News

The first keynote of the 2022 CERN LIVIANA conference was delivered by Dr Priscilla Ferreira, Assistant Professor of Geography and Latinx and Caribbean Studies at Rutgers University, who explored the lived tactics of Black survival especially by Black women who are experimenting with life-affirming initiatives even in the face of deadly violence.

Ferreira’s presentation “Economic Marronage: Black Solidarity Economies” is now available online through the CEI YouTube channel.

Abstract submissions are now open for the 9th edition of the EMES International Research Conference on Social Enterprise which will take place 11 to 14 September 2023 at Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences, Germany, with the conference theme “Act locally, change globally: Social enterprises and cooperatives for more resilient economies and societies.”

This is the first fully-fledged face-to-face EMES conference since the start of the Covid 19 pandemic and it aims to be a meeting place for scholars worldwide who are involved in social enterprise, cooperative, and social innovation research across the globe.

CEI and CERN members were saddened by the recent news of Jody Kretzmann’s death.

Jody Kretzmann’s work, with John McKnight, on asset-based community development (ABCD) has had an indelible impact on community economies thinking and practice.

The foundational ABCD concept of identifying existing assets and then building on these assets resonates with the community economies approach of starting with what we have at hand to build the type of world we want to live in.

CEI and CERN members have drawn on Kretzmann and McKnight’s ABCD work in a range of contexts for almost three decades.

FLOAT – Feral MBA, a radically re-imagined training course in business for artists and others, will be held in East Gippsland, Australia over a 5-week period from February to April 2023.

The course will be run by Kate Rich, artist, trader and feral economist (and member of the Community Economies Institute) who ran the pilot Feral MBA – Inception in Hobart, lutruwita |Tasmania, Australia in early 2020 and a second Feral MBA – Succession in Plymouth, UK later in 2020.

The Community Economies Institute announces its first Practice Retreat - Community Economies in Action.

The retreat will be held 12-19 July 2023, in the Italian Alps (in Rovereto, Vallagarina Valley, Italy).

The Practice Retreat is for practitioners from diverse fields (e.g., agroecology, art and design, urbanism, food transformation, crafts, pedagogy, co-housing) as well as practice-oriented PhD students and researchers with a participatory, activist approach.

Today may have been the last day of the Community Economies Research Network's (CERN) third LIVIANA International Online Conference but there is more to come.

The recordings of each session are currently being processed and will soon be available on the CEI YouTube Channel as a playlist, and joining other playlists, including the 2021 LIVIANA Conference playlist.

The Community Economies Institute announces the 2023 Summer/Winter School.

Researching Postcapitalist Possibilities, 20 to 29 June 2023

Expressions of Interest are being called for. Closing date, 18 November 2022.

The Summer/Winter School is for PhD students, early career researchers and others. It engages with the foundational concepts and tools that community economies scholars have been using to envision and enact postcapitalist economies. It explores connections with longer traditions that also value collectivity and interdependence.

The contribution of community economies scholars to enriching understandings of diverse economic practices in Central and Eastern Europe was acknowledged during the closing plenary of the recent Regional Studies Association 2022 Central and Eastern Europe Conference in Leipzig, Germany.

In her closing comments, Petya Slavova, Associate Professor and Senior Research Fellow at Sofia University, Bulgaria, highlighted the importance of conference presentations “based on PhD research projects and locally developed projects that explore processes, including cultural processes, that lead to non-capitalist and diverse economies.”

A four-day event on 5 to 8 October in Helsinki, Finland opens with the launch of the fourth book in the Rehearsing Hospitalities series, which is published by Frame Contemporary Art Finland and Archive Books (and can be downloaded free-of-charge here).

The publication, Rehearsing Hospitalities Companion 4 asks, What are the possibilities and limitations of hospitality? How escapable are the imbalances of power instilled in hospitality? Should we instead be “rehearsing” redistribution?

In the ten years since the devastating Canterbury earthquakes resulted in 80 per cent of the buildings in central Ōtautahi Christchurch being demolished, a charitable trust has supported more than 700 projects focused on place-making and urban wellbeing.

