Hyvärinen, Pieta
Published: January 2017

Food production is a feminist issue, and feminist research offers many fruitful ways of examining its different sectors. In this article I incite a dialogue on food production between feminist theories on naturecultures and the economy. Using concepts of companion species and diverse economies I analyse weed management as multispecies relations and ask, how voluntary weeding practices open up space for

Johanisova, Nadia, Eva Fraňková
Published: November 2017
Isaac Lyne
Published: May 2017

Social enterprise (or business driven by social objectives) is a prominent focus of development. In higher income countries it is a strategy for regional development or regeneration by creating optimal levels of social value from under-utilised resources. In developing countries, social enterprise offers hope for sustainable development by reducing dependency on aid and by developing markets and improving economic growth. Social enterprise is widely linked to ‘business at the bottom of the pyramid’, there is particular attention to heroic 'social entrepreneurs'. But critical literature shows a tension between the top-down ‘development’ driven view of social enterprise and a bottom-upwards grassroots community development approach driven by wellbeing.

Anna Kruzynski
Published: January 2017

Des mouvements sociaux partout sur la planète se révoltent contre la démocratie libérale et le capitalisme tout en expérimentant des manières d’être, de penser et de faire basées sur l’autonomie, le respect de la diversité et l’aide mutuelle. Dans cet article, les pratiques politiques, culturelles et économiques du Centre social autogéré de Pointe-Saint-Charles déployées durant la lutte pour l’appropriation collective du Bâtiment 7 sont examinées à l’aune du concept d’autonomie collective. En rendant visibles ces pratiques subversives, l’analyse permet de saisir la portée révolutionnaire de cette initiative libertaire située en marge de l’économie sociale au Québec.

Anna Kruzynski
Published: January 2017

Ce texte est un exercice de réflexion. Plutôt que de travailler avec des étiquettes idéologiques, j’ai envie de faire de la gymnastique mentale avec des concepts et des pratiques qui m’inspirent. Pour en arriver à proposer une méthode d’organisation qui soit porteuse d’espoir (un autre vivre ensemble est possible) tout en étant ancrée dans un pragmatisme mobilisateur. Je commencerai par expliciter mon point de vue sur l’exploitation et l’oppression des humains et de la nature. Puis, je reviendrai sur les idées mises de l’avant par Murray Bookchin et sur l’application de ses concepts d’écologie sociale et de municipalisme libertaire par le collectif anarchiste la Pointe libertaire. Ensuite j’aborderai les propositions de J. K.

Katherine Gibson, Stephen Healy, Jenny Cameron
Published: September 2017

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.

Redrawing the Economy Workshop
Stephen Healy
Published: September 2017

This report details the workshops conducted in Colombia 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 Spanish version of Take Back the Economy, artists, and members of community economy initiatives from across Colombia.

Workshops were also conducted in Finland and South Korea, and there is a summary report for the Scholar-Activist Project Award from the Antipode Foundation.

Colombia Workshop
Jenny Cameron
Published: September 2017

This report details the workshops conducted in Finland as part of the Redrawing the Economy project.

Finland Workshop
Katherine Gibson and Binna Choi
Published: September 2017

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.

South Korea Workshop
Kathrin Böhm, Doina Petrescu and Tom James (editors)
Published: September 2017

The book is titled Learn to Act, because that’s what we set out to do. The title is a clear proclamation towards a form of  learning which is both an act of commoning and a moment in which knowledge becomes relative, collective and applied. Learn to Act is about the near future, how to act, and how to support each other.

 

 

Learn to Act
Katherine Gibson, Ann Hill, Lisa Law
Published: November 2017

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.

Front cover of the Routledge Handbook of Southeast Asian Development
Mclean, Heather
Published: December 2017

This intervention contributes to feminist and queer responses to Brenner and Schmid’s ‘planetary urbanization’ thesis. I discuss the generative potential of their attempts to craft alternative urban research pathways and their critique of urban age discourse, a body of work that defines cities as static sites of ‘innovation’, ‘creativity’, and ‘sustainability’. However, echoing critics of the planetary urbanization approach, I contend that Brenner and Schmid’s research schema risks reproducing exclusionary analytical hierarchies by promoting a totalizing, ‘god-trick-like’ standpoint and ignoring marginalized feminist, queer, and praxis-oriented urban studies approaches. As a result, planetary urbanization ignores situated and relational knowledges and lived experience.

