Publications

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.

Diverse economic possibilities in Kiribati.

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.

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.

Reflecting on the process of field research this paper explores the challenges of bringing together empirical research and the experience of doing development work, with the complex and often speculative theorising of contemporary political and social philosophy.

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. 

This paper discusses the sorts of ethical economic decisions made by community enterprises, and how this contributes to regional social, environmental and economic well-being.

Informal caregiving frequently exacts a heavy psychic and physical toll on subjects that perform it while simultaneously figuring as a source of deep ethical meaning, raising questions about how to account for both dimensions in a politics of health care reform.

This paper addresses three topics: an easy-to-understand review of money and complementary currencies

This chapter explores how the idea of sustainable development might be transformed from an impossible dream (sabotaged at every turn by the force various identified as 'capitalism," 'the market," 'modernization," and 'development") into a realistic and attainable project for organizations and communities.

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.

Introduces three strategies for rethinking the economy with students.

This article discusses the power of telling different economic stories, and making connections between diverse initiatives, in the work of imagining and enacting more just and joyful community economies.

Fishing economies are typically represented as pre-capitalist and as a barrier to capital accumulation rather than as an alternative economy with its own potentials. Privatization (and capitalism) appears logical and inevitable because there is no alternative described or given. The class analysis presented here focuses on questions of property and subjectivity and describes fishing as a non-capitalist and community-based economy consonant with both a tradition of common property and an image of fishermen as independent and interested in fairness and equity. While the latter is associated with a neoliberal subject aligned with the capitalist economy, a class analysis of fishing repositions fishermen as community subjects aligned with a community economy.

In response to the accusation that development can only serve to perpetuate uneven power between the '1st' and '3rd' worlds, this paper explores possibilities for new postdevelopment approaches founded on an understanding of development as a political engagement.

A book review about J.K. Gibson-Graham's 'A Post-Capitalist Politics' in Critical Sociology.

This review article asks, how is it that Markets of Dispossession, are able to contribute both to critical Marxist research documenting and analysing neoliberalism and also to a post-structural performative approaches to market networks?

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.

The politics of health care reform in the US in the United States has focused for 100 years on the question of whether health care is a commodtiy or right: beyond this political deadlock it is possible to reform care through attention to the conditions under which care is produced as a value and the ethical relation that transpires between care provider and patient.

The emergence of a participatory orthodoxy in the development industry has had enormous positive impact, however discourses of participation are also being used in surprisingly political ways. This paper explores how a “pro-local” discourse amongst development professionals in northern Thailand is being deployed in ways that undermine the goals of empowerment and emancipation that are central to the aims of participatory approaches.

Discussion of the history and concept of 'solidarity economy" and possible implementations in the U.S. context.

This paper co-written with Ken Byrne uses the psychoanalytic concept of fantasy to explore how people are attached to particular notions of economy. We explore how worker cooperators in Argentina's newly formed worker cooperatives experience their economic subjectivity.

This paper engages with recent geographical debates on alternative economic practices, arguing that insufficient attention has been paid to the scale at which they operate. Through an analysis of recent attempts to 'fix' economic activity at a scale felt to be normatively desirable through alternative currencies, the paper argues that when attempting to build non-capitalist practices, scale matters. The paper discusses processes of financial structuration that limit and channel these spaces through an analysis of localized alternative networks in the UK (Local Exchange Trading Schemes - LETS) and the geographically wider barter networks in Argentina.

In this paper interpreting mushroom hunting as part of the diverse economy facilitates its place independent of environmental protection strategies like green capitalism, which fail in part because they ignore non-capitalist resource use and extraction activities that do not fit within market oriented approaches to resource management.

The first paper published during my PhD studies, this article explores how the movement to obtain citizenship rights for highland minorities in Thailand is carefully engaging with dominant discourses of Thai-ness in ways that open up the incompleteness of Thai state hegemony.

This paper offers a synopsis of the key findings of my PhD Thesis which explored the politics of development practice and theories of postdevelopment. Drawing on a series of case studies from northern Thailand, I argue that development is always political, whether it is being shaped by a politics of emancipation or the international geopolitical concerns of the day. Thus what is required in development practice is a much more aware engagement with the political dynamics at play.

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.

This chapter introduces the focus group as a method for qualitative social research.