The work of Life in Vacant Spaces (LiVS) is being celebrated with an outdoor exhibition along Cashel St Mall in Ōtautahi Christchurch from 13 to 29 September 2022, and the upcoming launch of a book, Huritanga: 10 Years of Transformational Place-Making.

Community economies artists and practitioners have made an important contribution to the fifteenth edition of Documenta, the 100-day exhibition that takes place in the German city of Kassel every five years and that closes on Sunday 25 September.

Documenta fifteen was curated by the Jakarta-based collective ruangrupa who based this year’s documenta on the values and ideas of lumbung, the Indonesian word that directly translates as rice barn and is used to refer to a communal building in rural Indonesia where a community’s harvest is gathered, stored and distributed according to jointly determined criteria as a pooled resource for the future.

There is a strong theme of community economies running through this year’s documenta fifteen in the City of Kassel (in Germany), and this has been brought to the fore through the contribution of the Rural School of Economies, an initiative being run by Kathrin Böhm from the Community Economies Institute and Wapke Feenstra from Myvillages.

The Community Economies Research Network (CERN) is holding its third LIVIANA International Online Conference, 31 October to 11 November 2022.

LIVIANA is a decentralised series of exchanges and symposia that runs for two weeks, providing an opportunity for CERN members to connect and share.

The event is based on the sense of openness, free-floating train of thought, and cheerful spirit that the Spanish term liviana connotes.

Community Economies Research Network (CERN) members are among the contributors to a new encyclopedia on the social and solidarity economy, with Caroline Shenaz Hossein part of the editorial team.

Hossein says “I was one of the many editors, with Dr Ilcheong Yi and his awesome team, and I am so proud that so many feminists, Global South and Black scholars are cited here in a book on the social and solidarity economy.”

“This encyclopedia reflects how the social and solidarity economy has gained currency across the world, over the past two decades, as a crucial approach to promoting human well-being, social justice and economic and sustainable development.”

Andrew Zitcer’s recent book, Practicing Cooperation: Mutual Aid Beyond Capitalism, draws on his experiences with food, health-care and arts cooperatives to explore the central question of what makes cooperatives ethical, effective and sustainable.

Zitcer says “This book walks that fine line of searching for the positive value of cooperation while also recognising shortcomings and looking for ways that cooperatives might be more just and effective.”

A recently published book edited by Antònia Casellas from the Community Economies Research Network (CERN) and Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Department of Geography), introduces Spanish readers to seminal texts by JK Gibson-Graham as well as new materials.

The three seminal texts included in the book are Spanish translations of:

The Community Economies Institute announces the 2022 Summer/Winter School

RESEARCHING POSTCAPITALIST POSSIBILITIES, 1-9 June

Expressions of Interest are being called for (closing date, 14 March 2022)

The Summer/Winter School is for PhD students, early career researchers and others. It engages with the foundational concepts and tools that community economies scholars have been using to envision and enact postcapitalist economies. It explores connections with longer traditions that also value collectivity and interdependence.

Members of the Community Economies Research Network (CERN) and the Community Economies Institute (CEI) have been saddened by the sudden death of our friend and colleague Silke Helfrich.

CERN members reflect that Silke was brilliant and warm, a magical commoner and friend.

Silke crossed many of our paths in different places and networks. For example, she played a crucial role in a two-day workshop in November 2019 for the writing of the interdependence charter. Her contribution was characterised by her sharp questioning and creativity with language.

In the second keynote at the online CERN Liviana conference, Maliha Safri discussed her recent research on social and solidarity economies, describing these economies as “examples of postcapitalist practices in action.”

Safri started her keynote, entitled ‘Mapping the US Solidarity City: Spatializing Diversity, Difference and Social Justice,’ by outlining the participatory action research project she ran in Asbury Park in New Jersey with people of colour, including ex-prisoners and Spanish-speaking undocumented workers.

How do communities and commons become a meaningful part of how oceans and fisheries are thought about, researched and managed?

This question was explored in Kevin St Martin’s opening keynote of the CERN Liviana online conference, entitled “Creating openings for community and commons in the Digital Ocean.”