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The Department of Decolonial Economics at El Cambalache is running its third online workshop: Make Your Own Non-Capitalist Economy.

The workshop is provided in both English and Spanish, and will take place as two-hour sessions on Saturdays from May 29 to September 11, 2021.

El Cambalache was founded in 2015 and is a moneyless economy project located in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, made by and for women and everyone in their everyday networks, as featured in the documentary, Inter-Change Value (2016).

For the workshop, the El Cambalache collective will facilitate a series of sessions on, ‘Sharing Seeds of Practice from El Cambalache: The Thought and Praxis of El Cambalache.’

“What would the cultural economy be like if it loved Black and Indigenous people?” This is the question posed by a recently released report on arts and cultural grantmaking in the United States.

Solidarity Not Charity: Arts and Culture Grantmaking in the Solidarity Economy is a rapid report, with supporting video and website, created for Grantmakers in the Arts by Nati Linares and Community Economies Research Network (CERN) member Caroline Woolard.

A recently released 3-minute animation captures the findings of a 3-year research project on cultures of manufacturing for the 21st century.

The animation, Manufacturing Futures: Beyond Business as Usual, highlights how manufacturers can produce in ways that are socially just and environmentally responsible.

The animation is based on in-depth research, funded by the Australian Research Council, into the ways that ten manufacturers are creating high quality jobs for a diverse workforce, redressing environmental harms and benefiting communities through the ways they operate their businesses.

One of the clear messages from Caroline Shenaz Hossein is to take the lived experience of black banker ladies seriously and to put them at the centre of community economic development efforts, as well as at the heart of the cooperative and credit union movement, and banking reform.

The recently released documentary Nowtopia explores a range of themes relevant to community economies.

Written and directed by Community Economies Research Network member Tom Smith, Nowtopia was filmed in Brno, the Czech Republic’s second largest city, and was inspired by the community economies approach of J.K. Gibson-Graham and the economic utopianism of the Degrowth movement.

The PhD thesis of CERN member Dr Wali Uz Zaman, which uses the lens of commoning to offer fresh insights into life in informal settlements in the global South, is now available online.

The thesis entitled, 'A Commons Perspective on Urban Informal Settlements: A Study of Kalyanpur slum in Dhaka, Bangladesh', pushes aside the idea that slums are places of disorder and dysfunction and shows how slum dwellers are contributing their time, effort and creativity to protect their families’ livelihoods and maintain the liveability of slums through collective initiatives.

La edición más reciente de Development, la revista insignia de la Sociedad para el Desarrollo Internacional, explora la pregunta de si la crisis actual por el COVID-19 provee una oportunidad necesaria para la introducción de estrategias de salud que estén explícitamente relacionadas con la construcción de un mundo más justo y sustentable.

The most recent edition of Development, the flagship journal of the Society for International Development, explores whether the COVID-19 crisis provides a much-needed opportunity for introducing health strategies that are explicitly linked to the building of a more just and sustainable world.

Como co-facilitadora del Youth Working Group (Grupo de Trabajo Joven) del Mecanismo de la Sociedad Civil y de las Personas Indígenas, Anisah Madden (miembro de CERN) ha estado trabajando con jóvenes de organizaciones de base, tales como La Vía Campesina, the World Fisher Forum, y el International Indian Treaty Council, para asistirlxs en su participación en los debates sobre políticas del Comité por la Seguridad Alimentaria Mundial de las Naciones Unidas.

As a co-facilitator of the Youth Working Group of the Civil Society and Indigenous People's Mechanism, CERN Member Anisah Madden has been working with young people from grassroots organisations such as La Vía Campesina, the World Fisher Forum and the International Indian Treaty Council to assist them participate in policy discussions at the UN Committee on World Food Security.

Il libro di Benedikt Schmid di recente pubblicazione intitolato Making Transformative Geographies: Lessons from Stuttgart’s Community Economy esplora la costruzione di futuri urbani post-crescita più sostenibili ed equi attraverso l’analisi del lavoro di ventiquattro iniziative di comunità nella città tedesca di Stuttgart.

Schmid nota che una delle più importanti scoperte della sua ricerca risiede nell’impossibilità di scindere in modo chiaro traiettorie sostenibili da traiettorie non sostenibili, e similarmente orientamenti economici di decrescita da orientamenti economici di crescita.

El nuevo libro de Benedikt Schmid, Making Transformative Geographies: Lessons from Stuttgart's Community Economy, explora la creación de futuros urbanos “post-crecimiento” mediante la investigación de veinticuatro iniciativas radicadas en la ciudad alemana de Stuttgart que buscan un mundo más justo y sustentable.

Schmid comenta que uno de los hallazgos más importantes de la investigación es que “no existe una oposición tajante entre lo que es sustentable (y su trayectoria asociada, el decrecimiento), y lo que no es sustentable, (y su trayectoria asociada, hacer las cosas como las venimos haciendo)”.

Benedikt Schmid‘s recent book Making Transformative Geographies: Lessons from Stuttgart's Community Economy explores the making of post-growth urban futures by researching how twenty-four initiatives in the German city of Stuttgart are forging a more just and sustainable world.

Schmid highlights that one major finding of the research is that “there is no black and white between sustainable/unsustainable and degrowth/business-as-usual trajectories.”

In their quest to put in place more just and sustainable practices the initiatives in the study navigate constraints and opportunities, and make various trade-offs in order to remain viable.

La exposición de Katherine Gibson en el plenario de la Conferencia Liviana del CERN inaugural ahora está disponible online (en Youtube) apretando aquí.

En el plenario, titulado Thinking with Community Economies (“Pensando con Economías Comunitarias”, en español), Gibson exploró algunas de las formas en las que las economías comunitarias están llevando adelante, junto con otrxs, acciones para generar oportunidades éticas en el marco de las economías.

The plenary address by Katherine Gibson for the inaugural CERN Liviana Conference is now available online (on YouTube) by clicking here.

In the plenary, entitled Thinking with Community Economies, Gibson explored some of the ways that community economies scholars are thinking with and alongside others in order to strengthen opportunities for ethical economic actions, and she did this by focusing on two threads of community economies thinking.

The final presentation in the CERN online Liviana conference was on the theme of Indigenous-led economic codesign, and was presented by Community Economy Research Network members Alison Guzman and Ignacio Krell who reflected on the process of working with the Mapuche-Lafkenche people of Lof Llaguepulli in the Lake Budi area of Chile to establish the Grupo de Apoyo Mutuo (or Mutual Support Group) that would serve the lives, lands, and values of the community.

During the second week of the online Liviana conference The Interdependence was launched to an international audience.

The Interdependence is a multi-local alliance between community economies initiatives that identify as being part of the alliance by using the identifier .idt, an alternative to more familiar identifiers such as .ltd or Inc.

The Interdependence exists to make visible and to support people and organisations who perceive themselves as interdependent with others, and part of a larger movement to create economies that have the well-being of people and the planet at their core.

One of the highlights of the first week of the online Liviana conference was a panel ‘The Black Social Economy: Black Women and Cooperativism in the Americas and Beyond’ organised by Professor Caroline Shenaz Hossein from York University in Canada.

Professor Hossein’s introduction included an acknowledgement of the unceded territories on which the conference was taking place, and recognition of ancestors who toiled the land and those who continue to toil under unjust conditions.

The recent online International Contagion Design Symposium featured four Community Economies Research Network (CERN) members from Australia, Britain and Europe who presented papers in a session on Contagious Mutualities.