Publications

This article came out of many years of thinking and talking together about our earlier work in an urban youth garden in Ōtautahi Christchurch, Aotearoa New Zealand. We were really interested in the way youth talked about the changes in themselves as people who could learn to care for each other and shared spaces (commons). We had the opportunity to publish in a special issue of Cities on storying the 'counter-city', so we used our thinking about changes in subjectivity to write and think about what this might mean for postcapitalist countercities already present in place. 

I wrote this piece for a special issue on emerging methodologies in care and care-giving in Asia Pacific. In it, I reflect on some of the embodied aspects of ethnographic methods that we sometimes overlook. I use Anna Tsing's idea of awkward engagements, but apply it as an embodied method for sensing and responding to different pluriversal realities. The context is myself as a Pākehā New Zealand European person doing research work in the multicultural far west of China.

This paper critically examines the dominant role of concrete in the modernization of Asian cities since the mid twentieth century. While builders, architects, planners and citizens have long praised the advantages of concrete, we argue that concrete can no longer be seen as socially and environmentally neutral in the Anthropocene. When concrete cracks, it does so literally and metaphorically. The cracks manifest not only in the actual material but as socioecological concerns. We employ the concept of “shadow places” to explore the underside of concrete production where those cracks emerge.

Executive Summary

The concept of the commons has gained traction across multiple disciplines as researchers explore ways we might live ‘in common’ with other people and the world around, and with consideration for the wellbeing of current and future generations. This chapter traces how the work of human geographers builds on research in other fields, including ecology, political science and history. It shows how human geographers attend to processes of commoning with examples drawn from commons on land, air and sea. 

This article is an interview with four researchers about the role of community and community-based initiatives in climate adaptation in urban contexts

This paper explores the multisensory dimension of urban manufacturing to interrogate the spatial possibilities for production in a small town in Switzerland. Together with a group of graduate students, we apply sensory methods to explore how production shapes urban sensescapes and how these sensescapes affect our relation to production. Our study sparks critical questions about mixed-use zoning and tentatively advances the concept of sensible production: a production that not only is perceptible and can actively be engaged with, but that also shows good sense, makes sense, and focuses on what we need. 

This paper aims to tentatively explore the benefits of placing art’s knowledge-building tradition, with its capacity to disrupt and reframe, at the centre of how we look at alternative organizing and alternative economic spaces, positioning lived experience, its uncertainties intact, at the heart of researching and practicing social enterprise (SE). The paper explores indeterminacy through two case-study narratives, one of an academic arts-based research project and the other of a unique organization it encountered. It describes the way juxtaposition, encounter and drift value indeterminacy as central to generative processes, challenging the control central tomanagement and its research.

The term “solidarity economy” is most commonly deployed to describe altruistic and socially beneficial ways of doingbusiness, often in opposition to ones that are less so. Drawing on a year and a half of ethnographic fieldwork among Danish minority gangs, this article seeks to open the discussion on solidarity economies beyond these traditional understandings by addingthe perspective of gangs. It explores the more exclusive and violent aspects of solidarity economies, drawing on the analytical lenses of reciprocity and pooling. These dimensions afford the tracing of the conditions of solidarity within that group, rather than the mere verification of its absence orpresence.

This report outlines two approaches to assessing the intentions and outcomes of the non-governmental organisation, Life in Vacant Spaces (LiVS), in Ōtautahi Christchurch. Ōtautahi Christchurch presents a useful case study for wellbeing as it continues to recover from the physical and psychological trauma of earthquakes. 

(Open access article)

The article presents an exploratory study of the equub, a form of community-based finance in the Ethiopian diaspora in Germany. Equubs exemplify how People of African Descent in Germany organize against financial exclusion. Grounded in the theory of diverse economies and the method of "reading for difference", the article analyzes the characteristics of the equub as a nonmarket financial institution that contributes to building community economies. Processes of decommodification, collective governance, and ethical decision making around financial needs are discussed alongside the linkages to the diverse economy at large. 

This chapter draws on two initiatives situated in Thailand and Cambodia, inspired by strength-based capacity building approaches known as ‘asset-based community development’ (ABCD) and ‘Appreciative inquiry’ (Ai). Our approach challenges western-centric conceptions of equality in participatory design and novelty in creative process. In Cambodia, a failed experiment with bamboo furniture led to the re-evaluation of welfare safety nets and sustainable social arrangements.

