Community Economies

Stephen Healy

Contact Details:

Stephen Healy
Physical and Earth Sciences Department
Worcester State College
486 Chandler St
Worcester MA 01602
USA

Qualifications

PhD University of Massachusetts, Amherst

MS University of Massachusetts, Amherst

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Research Areas:

community economies, marxian theory, subjectivity, psychoanalytic theory

What is at stake is the creation of values, not simply the act of adhering to already existing values. … All great sublimations (art, sciences, religion) create new values, transform things into values. (Zupancic 2003, 73)

Historically my work has explored the relationship between subjectivity and economy through the lens of Marxian and psychoanalytic theory. The areas in which this research interest takes shape has varied over time: health care reform in the United States, the work of informal care givers, cooperative development for marginalized populations, efforts to integrate environmental concerns into teaching and the process of regional development.

I understand our common project to be one of developing and learning to speak a new language of economy. The practice of speaking this language is learning to revalue every day care, ordinary places and labors and to find in them both meaning and potential. Our aim is to give voice to an economy of values capable of holding and experssing our commitments to others.

Publications

Cooperation, Surplus Appropriation, and the Law’s Enjoyment

Stephen Healy

This paper explores the performative effects of law legal incoporation in the context of worker cooperatives internally governed through consensus, concluding that this representational disjuncture has particular effects on cooperative subjectivity.

Healy, S., 2011.  “Cooperation, Surplus Appropriation, and the Law’s Enjoyment,” Rethinking Marxism 23(3): 364-370.

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).

Caring for Ethics and the Politics of Health Care Reform

Stephen Healy

Informal caregiving frequently exacts a heavy psychic and physical toll on subjects that perform it while simultaneously figuring as a source of deep ethical meaning, raising questions about how to account for both dimensions in a politics of health care reform.

Healy, S. 2008. “Caring for Ethics and the Politics of Health Care Reform,” Gender, Place and Culture, 15(3): 267-284.

Building Community Economies: A Postcapitalist Project of Sustainable Development

Julie Graham, Stephen Healy

Explores how the idea of sustainable development might be transformed from an impossible dream (sabotaged at every turn by the force various identified as "capitalism", "the market," "modernization," and "development") into a realistic and attainble project for organizations and communities.

Healy. S. and J. Graham. 2008. Building Community Economies: A Postcapitalist Project of Sustainable Development, in D. Ruccio, ed, Economic Representations: Academic and Everyday. Routledge, New York, 291-314.

CARE IN THE COMMUNITY ECONOMY: TOWARDS AN ALTERNATIVE DEVELOPMENT OF HEALTH CARE

Stephen Healy

The politics of health care reform in the US in the United States has focused for 100 years on the question of whether health care is a commodtiy or right:  beyond this political deadlock it is possible to reform care through attention to the conditions under which care is produced as a value and the ethical relation that transpires between care provider and patient.

Ph.D., Geography, University of Massachusetts, 2006 Dissertation: Care in the Community Economy: Toward an Alternative Development of Health Care. Supervisor: Julie Graham

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.

Constructing the community economy: civic professionalism and the politics of sustainable regions

Julie Graham, Stephen Healy, kenneth byrne

Outlines the Rethinking Economy action research project in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts, highlighting the role of academy-community partnerships in constructing community economies.

 Graham, J., S. Healy and K. Byrne. 2002. Constructing the community economy: civic professionalism and the politics of sustainable regions, Journal of Appalachian Studies 8(1), 50-61.