Publications

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.  

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Public sector interest in social innovation is rapidly growing around the world. However, only recently has substantial empirical research emerged to support practice. Through combining Community Economies research methods with emerging new public governance literature, this thesis makes a unique contribution to the field. A language politics is developed, based on two experimental conceptual frameworks. Using these, social innovation assemblages are explored, with a particular focus on social procurement relationships. Openings for performing new kinds of economy are established, offering a counter to ‘fast policy’ approaches and contributing to decentring prevailing discourses of intractable ‘wicked problems’.

This discussion paper documents gaps in professional legal support for small-scale sustainable economy initiatives (SSEIs) in Australia. It draws on (Section 2 and Appendices) data from multiple sources, including a three-year research project on the legal and regulatory support structures for SSEIs, two small surveys of social enterprise, a review of eight cognate initiatives, a review of law firm websites and direct contact with nine social enterprise-related capacity building programs around Australia.The paper first discusses what we mean by SSEIs and their relevance to current debates about innovation, the new economy and the need to respond to urgent economic and environmental challenges (Section 3).

This paper is part of a series of Working Papers produced under the International Comparative Social Enterprise Models (ICSEM) Project. Launched in July 2013, the ICSEM Project (www.iap- socent.be/icsem- project) is the result of a partnership between an Interuniversity Attraction Pole on Social Enterprise (IAP-SOCENT) funded by the Belgian Science Policy and the EMES International Research Network. It gathers around 200 researchers—ICSEM Research Partners—from some 50 countries across the world to document and analyze the diversity of social enterprise models and their eco- systems. As intermediary products, ICSEM Working Papers provide a vehicle for a first dissemination of the Project’s results to stimulate scholarly discussion and inform policy debates.

Scholars from the social sciences and humanities are increasingly seeking to improve the relevance and social impact of their research beyond the academy. In this context, 'designerly' thinking and methods are being drawn on to inform social change agendas, and a range of new relationships and collaborations are forming around this node of activity. This article critically reflects on this trajectory through a dialogue between ethnography, design and theoretical principles from anthropology and human geography. We draw on the example from a workshop during the ICD Symposium and our response to the challenge of reimagining Western Sydney as 'Riverlands, Sydney'.