Janet Newbury
Published: April 2015

Since all communities face their own sets of unique challenges and assets, this report explores possibilities for new economic futures in the context of one particular community. By contextualizing the discussion within broader economic and political realities, it also provides insights for other communities that are undergoing economic and social transitions and striving to do so in a sustainable and humane way.

Penn Loh, Boone Shear
Published: February 2015

Solidarity Economy is a movement that can build power within and across scales and win supportive policy and public resources. Using the development of SE in Boston, Worcester, and Springfield, Massachusetts as examples, the article discusses the possibilities and challenges for SE projects to negotiate across differing values and politics, racial and class divides, and the challenge of accessing startup capital and building finance.

Janet Newbury, Katherine Gibson
Published: January 2015

Although communities are constantly undergoing processes of becoming the Powell River community on Canada’s Pacific coast is in a unique transitional moment when it comes to possibilities for post-industrial economic pathways. With the downsizing of its main industry and employer over the past 3 decades, community members are currently exploring a diverse range of economic possibilities that extend beyond strictly capitalist options. Reading for economic diversity can help us to identify and pursue existing and potential economic pathways that enhance wellbeing for human and nonhuman community members.

Ann Hill
Published: January 2015

This paper argues that through becoming critical minds in the Latourian sense researchers can play a key role in enacting economic food futures in the Anthropocene. It proposes a new mode of critical inquiry by centering on three broad research matters of concern: (1) gathering and assembling economic diversity (2) human actancy and (3) nonhuman actancy.

Gerda Roelvink, Kevin St. Martin, J.K. Gibson-Graham (Eds)
Published: February 2015

What exactly constitutes an economy? Making Other Worlds Possible brings together a compelling range of projects inspired by the diverse economies research agenda pioneered by J. K. Gibson-Graham. Firmly establishing diverse economies as a field of research, Making Other Worlds Possible outlines an array of different ways scholars are enacting economies that privilege ethical negotiation and a politics of possibility.

What makes the book so special is that each of authors know the communities they speak of and they write with real passion — Antipode

Making Other Worlds Possible
Bianca Elzenbaumer
Published: January 2014

This practice-based doctorate sets out to investigate and intervene in the tense relation between the production of socially as well as politically relevant design work and the socio-economic precariousness many designers experience. Starting from an engagement with the precarious working conditions of designers, their genealogy over the last 30+ years and the role precarisation plays in forming docile creative subjects, the research moves on to a wider critique of the political economy and of its precarising value practices. Based on this analysis, it then considers the strategic use that can be made of concepts around the commons in order to undo procedures of precarisation.

Bianca Elzenbaumer
Published: December 2014

This practice-based research sets out to investigate and intervene in the tense relation between the production of socially as well as politically relevant design work and the socio-economic precariousness many designers experience. Starting from an engagement with the precarious working conditions of designers, their genealogy over the last 30+ years and the role precarisation plays in forming docile creative subjects, the research moves on to a wider critique of the political economy and of its precarising value practices. Based on this analysis, it then considers the strategic use that can be made of concepts around the commons in order to undo procedures of precarisation.

Eeva Talvikallio
Published: November 2014

[EN: Value with No Price? A Study on the Motives and Ethics of Unpaid Translation], Master’s thesis, Master’s Programme in Multilingual Communication and Translation Studies, School of Language, Translation and Literary Studies, University of Tampere, Finland.

Amanda Huron
Published: January 2014

The limited-equity cooperatives that emerged in Washington, D.C. in the 1970s and '80s were a form of the commons: a resource that is governed collectively by its members, and is used not to extract profit for a few individuals, but to support the lives of a group. The commons are a dignified basis of survival for poor people who are largely cut out of capitalist markets, an alternative to both market- and state-oriented approaches to managing resources and sustaining life. In Washington, a housing commons arose when two historical factors came together in the 1970s: the return of Home Rule and a wave of gentrification and tenant organizing.

Istvan Rado
Published: January 2014
Luke Drake
Published: January 2014

Community-produced spaces such as community gardens are attracting widespread scholarly interest for the potential of not only food production, but also for social, environmental, and educational benefits. Yet community gardens have also been scrutinized as sites of governmentality that produce neoliberal subjects. In this article, six case studies are analyzed as representative of three ways to organize and manage gardens—grassroots, externally-organized, and active nonprofit management. I use performativity theory to examine how definitions and enactments of community can be used to include, exclude, or bridge difference.

Jenny Cameron, Sarah Wright
Published: January 2014

This editorial introduces the papers that form this special edition on Researching Diverse Food Initiatives. The papers had their genesis in a series of sessions held at the Institute of Australian Geographers annual conference in September 2009. The sessions sought to draw together research on existing alternatives to mainstream agriculture and to further understand the role of research and researchers in contributing to the movements they study. This editorial focuses on two themes arising from the papers: the plethora of diverse food initiatives from across the globs; and the role of research in helping to strengthen this diversity.

