class

Class is one of the most important, widely used, and complicated concepts in human geography and the social sciences. It underpins economic geographies and intersects with geographies of gender, race, and sexuality. Different notions of class have been in use, along the spectrum from neoclassical to Marxist economic theories. These theories have also been reworked by feminist, postcolonial, and poststructuralist scholars in order to augment critiques of class-related inequalities and to construct possibilities for imagining and producing progressive geographies of class.

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.

Using diverse economies and relational poverty insights, we examine the place-making practices of the cooperatively owned and democratically structured financial institutions – credit unions. In the U.S., they represent the rarely recognized but widely spread local banking systems that prioritize interests of communities over profit-maximization for outside investors. Their mission to a large degree aligns with anti-poverty and anti-racist social justice struggles and with the ethics of “solidarity” economy, a growing international movement.

This chapter, written for the Handbook of Alternative Theories of Political Economy, introduces the two primary theoretical traditions that have shaped diverse and community economies research and practice: anti-essentialist Marxian political economy and feminist poststructuralism. The chapter discusses the contribution of these two traditions highlighted how they have shaped the diverse economies and community economies approach.

In Transcending Capitalism Through Cooperative Practices, Mulder shows how exploitation, and non-exploitation, can be analytically discerned, and she describes some various contexts in which non-exploitation exists. Mulder's analysis, analytical approach, and contextual descriptions, surface and prompt important questions around the conditions of possibility for imagining and actualizing economic difference and transformation.

This article examines unpaid work within urban agriculture sites. It focuses on the extra work—the surplus labor—that is performed to sustain these sites and how this work relates to subject formation. Land access and subjectivities are widely discussed in the urban agriculture literature, particularly in the Global North, but recent research has also identified the continual supply of labor as a crucial issue as well.

This article introduces German language readers to the work of J. K. Gibson-Graham. Thematically, it discusses the relevance of gender and class as intertwined categories in the diverse economy perspective.