Publications

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 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.

This paper critically but sympathetically examines eco-localisation as a response to ‘peak oil’ and to reduce the emission of CO₂ to avoid dangerous climate change. Rather than seeing the politics of climate change and peak oil as in some way ‘post-political’, the paper argues that protagonists of localised economies are developing radical new conceptions of livelihood and economy that directly cut against the logic of growth-based capitalist economic strategies and elite conceptualisations of economic development. Building on development theory, the paper develops a conceptualisation of ‘immanent’ and ‘intentional’ localisation, with the former a simple move by businesses of economic activities that have high transport costs closer to their markets.

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.

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.

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.

An overview of concepts and strategic organizing practices of the emerging solidarity economy movement.

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 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 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.

This paper draws on ecological ideas to rethink the dynamics of rural economic transformation in the Philippines.

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 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 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.

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.

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.

In this chapter we discuss empirical evidence of communal gardening projects through a 'realist governmentality' approach.

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.

[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.)

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.

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.

This review of Peter North's analysis of international alternative currency movements includes a critique from the perspective of community economies theory.

This article reviews current literature within geography focused on alternative economies, a term that has contradictory effects in a discipline fixated on a realist imagining of the link between 'capitalism" and state through neoliberal governance.

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.

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.

Report on Churchill Fellowship study tour to the UK, Canada and the US.

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 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.