Mclean, Heather and Kern, Leslie
Published: December 2017

There is a well established body of feminist scholarship critiquing the methodological and epistemological limits of an “objective” view from nowhere in urban research and political economy frameworks. Recent developments, such as the planetary urbanization thesis, have reignited feminist efforts to counter patriarchal, colonial, and hegemonic ways of knowing. Here, we recount our frustrations with the reproduction of dominant political economic modes of “knowing” urban processes such as gentrification and culture-led regeneration in research that seeks to uncover the production of neoliberal spaces and subjectivities.

Lester R. Brown
Published: February 2017

Book translation of Lester R. Brown's The Great Transition: Shifting from Fossil Fuels to Solar and Wind Energy (W. W. Norton & Company, 2015), translated from English to Finnish by Eeva Talvikallio, published by Into Kustannus, 2017.

 

 

Cover of Suuri energiamurros: Hyviä uutisia elinkelpoisista energiavaroista ilmastonmuutoksen aikakautena.
Molly Mullen
Published: January 2017

Some of the perennial tensions in applied theatre arise from the ways in which practice is funded or financed. They include the immediate material pressures and pragmatic dilemmas faced by theatre makers on the ground and the struggle to secure the resources needed to produce and sustain work or to negotiate the dynamics and demands of particular funding relationships. In the applied theatre literature, there are many examples of groups and organizations that have compromised their political, pedagogic, artistic or ethical principles to make their work economically viable. There are also ongoing debates about the nature of the relationship between applied theatre and the local, national and global economic conditions in which it is produced.

Naylor, Lindsay
Published: February 2017

Fair trade certification is a mechanism used by coffee cooperatives to assist farmers with accessing cash income and securing a better price for their product. Third-party certifiers regulate the fair trade label, which is tied not only to price, but also to standards for production and development. In this paper I examine these standards as they are deployed in self-declared autonomous communities in the highlands of Chiapas, Mexico. I argue that third-party certifiers through enforcement of standards, and surveillance attempt to create a producer subject who becomes “fixed” through certification.

Amanda Huron
Published: January 2017

A review essay of three books that take up the urban commons: Dellenbaugh, Kip, Bieniok et al. (eds.), 2015, Urban Commons: Moving Beyond State and Market; Borch and Kornberger (eds.), 2015, Urban Commons: Rethinking the City; and Ferguson (ed.), 2014 Make_Shift City: Renegotiating the Urban Commons.  

Susan Brinn Hyatt, Boone W. Shear, Susan Wright
Published: May 2017

As part of the neoliberal trends toward public-private partnerships, universities all over the world have forged more intimate relationships with corporate interests and more closely resemble for-profit corporations in both structure and practice.  These transformations, accompanied by new forms of governance, produce new subject-positions among faculty and students and enable new approaches to teaching, curricula, research, and everyday practices. The contributors to this volume use ethnographic methods to investigate the multi-faceted impacts of neoliberal restructuring, while reporting on their own pedagogical responses, at universities in the United States, Europe, and New Zealand.

Learning Under Neoliberalism Book Cover
Boone W. Shear
Published: January 2017

In this essay, I envision the university, not simply as a discreet institution with formal boundaries to attend to and defend from neoliberal and conservative assaults, but as a location of possibility from which to locate and advance projects that connect students and others to the possibility of other economic worlds.

Alison Mathie, Jenny Cameron, Katherine Gibson
Published: January 2017

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.

Azusa Yamashita, Christopher Gomez, Kelly Dombroski
Published: April 2017

In this paper, Azusa Yamashita leads us in reflecting on the experiences of LGBT people following the Japanese tsunami and earthquakes of 2011, based on her work setting up a LGBT hotline with Iwate Rainbow Network.

