Publications
The chapters in this edited collection were envisioned as conversations between scholars and indigenous collaborators from around the world. My contribution was drawn from a round-table session with highland activists and community representatives who met in Chiang Mai in 2007 to discuss how to represent themselves as indigenous.
This paper explores the performative effects of law legal incoporation in the context of worker cooperatives internally governed through consensus, concluding that this representational disjuncture has particular effects on cooperative subjectivity.
Written in the early weeks of the Occupy movement, this short essay understands Occupy as reflecting and releasing dormant and suppressed economic values from which to imagine and practice a new world.
This paper reveals how ethical economic decision making in a government-led local food project in the Philippines is generating social surplus, creating and sustaining commons and building a community-based food economy.
This paper highlights social enterprise development as a post-disaster livelihood re-building strategy that has the potential to build resilience and foster disaster preparedness in local communities.
In recent years a growing literature on biopolitical governmentality, prompted by the work of Michel Foucault, presents subjectivity as the decisive locus of both the rule of neoliberal capitalism and the production of the common. While sharing its central focus of subjectivity, we are concerned with what this literature leaves out (due to what we discern to be certain implicit tendencies of behaviorism): the constitutive role that subjective investments and “enjoyment” (jouissance) play in the crisis-ridden formations of capitalism and in the constructive turns to communism. We proceed from the premise that there is no balanced relation to jouissance and that class antagonism is irreducible.
This article examines the force of affect in collective action transforming the economy. I draw on my experience at the 2005 World Social Forum to illustrate the operation of affect in collective action.
In this chapter we discuss empirical evidence of communal gardening projects through a 'realist governmentality' approach.
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.
An overview of concepts and strategic organizing practices of the emerging solidarity economy movement.
This paper draws on ecological ideas to rethink the dynamics of rural economic transformation in the Philippines.
In Dirt!: The Film, Wangari Maathai, the Kenyan Nobel Peace Laureate and founder of the Green Belt Movement in Africa, tells the story of the tiny hummingbird who fights a huge bush fire drop by tiny drop of precious water. What can the little hummingbird tell us about ways of building a sustainable food future? This paper explores this question.
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.
This paper uses the Diverse Economies Framework to explore initiatives that have been developed to build more sustainable and ethical food futures, and to identify policy and reseach activities that might help strengthen these initiatives.
This paper takes a look at the practice of 'ba niao" or 'Elimination Communication', where even very small babies are held out to 'eliminate' their waste rather than using nappies! The cross-cultural awkward engagement between two different hygiene understandings sparks changes in the day-to-day domestic practices of a group of Australasian mothers who rethink their use of hygiene products and other 'stuff'.
This paper explores the different and diverse economic practices that two Community Supported Agriculture initiatives use to enact their ethical commitments. The paper considers what this means for current government support for social and community enterprises.
This paper discusses a performative research project conducted with community gardeners in Newcastle Australia.
This article reviews the growing body of literature produced by geographers who make use of psychoanalytic theory in the course of their research, before considering how Left Lacanian theory was deployed in diverse economies research.
This chapter appeared in a volume that brought together work on alternative economic and political forms. My piece is in the section on “Alternative spaces of social enterprise and development" and considers how post-development thinking, such as that present in the work of geographers like J.K. Gibson-Graham or Lakshman Yapa, can support concrete efforts for real change in the world.
This paper takes issue with economic discourses that present excessive greed as the central cause of economic crises. We argue that this focus on greed as the catalyst (when harnessed or the enemy of social order keeps the public debate from deliberating on the particular modes of enjoyment, which both shore up and destabilize the dynamics of production, appropriation, distribution and consumption under capitalism. We produce an analysis of the latest crisis of US capitalism that steers away not only from the theoretical humanist categories like greed but also from the residual reproductionism that continues to silently inform certain Lacanian analyses.
[EN: Conscious of Noir: A Study on the Generic Identity of the Comic Book Series Blacksad], Bachelor’s thesis, French Language, School of Languages and Translation Studies, University of Tampere, 2009. (NOTE: The thesis can be accessed by contacting the author.)
This article draws on the work of Bruno Latour and Eve Sedgwick to examine the ways in which two documentary films are broadening the horizons of economy.
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?
This chapter explores how Nuestras Raices and the Alliance to Develop Power, two community organizations in Western Massachusetts, are building community economies and unsettling traditional formulas for economic development.
Competing with the cartography of capitalism, undermining its power to fix resources as open to capitalist appropriation and space as enclosed, will require a cartography of the commons that makes visible community and commons processes; it will require a shift in strategy from explicating and defending existing commons to mapping spaces into which a commons future might be projected. The Buffalo Commons and a map-based project in New England fisheries link new spatial imaginaries with desires for and enactments of alternative economic initiatives. Each project rereads economic and environmental processes relative to the potential of the commons rather than the potential of capitalism.
Report on Churchill Fellowship study tour to the UK, Canada and the US.
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.
This review of Peter North's analysis of international alternative currency movements includes a critique from the perspective of community economies theory.