Rethinking the Economy - Community Economies

Rethinking the “Economy”

Is the economy ‘capitalist’?

What might it mean to think of economic identity in different ways?

The following papers present how a vision of a ‘diverse economy’ is inspiring new projects of economic becoming.

Socially Creative Thinking or how experimental thinking creates ‘other worlds’

JK Gibson-Graham

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.

Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2009) Socially Creative Thinking: or how experimental thinking creates ‘other worlds’.

Also presented at the Katarsis conference, 2008.

The Nitty Gritty of Creating Alternative Economies

JK Gibson-Graham

Amidst widespread concern about “the economy”, this paper explores how academic researchers can contribute to the work underway to create environmentally orientated and socially just economies. We offer the diverse economies framework as a technique with which to cultivate ethical economies.

Gibson-Graham, J.K. and Roelvink, G. 2010, The Nitty Gritty of Creating Alternative Economies, Social Alternatives, Volume 30, Number 1, 2011, pp. 29-33.

A Feminist Project of Belonging for the Anthropocene

JK Gibson-Graham

At the core of J.K. Gibson-Graham’s feminist political imaginary is the vision of a decentralized movement that connects globally dispersed subjects and places through webs of signification. We view these subjects and places both as sites of becoming and as opportunities for belonging. But no longer can we see subjects as simply human and places as human-centered. The ‘arrival’ of the Anthropocene has thrown us onto new terrain.

Gibson-Graham, J.K. 2010, A feminist project of belonging for the Anthropocene, Gender, Place and Culture - A Journal of Feminist Geography, Volume 18, Number 1, February 2011 , pp. 1-21(21).
Publisher: Routledge, part of the Taylor & Francis Group

Post Developmental Possibilities for Local and Regional Development

JK Gibson-Graham

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.”

J.K. Gibson-Graham (2010) 'Post-Development Possibilities for Local and Regional Developmen'. in Pike, A., Rodriguez-Pose, A., Tomaney, J., (eds) Handbook of Local and Regional Development, London: Routledge.

Occupy! Connect! Create! Imagining Life Beyond 'The Economy'

Ethan Miller

Inspired by and written for the global #Occupy Movement, this text is part theory, part strategy and part call-to-action for the immediate and long-term work of identifying and seizing spaces of democratic practice (occupy!), linking them together in networks of mutual support and recognition (connect!), and drawing on our collective strength to actively create new ways of meeting our needs and making our livings (create!).

Ethan Miller. 2011. Occupy! Connect! Create! Imagining Life Beyond "The Economy." Grassroots Economic Organizing.

Rethinking Economy for Regional Development: Ontology, Performativity and Enabling Frameworks for Participatory Vision and Action

Ethan Miller

This thesis involves three interrelated projects: first, a critique of conventional regional development literature; second, an exploration of the "performativity" of (economic) discourse at both conceptual and material levels; and third, a survey of alternative economic ontologies that might help us to imagine more diverse, ecological, equitable and democratic livelihoods.

Miller, Ethan. 2011. Rethinking Economy for Regional Development: Ontology, Performativity and Enabling Frameworks for Participatory Vision and Action. MS Thesis. Department of Geosciences, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst MA, USA.

Traversing Fantasies, Activating Desires: Economic Geography, Activist Research and Psychoanalytic Methodology

Stephen Healy

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.

Healy, S., 2010. “Traversing Fantasies, Activating Desires: Economic Geography, Activist Research and Psychoanalytic Methodology,” Professional Geographer, 62(4): 496-506.

Alternative Economies

Stephen Healy

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.

Healy, S.,2009. “Alternative Economies.” In Thrift, N. and Kitchin, R.,(eds) The International Encyclopedia of Human Geography (Oxford: Elsevier).

Diverse economies: performative practices for 'other worlds'

JK Gibson-Graham

Gibson-Graham, JK. 2008. Diverse economies: performative practices for 'other worlds', Progress in Human Geography 32(5), 613-632.

Review Article: Performing the Market

Gerda Roelvink

This review artilce asks, how is it that Elyachar’s book, Markets of Dispossession, is able to contribute both to critical Marxist research documenting and analysing neoliberalism and also to a post-structural performative approach to market networks?

Roelvink, G. 2007. Review article: performing the market, Social Identities 13(1), 125-133.

Co-operative Subjects: Towards a Post-Fantasmatic Enjoyment of the Economy

Stephen Healy

This paper cowritten with Ken Byrne uses the psychoanalytic concept of fantasy to explore how people are attached to particular notions of economy, by way of contrast we explore how worker cooperators in Argentina's newly formed worker cooperatives experience their economic subjectivity.

Byrne, K. and S. Healy, 2006. “Co-operative Subjects: Towards a Post-Fantasmatic Enjoyment of the Economy,” Rethinking Marxism 18(2): 241-258.

Enabling Ethical Economies: Cooperativism and Class

JK Gibson-Graham

Situates contemporary evaluations of the Îsuccessâ of Spainâs Mondragon cooperative complex within a tradition of debate about the politics of economic transformation and argues for the development of an economics of surplus that can guide ethical decisions in community economies.

Gibson-Graham, J.K. 2003. Enabling Ethical Economies: Cooperativism and Class, Critical Sociology 29(2), 123-161.

Jenny Cameron, Katherine Gibson, A Veno

How two communities in regional Victoria, Australia are beginning to rethink their relationship to processes of economic restructuring.

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