From January 5 to 10, 2020, a Boot Camp Winter Workshop entitled Decolonial Methods in Social, Solidarity and Non-Hierarchical Economies is being run by El Cambalache in San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico.
The workshop will explore questions such as how to move from theory to practice; how to start a non-capitalist economic project in a collective; and how to use participatory action research to create a small social and/or solidarity economy initiative.
The Handbook of Diverse Economies has entered the production process with the editors, J.K. Gibson-Graham and Kelly Dombroski, sending the almost 300 page manuscript to the publisher Edward Elgar.
The Handbook comprises 58 chapters, organised around seven parts, Enterprise, Labour, Transactions, Property, Finance, Subjectivity and Methodology, with each part being introduced by a Framing Essay.
The editors said, "We are delighted with the Handbook, and especially with the range of topics that are covered by authors from across the globe".
A recently published Finnish translation of Take Back the Economy: An Ethical Guide for Transforming our Communities joins the earlier Korean and Spanish translations, published in 2014 and 2017.
Elävä talous: Yhteisen tulevaisuuden toimintaopas is published by Vastapaino. Like the original, Elävä talous is structured as a guide for collective action, but one difference is that Eeva Talvikallio has been included as an additional author.
The second PhD Short Course on Researching Post-capitalist Possibilities will be held at Western Sydney University, 15 to 17 and 20 to 22 January 2020 (with a one-day conference on 23 January).
The short course will be led by J.K. Gibson-Graham, Stephen Healy and members of the Community Economies Research Network (CERN), and it explores the role of the humanities and social sciences in making other worlds possible, the capacities that scholars have to shape the world, and the associated ethical responsibilities and earthly cares.
On 1 August, Katherine Gibson and Joanne McNeill attended the Social Enterprise Evidence Forum organised by the Centre for Social Impact at Swinburne University in Melbourne.
Over 80 people attended the day-long forum, and participants included senior policymakers from national, state and local government, philanthropists, and social enterprise practitioners and researchers
For three days in early July, a group of artists, academics, and diverse economies thinkers gathered in Wageningen to discuss their work and understandings of art and diverse economies.
The event concluded with a public exhibition of individual and collective outputs, entitled Other (Food) + (Art) Economies are possible!
From 24 to 26 June, Stephen Healy and Maliha Safri attended the International Conference “Implementing the Sustainable Development Goals: What Role for Social and Solidarity Economy?” held at the International Labour Office in Geneva.
This was part of a series of conferences launched by the United Nations Inter-Agency Task Force on Social and Solidarity Economy (UNTFSSE) in 2018 and organized by United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD).
On 5 June, 2019, David Burin (member of the Community Economies Research Network and of INCLUIR, Argentina) and Alejandra Pagotto (Universidad de Buenos Aires and INCLUIR, Argentina) coordinated a small workshop on “Problems and solutions in cooperatives of workers”.
For 10 days in June, thirteen community economies scholars were ensconced in the 16th century Convento S. Maria del Giglio, Bolsena (Italy), for the 2019 Community Economies Theory and Writing Retreat.
The scholars, from universities in Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Netherlands, Spain, UK and US were all recipients of a 2019 Julie Graham Community Economies Research Fund Fellowship.
Community Economies scholars Bhavya Chitranshi and Stephen Healy recently participated in a day-long event at the University of Sydney entitled 'Economies after Anthropocene Capitalism'.
A major focus of the event was a dialogue focused on economic transformation and the role that multi-species justice might play in generating a response to the Anthropocene.
The first Community Economies Institute Summer School was held in Bolsena, Italy June 1-7 and taught by Katherine Gibson, Katharine McKinnon, Tuomo Alhojärvi and Sabrina Aguiari.
It was hosted at a 16th century Convento S. Maria del Giglio, now managed and maintained by the social enterprise Punti di Vista.
Over five days, participants affiliated with institutions in Canada, Finland, Italy, Sweden, the UK and the USA learnt about the foundational concepts of diverse economies and explored how these are put into practice drawing on the tools in Take Back the Economy: An Ethical Guide for Transforming our Communities.
Katherine Gibson, Kathrin Böhm, and Bina Choi recently participated in The Art of the Cooperative curated by Kuba Szreda for the 2019 Warsaw Biennale.
The theme of the Biennale is “Let’s Organize Our Future” and it brings artists and activist and activist/artists together.
Every two years the EMES research network holds an international conference and, building on Professor Katherine Gibson’s plenary session in 2017, ‘Decentering the Enterprise, Recentering the Social’, this year there is a half-day workshop on Community Economies Research and Practice as part of the opening Interdisciplinary Forum on Monday 24 June.
In March, Dr Luke Drake took eleven students to Port Vila, the capital of the South Pacific Nation of Vanuatu, to work with the Hango Hango Community Association to identify suitable locations for new urban gardens, and then build thirteen gardens across the city.
The project also involved Ambae chiefs based in Port Vila and community members from Walaha village who were compulsorily evacuated from Ambae Island following the second eruption of the Manaro Voui volcano in mid-2018.
Researchers Professor Katherine Gibson and Dr Joanne McNeill recently accompanied Australian Senator Dr Mehreen Saeed Faruqi on a visit to the social enterprise Soft Landing.
This was the second meeting with Senator Faruqi (the first female Muslim senator in Australian history) following the release of a Public Declaration on just and sustainable manufacturing in Australia.
In March, Stephen Healy (Western Sydney University) and Boone Shear (University of Massachusetts) attended the Annual Meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology in Portland, Oregon.
The meeting theme was "Engaging Change in Turbulent Times", and they presented in a session on "Designs for Teaching Other Worlds".
Dr Ann Hill and Professor Katherine Gibson have been at the "Seeds of Change: Gender Equality Through Agricultural Research for Development" conference in Canberra (Australia) this week.
They jointly ran a workshop on "Community Partnering for Local Development" based around the website they had developed as part of their action research in the Philippines.
A new short essay on the topic of Community Economy has just been published as one of 50 keyword essays celebrating 50 years of the radical geography journal, Antipode.
The essay was written by Oona Morrow, Kevin St Martin, Nate Gabriel and Ana Inés Heras on behalf of the Community Economies Collective.
The essay overviews the idea of community + economy and outlines various ways that community economies might be further activated.
This essay joins an earlier one, Cultivating Community Economies, published online in 2017 as part of the Next System Project.
A commemoration of the life of Deborah Bird Rose was held on Saturday March 25th on the banks of the Georges River in Sydney.
Deb was an anthropologist, a philosopher, a storyteller, and a passionate advocate for social and environmental justice.
She made major contributions in a range of fields, from the environmental humanities, and the anthropology of Indigenous Australia, to extinction studies, animal and multispecies studies, and philosophies of ethics, justice, religion, temporality, and place.
At the forthcoming Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting in Washington DC, author of Reimagining Livelihoods: Life beyond Economy, Society, and Environment meets a group of readers.
In his book, Ethan Miller argues that thinking of the world in terms of the categories of economy, society and environment not only fails to describe the actual world around us but poses a tremendous obstacle to enacting truly sustainable futures.