J.K. Gibson-Graham, Jenny Cameron, Kelly Dombroski, Stephen Healy, Ethan Miller, Community Economies Collective
Published: February 2017

This paper was commissioned by the Next System Project (co-chaired by Gar Alperovitz and by Gus Speth). The paper details community economies thinking, and covers the following topics:

  • key commitments of community economies thinking
  • understandings of transformation
  • community + economy
  • strategies for cultivating community economies (namely, applying the language of diverse economies and broadening the horizon of economic politics)

The paper includes examples of community economies from across the globe (including those that are 'local' an place-based (such as Hepburn Wind) to those that are 'global' (such as the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer).

Cover
J.K. Gibson-Graham, Ann Hill, Lisa Law
Published: July 2017

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.

Zanoni, Patricia, Contu, Alissa, Healy, Stephen , Mir, Raza
Published: January 2017

The record number of submissions we received in February 2016, apart from posing a major editorial challenge, confirmed our original intuition that a forum on the organization of alternative economies is timely. With this special issue, we would like to contribute to the current conversation on alternative economies, which is taking place in this journal (e.g. Bretos and Errasti, 2017; Cheney et al., 2014; Gibson-Graham, 1996b; Safri, 2015) and the broader organization studies community (e.g.

Gradon Diprose, Kelly Dombroski, Stephen Healy , Waitoa, Joanne
Published: January 2017

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. All of the questions however, point to ongoing pressing concerns around how to act ethically with human and non-human others in ways that decolonise our colonial, capitalist-oriented economy and society.

Marianna Pavlovskaya, Kevin St. Martin
Published: December 2017
Craig Borowiak, Stephen Healy , Marianna Pavlovskaya, Maliha Safri
Published: December 2017

In debates over post-capitalist politics, growing attention has been paid to the solidarity economy (SE), a framework that draws together diverse practices ranging from co-ops to community gardens. Despite proponents’ commitment to inclusion, racial and class divides suffuse the SE movement. Using qualitative fieldwork and an original SE dataset, this article examines the geospatial composition of the SE within the segregated geography of Philadelphia. We find that though the SE as a whole is widely distributed across the city, it is, with the exception of community gardens, largely absent from poor neighborhoods of color. We also identify SE clusters in racially and economically diverse border areas rather than in predominantly affluent White neighborhoods.

Ethan Miller, J.K. Gibson-Graham
Published: December 2017

This chapter, written for the Thinking in the World Reader (Bloomsbury Press), seeks to challenge and think beyond a key blockage in contemporary life: the conventional distinction between economy and ecology. As we argue, the distinction between these two domains severs us from transformative, ethically-infused encounters with our constitutive interdependencies. We explore one possible way to affirm and expand the politicization of this interdependence: a notion of "ecological livelihoods" linked with an ethics and politics of commoning.

Jo Barraket, Heather Douglas, Robyn Eversole, Chris Mason, Joanne McNeill, Bronwen Morgan
Published: December 2017

This paper aims to document the nature of social enterprise models in Australia, their evolution and institutional drivers. Design/methodology/approach: The paper draws on secondary analysis of source materials and the existing literature on social enterprise in Australia. Analysis was verified through consultation with key actors in the social enterprise ecosystem. Findings: With its historical roots in an enterprising non-profit sector and the presence of cooperative and mutual businesses, the practice of social enterprise in Australia is relatively mature. Yet, the language of social enterprise and social entrepreneurship remains marginal and contested.

Joanne McNeill, Jo Barraket, Aurora Elmes
Published: December 2017

This project was funded by the NSW Office of Environment and Heritage (OEH), and delivered by the Centre for Social Impact (CSI) Swinburne in partnership with Community Recycling Network Australia (CRNA) and Resource Recovery Australia. The project aims were: to improve understanding of how the environmental and social impacts of NSW-based community recycling enterprises are currently measured; to use this information to suggest some common indicators against which they could more effectively document and report on their performance in these areas; and to consider the implications of this work for sustainability-focused social enterprises more broadly.