Publications

This chapter in a book about post-capitalist futures outlines a community economies approach to post-capitalism. The chapter describes how a community economies approach to post-capitalist futures starts in the here and now with what is ‘at hand’ to build a more just and a more sustainable world and it highlights two strategies that community economies scholars and activists use to help strengthen existing post-capitalist practices. One strategy is to identify existing economic diversity and the ways it is being used for more just and sustainable economies; the second is to engage in actions to strengthen these economies.

The breast/chestfeeding body is a site of intense politics and power relations in the United States. Hardly a week passes without an incident in the news of a person being publically shamed, or unlawfully asked to change their behavior while using their body to feed their infant in public. Lactating bodies are deemed out-of-place. Simultaneously, birth-parents are judged on their infant feeding practices, with those who do not nurse cast outside of the biologically deterministic ‘good mother’ role. This framing causes the nursing or not-nursing body to become a site of debate. These takes, which point to governance, surveillance, and sexualization of bodies are limiting and have brought these debates to an impasse.

Recent research into waste has moved beyond focusing on individual behaviour change to the wider practices, systems, and social norms that construct and perpetuate waste. Running alongside this work on waste, community economy scholars have been exploring how communities form around and care for commons. In this paper we draw on social practice theory and community economy thinking to illustrate how a food rescue organisation, Kaibosh, based in Wellington, New Zealand, has created practices and mobilised meanings that enable people to collectively manage surplus food, address food poverty, and reduce waste. We show how these food rescue and distribution practices push back against individualised despair, moralism, or guilt, and connect people across food systems.

Greenfield Community College’s (GCC) faculty and staff are predominantly white (93%) and though most espouse progressive politics and have the best of intentions, conversations on campus focused on race or racism are still difficult. In an attempt to address this challenge, we created a book group based on Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility: Why it’s so Hard for White People to Talk About Racism.

PAR is a methodology that democratizes research by transforming the relationship of researcher and participants to where they are working together to actively learn about and create change in the world. In the context of student success for Black, Indigenous and other people of color (BIPOC) and other underserved students, the best place to learn about this is by recruiting students to become co-researchers and engaging students to help analyze the data and collaborate in finding ways to improve student success.

How to create the social and material conditions that make critical, transformative design practice possible? This question continues to drive us in our work, especially because we are convinced that if we want design skills to be used for the creation of a world into which many worlds fit, then lots of people interested in doing such transformative work need to be enabled to do it repeatedly and in the long-run.

Purporting that particular manifestations of social enterprises are conditioned, at least in part, by the cultural context in which they are enacted (Peredo & McLean 2006), the chapter seeks to unveil the ethnocentrism inherent in dominant renditions of social enterprise by zooming in on a United Nations project geared toward promoting entrepreneurial activity in and, ultimately, the livelihood of indigenous Cambodian forested communities. This research explores the everydayness of social enterprise among an indegenous resin tapper community in two adjacent villages, in Rovieng District which lies to the south of Preah Vihear Province in northern Cambodia.

Dominated by conflict, Turkey’s Kurdish Question has transformed over time, opening up new areas of inquiry. Under the Democratic Autonomy project ongoing since the mid-2000s, Turkey’s Kurdish Movement has promoted cooperatives and communes—a post-capitalist marketization project—in Northern Kurdistan. Drawing upon economization studies and diverse and community economies studies’ engagement with assemblage thinking, this article scrutinizes the retailers’ cooperative model the Movement experimented with and explains the practices linked to post-capitalist marketization: creating inclusive platforms for debate, incorporating ordinary actors as experts, and upscaling post-capitalist marketization through building relations with other cooperatives.

This article advances a framework for the study of community economies as assemblages constituted and shaped by three primary dynamics: relations, resources and constraints, and processes of stabilization and destabilization. Drawing on diverse and community economies scholarship, assemblage theory and actor-network theory, we develop a framework that will contribute significantly to understandings of the emergence of community economies and the strategies that make them more resilient and sustainable. The conceptual framework is illustrated through a case study from Turkey’s Kurdish region – a women’s cooperative that remained resilient in the face of armed conflict and political violence.