This paper questions a widespread narrative that presents cooperative initiatives as mainly unsuccessful in postsocialist contexts. Taking the example of cooperative promotion in Kyrgyzstan after its independence from the Soviet Union, it highlights how this narrative is part of a broader hegemonic discourse on development and on the economy. The paper advances an alternative, postcapitalist, reading of cooperatives and cooperation in Kyrgyzstan and postsocialist contexts more in general. 

This paper brings together two streams of literature which rarely enter into conversation: diverse economies scholarship and critical readings of postsocialism. Mobilising the cases of food self-provisioning (FSP) in Czechia and agricultural cooperatives in Kyrgyzstan as an empirical basis for our reflections, we pursue a two-fold aim. Firstly, we call for attention to the postsocialist East as fertile ground for the study of diverse economies. Secondly, we offer a postcapitalist reading of postsocialism as embedded and emancipated theorising, arguing that diverse economies thinking can support novel representations of this geopolitical area and open space to appreciate economic diversity on the ground.

Small-scale food production for domestic use or local markets is common in Finland. In particular, edible gardening and berry- and mushroom-picking are part of everyday life in many households and other small communities; for example, honey is typically produced in small apiaries. In this thesis I examine this phenomenon as an economic activity. Drawing on the theoretical and methodological framework of diverse economies (Gibson-Graham 2006a, 2006b), I understand the economy as an open and non-predefined multiplicity, and I concentrate on situated ways of doing economies in everyday practices of food production. I especially focus on how economies are enacted as more-than-human in small-scale food production and food self-provisioning.

This paper is a response to growing excitement about arts-engaged research in geography. More and more geographers are practicing participatory arts projects to co-investigate pressing issues with communities. However, there are a lack of reflexive discussions about the limits of this work within the confines of the neoliberal and colonial university pressuring researchers to produce 4-star work that makes an impact, or measurable change. Here I add criticality to our understanding of the pitfalls and potential of arts-based analyses. I reflect on interviews with women, queer, non-binary and trans artists who I met during my time as a post-doctoral researcher in Glasgow.

Thanks to Steve Dubb and NPQ for adapting this essay for their readership. This article is, with publisher permission, adapted from a more extensive journal article, “Fight and Build: Solidarity economy as ontological politics,” published this year by Sustainability Science, volume 17, pp. 1207-1221.

Resilience has become a “buzzword” of our time. It is commonplace to hear individuals, communities, organisations, and systems described as resilient. Resilience has also become a buzzword In development discourse and practice. World Bank programmes for instance, refer to ‘resilient cities’, ‘resilient institutions’ and climate risk management ‘resilience strategies’. As noted by developer thinker Andrea Cornwall (2007), buzzwords tend to garner general abstract consensus around the importance of certain concepts but they equally can be vague and ‘fuzzy’, providing little sense of what a concept actually ‘looks like’ or how it translates in practice and in specific contexts. Here, we provide some clarity around the concept of resilience and how it is used in development today.

Trading for a social purpose is nothing new; the Red Cross began trading in order to supplement revenues during the First World War. However, since the 1980s, the not-for-profit sector in many countries has taken a stronger commercial turn. Policy makers in the ‘rich world’ initially became appreciative of social enterprise’s potential for regional development and competitive public services.

The Urban Wellbeing project team developed their ideas in this piece on wellbeing-led governance frameworks and transformative Indigenous tools. In this paper we position our research project in a wider global context.

Read our book review here.

This chapter, written for the Handbook of Alternative Theories of Political Economy, introduces the two primary theoretical traditions that have shaped diverse and community economies research and practice: anti-essentialist Marxian political economy and feminist poststructuralism. The chapter discusses the contribution of these two traditions highlighted how they have shaped the diverse economies and community economies approach. The chapter also includes a discussion of the ever-evolving practice of making community economies and some research directions for a political economy of possibility.

Letter to Julie was written especially for Antònia Casellas's collection, J.K. Gibson-Graham. Hacia una economía postcapitalista o cómo retomar el control de lo cotidiano [J.K. Gibson-Graham. Towards a post-capitalist economy or how to regain control of everyday life], published by Editorial Icaria, Barcelona.

The English translation of the Letter is provided here. In the Letter, written in 2020, Katherine updates Julie on what has happened in the area of diverse and community economies scholarship in the ten years since Julie's death, and on recent events including the climate emergency, COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter.