded in political and ideological agendas that serve as guides to the appropriate conduct of those whose performance or behaviour is being measured. Drawing on participatory feminist, diverse economies and strengths based approaches, we outline a research methodology for developing community-based indicators that recognises women and men’s participation and relationships in all spheres of life, including the ‘non-economic’. If indicators are grounded in local meanings and realities, we propose that community members can use them to identify aspirational goals for gender equity, and measure progress toward these goals. |
| Infrastructures of care: opening up ‘home’ as commons in a hot city What does it mean to be at home in a hot city? One response is to shut our doors
and close ourselves in a cocoon of air-conditioned thermal comfort. As the climate
warms, indoor environments facilitated by technical infrastructures of cooling are
fast becoming the condition around which urban life is shaped. The price we pay for
this response is high: our bodies have become sedentary, patterns of consumption
individualized, and spaces of comfortable mobility and sociality in the city, termed
in this paper as “infrastructures of care,” have declined. Drawing on the findings
of a transdisciplinary pilot study titled Cooling the Commons, this paper proposes
that the production of the home as an enclosed and private space needs to be
rethought as an infrastructure that potentially undermines more social, convivial,
and environmentally sensitive responses to a warming world. The paper asks, what
role might design now play in developing alternative infrastructures of care that start
with the idea of “home” as a distributed proposition? |
| Economic Geography, Manufacturing and Ethical Action in the Anthropocene: A Rejoinder We are thrilled by Vicky Lawson’s deeply appreciative response to the Roepke Lecture and the written article. In her response, Vicky does more than we could ask for by inviting economic geographers to think with us about ways of reworking manufacturing (and other economic activities) that center on care for the well-being of people and of the planet. Vicky goes to the heart of our project by highlighting the importance we place on looking for the ethical openings that arise in the current context of climate change and growing socioeconomic inequality. As she identifies, part of our armory includes tactics of attending to already existing possibilities that are hidden from view and reframing understandings of what an economy is for. |
| Roepke Lecture in Economic Geography—Economic Geography, Manufacturing, and Ethical Action in the Anthropocene In a world beset by the problems of climate change and growing socioeconomic inequality, industrial manufacturing has been implicated as a key driver. In this article we take seriously Roepke’s call for geographic research to intervene in obvious problems and ask can manufacturing contribute to different pathways forward? We reflect on how studies have shifted from positioning manufacturing as a matter of fact (with an emphasis on exposing the exploitative operations of capitalist industrial restructuring) to a matter of concern (especially in advanced economies experiencing the apparent loss of manufacturing). Our intervention is to position manufacturing for the Anthropocene as a matter of care. |
| Public Declaration: Just and Sustainable Manufacturing in Australia This public declaration was one outcome from the Reconfiguring the Enterprise Research Project. It was written and signed by the research team (Katherine Gibson, Stephen Healy, Jenny Cameron and Joanne McNeill) and the participating Australian manufacturers. The declaration was widely distributed, including to state and Federal members of parliament. It has contributed to ongoing discussions about the direction of Australian manufacturing in the 21st century. |
| Community economies in Monsoon Asia: Keywords and key reflections 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. |
| Technological change and the future of work This is a public submission made to the Australian Federal Government's Select Committee on the Future of Work and Workers (2018). The submission highlights that it is not sufficient to focus on technological change in and of itself, rather technological change needs to be developed in service to forms of work and ways of working that directly contribute to social and environmental wellbeing. |
| Commoning Social Life From our atmosphere to the open ocean, from our languages to the rule of law, use without ownership underpins human experience. It is critical to our continued survival beyond the Anthropocene. These resources and properties are ineluctably shared because they are not wholly appropriable; they are used as part of a commons because they cannot be entirely exchanged. They are held in common because they cannot be completely enclosed. This essay is concerned with the use of and care for the commons as an object of inquiry, a practice of all social life, and as the operative condition of intellectual production.The essay continues the ‘Foundational Essays’ series developed by the Institute for Culture and Society on basic concepts and approaches in social enquiry and practice. In the Institute, we treat ‘commoning’ as a key concept of our collective project. 
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| Community economies in Southeast Asia: a hidden economic geography Researchers have long recognized practices of mutual aid, reciprocity and sharing as prevalent features of everyday community life in Southeast Asia. Such practices are often represented as persistent vestiges of pre-capitalist societies and variously categorized as aspects of 'informal economies,' 'patron-client' relations or 'social capital.' In debates about capitalist development these 'relict' practices are seen as standing in the way of modern economic growth, as something to be overcome or enrolled into the mechanics of transition to market capitalism - that is, they are harnessed into a narrative of either decline or transcendence. However, such a framing obscures the valuable role mutual aid, reciprocity and sharing may have played in shaping responses to social, economic, political and environmental threats over the long duree. It is clear that these practices contribute to local social safety nets and act to support households in the event of misfortune or calamity, even today (Ong and Curato 2015). While they may be ill fitted to capitalist development trajectories, they are well suited as survival strategies and may potentially contribute to development trajectories more suited to life in the Anthropocene, the age we have entered in which human systems have become a geological force capable of destabilizing earth systems (Steffen et al. 2015). This chapter outlines an intellectual framing that situates mutual aid, reciprocity, sharing and other 'community economic practices' within a diverse economy in which the trajectory of change is not dominated by the capitalist development narrative but is up for negotiation. 
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| Redrawing the Economy: South Korea Report This report details the workshops conducted in South Korea as part of the Redrawing the Economy project. The workshops were conducted by one of the authors of Take Back the Economy, the translators of the Korean version of Take Back the Economy, artists, and members of community economy initiatives from across South Korea.
Workshops were also conducted in Colombia and Finland, and there is a summary report for the Scholar-Activist Project Award from the Antipode Foundation.
The project also gave rise to the Redrawing the Economy website produced by Kathrin Böhm. 
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| Redrawing the Economy: Summary Report This is the summary report on Phase 1 of the Redrawing the Economy project. The report was prepared for the for the Scholar-Activist Project Award from the Antipode Foundation.
Following this phase of the project, the Redrawing the Economy website was produced by Kathrin Böhm. More information about the project is also available by clicking here. 
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| Re-embedding Economies in Ecologies: Resilience Building in More than Human Communities The modern hyper-separation of economy from ecology has severed many of the ties that people have with environments and species that sustain life. In this paper we argue that a first step towards strengthening resilience at a human scale involves appreciating the longstanding social and ecological relationships that have supported life over the millennia. Our capacity to appreciate these relationships has, however, been diminished by economic science which encloses ecological space within more and more delimited confines. Our task is thus to cultivate new sensibilities that will enable us to enact resilience in both our thinking and practice. The theoretical argument of this paper will be illustrated drawing on examples from a research project on strengthening economic resilience in Monsoon Asia. We explore how people and environments have co-produced ways of living with severe climatic disturbance. While longstanding infrastructural assemblages have been devalued or destroyed by modernization, key elements of these assemblages are now the subject of much interest. Bamboo, a building material central to survival in Monsoon Asia, has been dismissed as a viable element of modern Asia’s built environment. But this is changing as the properties of bamboo are re-evaluated. When humans are resituated within the vegetative assemblages that have supported life in Asia over the long durée we can begin to explore the ethical practices of bamboo and the ecological actions of humans that might co-produce more resilient and liveable futures. |
| Asset-based and citizen-led development: Using a diffracted power lens to analyze the possibilities and challenges Asset Based Community Development or Asset-Based and Citizen-Led Development (ABCD) is being used in a range of development contexts. Some researchers have been quick to dismiss ABCD as part of the neoliberal project and an approach that perpetuates unequal power relations. This paper uses a diffracted power analysis to explore the possibilities associated with ABCD as well as the challenges. It focuses on the application of ABCD in the Philippines, Ethiopia and South Africa, and finds that ABCD can reverse internalized powerlessness, strengthen opportunities for collective endeavors and help to build local capacity for action. |
| 'After’ Area Studies?: Place-based Knowledge for Our Time From today’s perspective, early 20th century ‘Area Studies’ texts represent a relic form of geographical research and writing. These compendiums of place-based knowledge present what we now consider to be a layperson’s understanding of ‘geography’ – details of landforms, climate, land use, economic activities, urban patterns and so on. This empirical content is described in language littered with the judgemental adjectives associated with hierarchical knowledge systems
such as environmental determinism, economic stage theory and theories of modern state formation. In this essay I interrogate one subset of these texts, namely those that were written about Tropical or Monsoon Asia, as it was often referred to. I situate the publication of these geographies with respect to major shifts in human and earth systems and outline some preliminary ideas for how we could re-read these texts to recover place-based knowledge that might inform current research on economic resilience in Southeast Asia. |
| Cooling the Commons Pilot Research Study This pilot study provides initial insights into how residents living in Western Sydney keep cool during the hottest parts of the year and how they would like to see their living environments, at home and out and about, modified to improve wellbeing in a climate changing world. The research responds to the lack of qualitative information about: day to day living practices in outer suburban Sydney; the constraints people experience when trying to keep cool; and, people’s aspirations for more comfortable living environments. The pilot study introduces the concept of the ‘cool commons’ to identify those spaces that offer cooler temperatures than surrounding areas and that are used by, and are accessible to, a community of commoners who to some degree, care for, take responsibility for, and benefit from this coolness. 
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| ‘After’ area studies? Place-based knowledge for our time From today’s perspective, early 20th century ‘Area Studies’ texts represent a relic form of geographical research and writing. These compendiums of place-based knowledge present what we now consider to be a layperson’s understanding of ‘geography’ – details of landforms, climate, land use, economic activities, urban patterns and so on. This empirical content is described in language littered with the judgemental adjectives associated with hierarchical knowledge systems such as environmental determinism, economic stage theory and theories of modern state formation. In this essay I interrogate one subset of these texts, namely those that were written about Tropical or Monsoon Asia, as it was often referred to. I situate the publication of these geographies with respect to major shifts in human and earth systems and outline some preliminary ideas for how we could re-read these texts to recover place-based knowledge that might inform current research on economic resilience in Southeast Asia. |
| Gender Equality and Economic Empowerment in the Solomon Islands and Fiji: a Place-based Approach The economic empowerment of women is emerging as a core focus of both economic
development and gender equality programs internationally. At the same time there is
increasing importance placed on measuring outcomes and quantifying progress towards
gender and development goals. These trends raise significant questions around how well
gender differences are understood, especially in economies dominated by the informal sector
and characterised by a highly gendered division of labour, as is the case in many Pacific
countries. How well do existing international and national indicators of gender equality
reflect the experiences and aspirations of Pacific women and men? What do concepts such as
gender equality and economic empowerment mean in this geographical context? How might
local attitudes and practices be identified and measured? In this paper we draw on
Boaventura De Sousa Santos’ call to recognise and value knowledges of the majority world
that have been rendered either largely invisible or non-credible by mainstream development
and human rights policy agendas. Reflecting on an action research project conducted with
partner organisations in Fiji and the Solomon islands, we explore a more nuanced place-based
approach to understanding and measuring gender equality and economic
empowerment. This approach takes account of diverse economic practices, such as non-market
transactions, and forms of non-cash exchange and unpaid labour, and recognises the
imbalance in women’s and men’s household and care work. |
| Building Community Economies: Women and the Politics of Place Women and the Politics of Place (WPP) is a project of narrating and theorizing a globally emergent form of localized politics — one that is largely of if not necessarily for women — with the goal of bringing this politics into a new stage of being. What is truly distinctive about WPP is the vision of a place-based yet at the same time global movement (Osterweil 2004). Indeed this distinctive vision is what first attracted us to the project, for we were already imagining and fostering an economic politics with the same locally rooted yet globally extensive structure. Rather than ‘waiting for the revolution’ to transform a global economy and governance system at the world scale, we were engaging with others to transform local economies here and now, in an everyday ethical and political practice of constructing ‘community economies’ in the face of globalization. |
| Post-industrial Pathways for a 'Single Industry Resource Town': a Community Economies Approach Although communities are constantly undergoing processes of becoming the Powell River community on Canada’s Pacific coast is in a unique transitional moment when it comes to possibilities for post-industrial economic pathways. With the downsizing of its main industry and employer over the past 3 decades, community members are currently exploring a diverse range of economic possibilities that extend beyond strictly capitalist options. Reading for economic diversity can help us to identify and pursue existing and potential economic pathways that enhance wellbeing for human and nonhuman community members. Knowing that outcomes of such an emergent process cannot be taken for granted, tracking ideas and practices as we have done here is critical for this kind of collaborative research, as it helps to enhance reflexivity and inform decisions. |
| Rethinking the Economy with Thick Description and Weak Theory This paper was written as part of a suite of papers presented at a Wenner-Gren Foundation Workshop on ‘Crisis, Value and Hope: Rethinking the Economy.’ It brings diverse economy thinking and the practice of weak theorizing to bear on the anthropological interest in producing thick description. |
| Value in Postcapitalist Futures and More-than-capitalist Pasts A contribution to a Book Symposium on George Henderson’s Value in Marx: The Persistence of Value in a More-Than-Capitalist World. |
| Thinking Around What a Radical Geography 'Must Be' Simon Springer’s essay on ‘Why a radical geography must be anarchist’ offers both a useful overview of anarchism’s continued relevance to geography today and a lively provocation to relocate the political center of radical geography. In this response I think along with Springer about strategies for everyday revolution and point to many contributions that already dislodged 'traditional Marxian analysis" from the moral, methodological and political high ground within radical geography. I explore some of the ways that insurrectionary geographies are being practised and are informed by an eclectic mix of political and theoretical traditions, including anarchism as well as some versions of marxism, but, more importantly are researching beyond the limits of both these political theories born of 19th century conditions and concerns. |
| Cultivating Hybrid Collectives: Research Methods for Enacting Community Food Economies in Australia and the Philippines In this paper authors Cameron, Gibson and Hill discuss two research projects in Australia and the Philippines in which we have cultivated hybrid collectives of academic researchers, lay researchers and various nonhuman others with the intention of enacting community food economies. We feature three critical interactions in the 'hybrid collective research method': gathering, reassembling and translating. We argue that in a climate changing world, the hybrid collective method fosters opportunities for a range of human and nonhuman participants to act in concert to build community food economies. |
| Being the Revolution, or, How to Live in a 'More-Than-Capitalist' World Threatened with Extinction Much of J.K. Gibson-Graham’s work has been aimed at opening up ideas about what action is, both by broadening what is considered action (under the influence of feminist political imaginaries and strategies), and by refusing the old separation between theory and action. But the coming of the Anthropocene forced Julie and I to think more openly about what is the collective that acts. In this lecture I ask: what might it mean for a politics aimed at bringing other words into being to displace humans from the centre of action and to see more-than-human elements as part of the collective that acts? The lecture proceeds with sections discussing 1) elements and limits of a feminist imaginary of possibility, 2) the synergies between a politics of building community economies and the political imaginary of actor network theory, and 3) the materiality of emerging community economy assemblages. |
| Take Back the Economy: An Ethical Guide to Transforming Our Communities Take Back the Economy dismantles the idea that the economy is separate from us and best comprehended by experts. It demonstrates how the economy is the outcome of the decisions and efforts we make every day. Full of exercises and inspiring examples from around the world, it shows how people can implement small-scale changes in their own lives to create ethical economies. Click here for a copy of the introduction (provided with the publisher's permission).
Click here for the website that can be used in conjunction with the book.
A must read for those who seek to change the world bottom up — Massimo De Angelis
The single most farsighted and practical work enlightening us on the path to a steady transition towards a genuine postcapitalist world — Arturo Escobar
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| Economic Imaginaries This chapter, drawn from previous writings by J.K. Gibson-Graham, is part of a collaboration with artist Sarah Browne for the Ireland exhibition in the 2009 Venice Biennale. The piece provides an overview of some of the core thinking that emerged in the 10 years between the publication of The End of Capitalism (1996) and A Postcapitalist Politics (2006). |
| Thinking with Marx For a Feminist Postcapitalist Politics The article discusses the theoretical openings accorded by the recognition of economic difference and contingency within the Marxist tradition, exploring their potential contributions towards imagining and enacting a postcapitalist politics of economic transformation and experimentation. |
| Different Merry-Go-Rounds: Families, Communities and the 7-Day Roster A booklet outlining some of the major impacts of the 7-day work roster on families and communities from the perspective of women in four coal-mining communities in Central Queensland, Australia.
Based on action research conducted in 1991, the study raises some of the issues encountered by women, men and families after the introduction of the 7-day roster. It highlights the need to consider factors broader than increased pay arrangements and men's leisure time.
The booklet is illustrated with cartoons by Gaynor Cardew. 
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| The Nitty Gritty of Creating Alternative Economies Amidst widespread concern about the economy, this paper explores how academic researchers can contribute to the work underway to create environmentally orientated and socially just economies. We offer the diverse economies framework as a technique with which to cultivate ethical economies. |
| A Feminist Project of Belonging for the Anthropocene At the core of J.K. Gibson-Graham's feminist political imaginary is the vision of a decentralized movement that connects globally dispersed subjects and places through webs of signification. We view these subjects and places both as sites of becoming and as opportunities for belonging. But no longer can we see subjects as simply human and places as human-centered. Th arrival of the Anthropocene has thrown us onto new terrain. |
| Rethinking the dynamics of rural transformation: performing different development pathways in a Philippine municipality This paper draws on ecological ideas to rethink the dynamics of rural economic transformation in the Philippines. |
| Forging Post Development Partnerships: Possibilities for Local and Regional Development A post-development approach to world-making has arisen from a critique of the idea that development, especially economic development, is yoked to capitalist growth. This approach extends the long tradition of critique that has accompanied the hegemonic rise of a mainstream development project focused on the 'problem" of less developed regions of the world. As we see it, the challenge of post-development is not to give up on development, but to imagine and practice development differently. Thus post-development thinking does not attempt to represent the world as it is, but the world as it could be. |
| An Economic Ethics for the Anthropocene Faced with the daunting prospect of global warming and the apparent stalemate in the formal political sphere, this paper explores how human beings are transformed by, and transformative of, the world in which we find ourselves. |
| Community Enterprises: Imagining and Enacting Alternatives to Capitalism If the rise of the World Social Forum is any indication, there is a groundswell of support for alternatives to capitalism. But within this movement that links North and South, ‘developed’ and less ‘developed’ nations worldwide, the debate as to what constitutes an economic alternative is fraught with judgments about the purity or contamination of what is on offer. Wholehearted experimentation with the premise that ‘other economies are possible’ is held back by the critical voices (many in our own heads) arguing that this or that element of an alternative project is no different from capitalism or is insufficient to withstand the colonizing forces of the ‘capitalist’ market. J.K. Gibson-Graham’s recently published book A Postcapitalist Politics (2006) argues that the danger of taking too much notice of these objections is that desires for alternatives become destabilized and the intentional practice of building alternatives gets undermined. It seems that a prerequisite for enacting economic alternatives to capitalism is an affective stance that will enable us, as authors, researchers and activists, to be a condition of possibility (rather than impossibility) for the emergence of other worlds and other economies. In this short chapter we discuss how we have cultivated a stance that enables possibility, while building economic alternatives alongside or perhaps outside of something called ‘capitalism’. |
| A Postcapitalist Politics of Dwelling In this article we draw on community economies and ecological humanities scholarship to tackle perhaps the most pressing question of our time. How do we live together with human and non-human others? |
| Building Community-Based Social Enterprises in the Philippines Community-based social enterprises offer a new strategy for people-centred local economic development in the majority 'developing' world. In this chapter we recount the stories of four social enterprise experiments that have arisen over the last five years from partnerships between communities, NGOs and municipal governments in the Philippines, and university based researchers from Australia. |
| Social Innovation for Community Economies In this chapter we stage a conversation between two innovative and longstanding projects, (1) the multiphase European-based research project on local social innovation that is represented in this book and (2) the Community Economies project which is engaged in rethinking economy through action research in Australia, the Philippines and the US. |
| ABCD Meets DEF: Using Asset-Based Community Development to Build Economic Diversity This paper reframes existing economic diversity as a community asset that can be built on for community and economic development. The paper outlines strategies for doing this, and draws on examples from the Philippines and Australia. |
| Remarx. “Place-Based Globalism”: A New Imaginary of Revolution Over the past several decades a revolutionary “politics of place” has emerged around the world, linked through globally accessible media, loosely coordinated federations, and international gatherings, most notably the World Social Forum. While traditional revolutionary politics confronts a single space of dominion, the politics of place imagines and creates multiple spaces of freedom and self-determination. It is a politics of the here and now, embedded in place yet globally transformative. |
| Openings in the Body of ‘Capitalism’: Trust Funds, ‘Marginal’ Places, and Diverse Economic Possibilities Diverse economic possibilities in Kiribati. |
| Diverse Economies: Performative Practices for 'Other Worlds' In this paper we describe the work of a nascent research community of economic geographers who are making the choice to bring marginalized, hidden and alternative economic activities to light in order to make them more real and more credible as objects of policy and activism. The diverse economies research program is, we argue, a performative ontological project that builds upon and draws forth a different kind of academic practice and subjectivity. |
| Socially Creative Thinking, or How Experimental Thinking Creates ‘Other Worlds' The KATARSIS research project responds to one of the most pressing questions of our times; how to live together? In EU countries this concern has focused on creating conditions for social cohesion, especially by researching the ways that processes of exclusion and inclusion operate. On the global stage the question of how to live together has gained increasing weight in recent times in the light of climate change, public health challenges and economic crisis. Hard-hitting questions about basic needs, consumption levels, capitalist surplus, and the environmental commons that have been suppressed in the language of cohesion and inclusion are beginning to surface. |
| Surplus possibilities: Post-development and community economies In recent years, development practitioners, anthropologists, geographers and others who are observers ‘on the ground’ of the failures of the one-size-fits-all model of development have begun to generate a ‘post-development’ discourse (Rahnema with Bawtree, 1997). By this, we mean a set of thinking and doing practices that are guided by a distinctive ethical stance. Post-development discourse is aligned with the long leftist tradition of critical analyses that accompanied the global consolidation, immediately after the Second World War, of a hegemonic mainstream development project. But while sharing a dissatisfaction with mainstream development, this emerging post-development discourse effects a radical rupture with a style of thinking that underpins much of the critique of development. In this chapter, we aim to give a taste of how we are broaching the practice of post-development thinking in a linked set of projects — a language project of representing the economy as diverse, a collaboration with an NGO that is involved in what we see as post-development interventions in the global trade in labour and an action research project negotiating post-development pathways in place in a Philippines municipality. |
| Imagining and Enacting a Postcapitalist Feminist Economic Politics We, like Hester Eisenstein, have been encouraged by the resurgence of interest in "discussions about capitalism, socialism, and alternative economic systems" and by the innovative organizing energies of "those who believe that another world-a postcapitalist world-is possible." Indeed, our forthcoming book A Postcapitalist Politics (Gibson-Graham 2006b) takes up the very question of an alternative economic politics and, as the sequel to The End of Capitalism (as We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy (1996, 2006a), does so with feminist politics as its guiding inspiration. So it is fascinating to both agree with Eisenstein's core plea, that the women's movement "align itself with the struggle for alternatives to the current economic world order," and yet diverge in so many ways from her challenging stock-taking of feminism's achievements and failures. We wonder whether our idiosyncratic offerings in answer to the question "What is to be done?"(we might ask, "What is being done?") could in any way satisfy Eisenstein, built as they are upon an affiliation with poststructuralist feminism, queer theory, and antiessentialist Marxism. In this brief response to her engagingly personal and provocative essay, we identify some of the theoretical insights we have drawn from these lines of thought and the key elements of feminism's political contribution that we build on to forward our postcapitalist (feminist) political imaginary. As the narrative of her life experience illustrates, Hester Eisenstein has benefited from the gains feminism has been able to effect and she is somewhat amazed at the" ease with which gender discrimination could be reversed," virtually in one lifetime. This leads her to observe that" gender has been a much more malleable feature of public life than either race or class." Her assessment seems to oddly devalue the achievements of feminism, suggesting that gender was an easier target than these other dimensions of social life. |
| A Postcapitalist Politics In this creatively argued follow-up to their book The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It), J. K. Gibson-Graham offer already existing alternatives to a global capitalist order and outline strategies for building alternative economies. A Postcapitalist Politics reveals a prolific landscape of economic diversity—one that is not exclusively or predominantly capitalist—and examines the challenges and successes of alternative economic interventions.
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| Representing Marginalisation:Finding New Avenues for Economic and Social Intervention This paper describes the limiting ways in which people in marginalised areas are portrayed in policy and research, and introduces a different way of representing marginalised groups and the more enabling economic and social policies that result. |
| Alternative Pathways to Community and Economic Development: The Latrobe Valley Community Partnering Project Based on the Latrobe Valley Community Partnering Project, this paper introduces new ways of understanding disadvantaged areas, the economy, community and the research process in order to open up new ways of addressing social and economic issues. |
| Participatory Action Research in a Poststructuralist Vein This paper introduces a poststructuralist influenced participatory action research project seeking to develop new pathways for economic and community development in the context of a declining region. |
| Building Community Economies in Marginalised Areas This chapter elaborates an economic and social policy responses to build on the skills and ideas of marginalised groups. |
| The Violence of Development: Two political imaginaries J.K. Gibson-Graham explores two responses to the violence of development – the politics of empire and the politics of place. Drawing on the well-known book Empire by Hardt and Negri, the experience of the SID project on Women and the Politics of Place, and a slum dwellers' initiative in India, she attempts to open up alternatives to the dominance of capital and affirm a new political space. |
| Area Studies after Poststructuralism In this paper we address the question of ‘what next after poststructuralism’ through a reassessment of area studies. In a narrative of our own involvement with place-oriented research and institutions, we examine the traditional position of area studies in geography and anthropology and its reevaluation by poststructuralist scholars in a number of disciplines. We argue that both prestructuralist and poststructuralist treatments of areas are oriented by a narrative of capitalist development; at the same time, we recognize that traditional area studies has a deep interest in noncapitalist economic practices and relations. It is therefore a resource for those of us who want to create a discourse of economic diversity as a contribution to a politics of economic innovation. The latter half of the paper presents an extended example of reading for economic difference drawn from fieldwork in the oil-palm sector in Papua New Guinea. We conclude with a ‘post-poststructuralist’ reflection on geographic field research. From our evolving perspective, the fieldwork practices that are the principal research methods of area studies constitute a relatively untheorized form of academic politics, creating differences in thought (and thus in the world) via new interpenetrations of concepts and ‘matter’. |
| Enabling Ethical Economies: Cooperativism and Class Situates contemporary evaluations of the success of Spain's Mondragon cooperative complex within a tradition of debate about the politics of economic transformation and argues for the development of an economics of surplus that can guide ethical decisions in community economies. |
| Feminising the Economy Exploring how recent feminist thinkers are attempting to add women into the economy. |
| An Ethics of the Local Principles and practices for cultivating a local ethics of economic transformation. |
| Women and Economic Activism in the Asia Pacific Region How women's activism in the Philippines, China and Papua New Guinea is helping build and strengthen community economies. |
| Beyond Global vs Local: Economic Politics Outside the Binary Frame Offers a counter to the common denigration of local economic politics 'in the face of globalization'. |
| Transforming Communities: Towards a Research Agenda A review of Australian research and policy interventions aimed at communities and regions from the perspective of the Community Economies Project. |
| Re/Presenting Class: Essays in Postmodern Marxism Re/presenting Class is a collection of essays that develops a poststructuralist Marxian conception of class in order to theorize the complex contemporary economic terrain. Both building upon and reconsidering a tradition that Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff—two of this volume’s editors—began in the late 1980s with their groundbreaking work Knowledge and Class, contributors aim to correct previous research that has largely failed to place class as a central theme in economic analysis. Suggesting the possibility of a new politics of the economy, the collection as a whole focuses on the diversity and contingency of economic relations and processes. ![[cover image]](/sites/default/files/styles/thumbnail/public/2017-11/41-wJzQOJqL._SX348_BO1%2C204%2C203%2C200_.jpg?itok=CZ75qO3x)
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| Class and Its Others The authors offer new and compelling ways to look at class through examinations of such topics as sex work, the experiences of African American women as domestic laborers, and blue- and white-collar workers. Their work acknowledges that individuals may participate in various class relations at one moment or over time and that class identities are multiple and changing. Taken together, the essays in this book will prompt a rethinking of class and class subjectivity that will expand social theory.
Contributors: Enid Arvidson, Jenny Cameron, Harriet Fraad, Janet Hotch, Susan Jahoda, Amitava Kumar, Cecilia Marie Rio, Jacquelyn Southern, Marjolein van der Veen. ![[cover image]](/sites/default/files/styles/thumbnail/public/2017-11/image_large.jpeg?itok=xdIrEznv)
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| Poststructural Interventions This chapter in the Companion to Economic Geography overviews three poststructural strategies: deconstruction; discourse analysis and genealogy; and performativity. It then uses examples to show how these strategies have been picked up in the work of economic geographers, and it concludes by focusing how economic geographers have used these strategies in research projects that have an explicit agenda to help shape positive change in the world. Overall, the chapter aims to give a sense of the powers and potentials of poststructural interventions. |
| Community Economies: Economic Politics Outside the Binary Frame Script of a presentation about the contradictory politics of "community" and how this website might help to redefine mainstream understandings of both community and economy. |
| Negotiating Restructuring: A Study of Regional Communities Experiencing Rapid Social and Economic Change How two communities in regional Victoria, Australia are beginning to rethink their relationship to processes of economic restructuring. |
