Community Economies researchers have been providing insights into debates about policy initiatives that can contribute to economic and social wellbeing, and help people to live decent lives.
Australia is one of only a few high-income countries that does not provide free school lunches and there is a push to change this. Community Economies Institute member, Miriam Williams has provided…
A recent 2025 issue of Rethinking Marxism featured a symposium discussing The Handbook of Diverse Economies, edited by Community Economies Institute members J. K. Gibson-Graham and Kelly Dombroski (Elgar, 2020).
The symposium brings together four review essays on the Handbook, each offering a distinct perspective on the book, followed by a response by Dombroski and Gibson-Graham.
There is also an…
CEI Member Elizabeth (Za) Barron recently convened a two-day workshop “Gender, Rights and Opportunities for Women – through Fungi” in Cotonou, Benin, as part of the Fourth International Congress on Fungal Conservation.
The GROW workshop brought together researchers and practitioners from a range of backgrounds, including agroecology, conservation biology, midwifery and teaching, and from Sub…
In 2026, the CEI Summer/Winter School is taking a rest. In its place the CEI is running an online workshop, 'The Politics and Practice of Writing for Community Economies.'
**NEWS FLASH**
There is now a waitlist for the June Workshop; places still available in the Nov/Dec Workshop
The writing workshop will run in June 2026 for those in…
Throughout 2025, members of the Community Economies Research Network (CERN) have published books on an array of topics. Many of these books are open access.
Congratulations to all.
…
Ethical commodity networks have been advanced as a means to promote cooperative development, engender more democratic forms of governance, promote environmental conservation, and redistribute a greater share of returns to farmers and workers. This essay draws upon long-term ethnographic research on the role of solidarity within two Mesoamerican coffee-producing cooperatives to understand the effects of certification regimes that undergird
Ethical labeling campaigns have become a central means for diffusing and negotiating conflicts between social movements and market actors. Fair Trade was a pioneering ethical label and, by many accounts, a success. For nearly a decade, United Students for Fair Trade (USFT) activists worked to build the reputation of the Fair Trade Certified (FTC) label, but in Fall 2011 they withdrew their support and urged ethical consumers to do the same.
In the early 2000s the coffee crisis emerged as a central object of study for commodity chain scholars. In this paper I revisit the scene of the coffee crisis in Nicaragua to understand violent processes of devaluation and disinvestment that devastated the countryside for more than five years (2000–05). Employing a commodity disarticulations approach, I argue that conventional explanations of the coffee crisis as one of overproduction and
Over the past three decades West Virginians have experienced a deepening economic crisis. Divestment in coal and manufacturing has resulted in widespread unemployment, state, county and municipal revenue losses, and cascading effects on social services, households, livelihoods and community life. For 10 years, FJL has conducted ethnographic research, coordinated cooperative experiments, and built pedagogical tools to democratize knowledge
On 29 July 2003, thousands of unemployed farmworkers and their families who had been evicted from coffee estates in the province of Matagalpa, Nicaragua, joined a peaceful march. “The March of the Hungry,” as they named their public demonstration, was not hyperbole. In 2001, global coffee prices had plummeted to record lows, leaving millions of rural people without sufficient income or resources to survive. In Nicaragua, this crisis impacted