Increasing small-scale vegetable production is a key target for growing a more sustainable food system. At first glance, meeting this target seems straightforward. On closer inspection, particularly in contexts experiencing the on-going effects of climate uncertainty and economic uncertainty, it can be hard to achieve. Community education has a vital role to play.

Invasive Tourism and Mapuche Tourism: indigenous territory and entrepreneurship with identity in Lake Icalma, Higher Biobio - This qualitative research explores the economic agency of Mapuche tourism entrepreneurs at the intersection between Development with Identity discourse and the touristification of Mapuche-Pewenche territory in Southern Chile.

Fair trade certified exchanges are often cast as an ethical purchasing choice compared to those conducted as part of free trade. Producers are cast as members of marginalized communities who can ‘lift themselves out of poverty’ by producing for the certified market. Third-party certifiers claim that consumers can empower producers, reduce poverty, and improve communities through their purchases. Here, fair trade exchanges may be read as a site of ethical encounter. In this chapter I argue that despite attempts to cast fair trade as an ethical encounter, these claims are mired in a capitalocentric worldview that puts profit ahead of people.

The neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) is a site of medical treatment for premature and critically ill infants. It is a space populated by medical teams and their patients, as well as parents and family. Each actor in this space negotiates providing and practicing care. In this paper, we step away from thinking about the NICU as only a space of medical care, instead, taking an anti-essentialist view, re-read care as multiple, while also troubling the community of care that undergirds it. Through an examination of the practice of kangaroo care (skin-to-skin holding), human milk production and feeding, as well as, practices related to contact/touch, we offer a portrait of the performance of the community of care in the space of the NICU.

The COVID-19 pandemic and associated response have brought food security into sharp focus for many New Zealanders. The requirement to “shelter in place” for eight weeks nationwide, with only “essential services” operating, affected all parts of the New Zealand food system. The nationwide full lockdown highlighted existing inequities and created new challenges to food access, availability, affordability, distribution, transportation, and waste management. While Aotearoa New Zealand is a food producer, there remains uncertainty surrounding the future of local food systems, particularly as the long-term effects of the pandemic emerge.

This chapter looks at social enterprise through a lens inspired by community economies and post-development. Without refuting that any trading enterprise must take form in one way or another, the authors look beyond essentialist models towards the embodiment of ‘social enterprising’; a term capturing various processes and intuitions that enact the social through bold economic experiments and that help multispecies communities to live well together. ‘Decolonial love’ and Buddhist teachings of ‘loving kindness’ (Mettā) are mobilized as a way of framing context in Eastern Cambodia and a University Town in Central Canada.

Until recently, bottled drinking water was a cause of concern for development in the Global South; now, however, it is embraced as a way to reach the 2030 United Nations Sustainable Development Goal target 6.1 for "[u]niversal and equitable access to safe and affordable drinking water for all". Reaching SDG 6.1 through bottled drinking water is controversial as there are broad questions about how any form of packaged – and therefore commodified – water can be ethical or consistent with "the human right to water" that was ratified in 2010 by the United Nations member states. By examining a social innovation enacted by a Cambodian NGO, this research questions polarising narratives of marketised and packaged water.

In this chapter, Joanne and Kelly discuss partnerships between Indigenous methodologies, such as Kaupapa Māori research, and community economies research.

In this chapter, Kelly lays out the case for proliferating and valuing caring labour, so that all kinds of different people might share in it.

J.K. Gibson-Graham’s postcapitalist approach to diverse economies has unleashed a flourishing of research and activism for other worlds. One reason for its successes is found in the intricate links between a feminist and antiessentialist critique of political economy and an experimental, enabling, and affirmative practice of economy. While initially powered by explicitly critical and negating energies, diverse-economies scholars have increasingly accentuated an affirmative, “post/critical” register. This essay explores what has happened to “capitalocentrism” in this process.

Humans depend on fungi to provide food and medicine, and to maintain the environments we inhabit. Yet their conservation has not captured the attention of conservationists, perhaps because existing normative economic, ecological, and social ways of creating value for plants and animals are a challenge to adapt for fungi. Using a critical physical geography perspective, this chapter argues that the value of fungi becomes clearer using alternative forms of accounting focused on interconnectivity. The concept of econo-ecologies refocuses value on the importance of work and exchange. For fungi, econo-ecological conservation is generated through sustainable livelihood practices, and ethical biogeographies.