| ‘“Stuffed if I Know!”: Reflections on Post-modern Feminist Social Research' Empirical studies conducted from a range of theoretical perspectives have all in some way affirmed the existence of women's experience as a source of privileged understandings, if not the basis of an alternative social science. With the turn to post-modernism many of the certainties of a feminist research practice have been dislodged. This has liberated a plethora of exciting philosophical, political and cultural endeavours that tackle the essentialism around women embedded in both feminist and non-feminist texts. The focus in the socialist-feminist literature upon industrial disputes, in which women are expected to express their real identities through solidarity with working-class men, situates this literature solidly within essential Marxism-feminism where consciousness is true or false and subjectivity structurally constructed and constrained. In dissolving the presumed unity of women's identity post-modern feminism has liberated knowledge and given rise to fruitful theoretical controversies as to who women are' and how to know' them. |
| Queer(y)ing Capitalist Organization "Recently I attended a conference on globalization and global regulation which was organized by some left social scientists at a university in the USA. One thing I noticed in many of the contributions was the way in which everything was centered on or by capitalism, almost by default. Regulation was seen as focused upon capitalism and ultimately became part of a capitalist formation. Non-capitalist social sites (including the household and the state) were involved in the reproduction of capitalism, perhaps in new forms. Even opposition was situated within capitalism, defined and ultimately coopted by it. Over the course of the conference, what was incrementally produced was an image of a unified and univocal social space, the sort of thing that's called a “capitalist” society—or in this case a global capitalist economy or just global capitalism..." |
| The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy In the mid-1990s, at the height of discussion about the inevitability of capitalist globalization, J. K. Gibson-Graham presented a groundbreaking argument for envisioning alternative economies. This new edition includes an introduction in which the authors address critical responses to The End of Capitalism and outline the economic research and activism they have been engaged in since the book was first published. The witty and incisive spliced author, J.K. Gibson-Graham, has given us a superb tool for undoing the strangling grip of the ways we understand capitalism. The End of Capitalism made me feel like an iron strap was removed from my lungs. In a wave of relief, I experienced Gibson-Graham to be teaching me to breath again outside the depleted atmosphere in which the story of Capitalism always and everywhere fills all space and time Donna Haraway, 1996
The Full Endorsement by Donna Haraway, 1996 The witty and incisive spliced author, J.K. Gibson-Graham, has given us a superb tool for undoing the strangling grip of the ways we understand capitalism. The End of Capitalism made me feel like an iron strap was removed from my lungs. In a wave of relief, I experienced Gibson-Graham to be teaching me to breath again outside the depleted atmosphere in which the story of Capitalism always and everywhere fills all space and time. By helping me notice again how much of the present world is not accounted for by the mega-narrative of the Monster Capital, Gibson-Graham teaches me to work more effectively toward a well-nourished and well-aerated non-capitalist economy, culture and society. Gibson-Graham knows how to see the glimmerings and hear the mutterings of non-capitalist practices amidst the cacophony of accounts of the ubiquitous and all-powerful Presence of Capital. The book helps feed the starving waif of a world-changing left political imagination. The End of Capitalism teaches its readers to hear and see what already exists in irreducible specificity—and to understand why it is so hard to narrate and explain these realities. The point of this controversial and risk-taking book is to learn with intellectual rigor and lusty strength how to enlarge non-capitalist worlds on the real earth. 
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| Querying Globalization |
| Identity and Economic Plurality: Rethinking Capitalism and ‘Capitalist Hegemony’ In the work of Chantal Mouffe, society is seen as structured by a hegemonic articulation, but one that is only temporarily fixed and always under subversion. Following Mouffe, in this paper I pursue the implications of theorizing ‘the economy’ as a hegemonic formation rather than as a fixed capitalist totality. What might it mean to understand ‘the economic’ as a provisional articulation of capitalist and noncapitalist activities and relations? How might it open up the possibility of anticapitalist and noncapitalist economic interventions? Encouraged by feminist attempts to produce a discourse of sexual difference that is not subsumed to a binary gender hierarchy, I envision a discourse of economic difference that could destabilize and problematize the presumption of capitalist hegemony. |
| Waiting for the Revolution, or How to Smash Capitalism while Working at Home in Your Spare Time This paper has a surplus of titles. The authoritative title is “Rethinking Capitalism,” affirming a connection with Rethinking MARXISM and with the larger movement to “rethink” received concepts; indeed, to question the entire epistemic foundation that has rendered such concepts prevalent and effective. The querulous title is “Why can feminists have revolution now, while marxists have to wait”? I’m drawn to this question about feminism and revolution, even though it may be a little misleading.’The question points to the proximity of social transformation for certain feminisms-that image of gender as something always being renegotiated, that vision of social transformation taking place at the interpersonal level as well as at the level of society as a whole. Those things make the marxist in me envious of the feminists within and outside me. My feminism reshapes the terrain of my social existence on a daily basis. Why can’t my marxism have as its object something that I am involved in reconstructing every day? Where is my lived project of socialist construction? |