Jenny Cameron, Jarra Hicks
Published: January 2014

Research is increasingly recognised as a generative and performative practice that contributes to shaping the world we come to live in. Thus part of the research ‘process’ involves being explicit about the worlds we want our research to contribute to and reflecting on how the concepts we use might help or inhibit this agenda. This paper is based on our commitment to strengthening the contributions that grassroots renewable energy initiatives might make to a climate changing world. However, to detect the potential of these initiatives, familiar concepts of scale and markets have to be recast.

Stephen Healy
Published: January 2014

In a recent essay Michael Hardt gives voice to a widespread discontent with the left-academic project of critique, stemming from its failure to deliver on its emancipatory promises. Scholarship, in geography and many other social science disciplines is dominated by a pre-occupation with charting the intricate connections between neoliberal governance and an expansive capitalism. As Hardt and many others have observed, the process of critical exposure fails to incite a political response from broader publics. As an alternative to the failed politics of critique, Hardt — inspired by Foucault's engagement with the cynics—argues for a practice of militant biopolitics—an autonomous mode of reflecting, thinking and acting together that eschews expert knowledge.

Ethan Miller
Published: June 2014

A review of The Solidarity Economy Alternative: Emerging Theory and Practice, edited by Vishwas Satgar (Durban: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2014).

Stephen Healy
Published: January 2014

This paper uses key concepts from psychoanalytic theory to explore the fantasies that structure social discourses around global warming and resource depletion as key features of the anthropocene. Forthcoming S. Pile and P. Kingsbury http://www.ashgate.com/default.aspx?page=4824&amp

Katherine Gibson
Published: June 2014

Simon Springer’s essay on ‘Why a radical geography must be anarchist’ offers both a useful overview of anarchism’s continued relevance to geography today and a lively provocation to relocate the political center of radical geography. In this response I think along with Springer about strategies for everyday revolution and point to many contributions that already dislodged 'traditional Marxian analysis" from the moral, methodological and political high ground within radical geography.

Esra Erdem
Published: February 2014
The article explores how the creative enactment of alternative urban imaginaries in Berlin can be theorized from a political economy perspective. It draws on the work of Gibson-Graham and Foucault to develop a heterotopic reading of economic diversity, focusing on three distinct aspects: the ubiquity and multiplicity of 'other spaces', the (il)legibility of the spatial order, and the politics of difference articulated through heterotopias.
Ethan Miller
Published: June 2014

This paper draws on interviews with economic development professionals in Maine (USA) to pursue two tasks: first, to explore the potentials and limits of Calsikan and Callon's notion of "economization" as the tracing of how "the economic" is produced as a material-semiotic construction; and second, to propose an approach that refuses the assumption that the composition of collective provisioning will (or should) take the ultimate form of an "economy." Development processes and struggles can also be read in terms of the "composition of livelihoods," beckoning toward a transversal politics that might open up possibilities for unexpected alliances and alternative regional development pathways.

Katherine Gibson
Published: June 2014

A contribution to a Book Symposium on George Henderson’s Value in Marx: The Persistence of Value in a More-Than-Capitalist World.

Kelly Dombroski
Published: October 2014

In water, hygiene and sanitation (WASH) literature and interventions, it is common to class households with anything other than private toilets as without sanitation. This implies that the people who use forms of hygiene and sanitation relying on collective toilets and alternative strategies are somehow unhygienic. Yet residents of Xining (Qinghai Province, China) rely on hygiene assemblages that do not always include private toilets, but nonetheless still work to guard health for families with young children. In this paper, I develop a postdevelopment approach to hygiene and sanitation based on starting with the place-based hygiene realities already working to guard health in some way, then working to multiply possibilities for future sanitation and hygiene strategies.

Ethan Miller
Published: November 2014

The three familiar categories of "economy," "society," and "environment"--staples in discourses of sustainable development--constitute a hegemonic formation that widely and problematically shapes the landscape of imagination and contestation, rendering particular, historically-produced relations seemingly inevitable and closing down possibilities for more generative and ethical modes of relationship. At the same time, however, economy, society, and environment are categories in crisis, and the world they aspire to organize and discipline is already escaping their clutches. A key task of our era is to identify, amplify, and connect multiple 'lines of flight" (Deleuze and Guattari 1987) beyond these categories.

Boone Shear
Published: May 2014

This paper explores and compares the activities of two green economy coalitions. I investigate how social actors, including myself, have been negotiating, responding to, and producing the meaning of the green economy, and the meaning of "the economy" writ-large, through our political efforts. I am particularly interested in thinking about the ways in which the expression of different desires for economy can lead to openings, or closures, for the construction of non-capitalist relationships, initiatives, and enterprises.

Trisia Farrelly , Rochelle Stewart-Withers, Kelly Dombroski
Published: January 2014

Much has been written about families and their influence on relationships and research in fieldwork, yet seldom has the absence of family in the field received analytical attention.

Nate Gabriel
Published: April 2014

Literature review of Urban Political Ecology. Focuses on the need for more work on environmental imaginary, governance, and the non-human.

J.K. Gibson-Graham
Published: June 2014

This paper was written as part of a suite of papers presented at a Wenner-Gren Foundation Workshop on ‘Crisis, Value and Hope: Rethinking the Economy.’ It brings diverse economy thinking and the practice of weak theorizing to bear on the anthropological interest in producing thick description.

Brian J. Burke, Boone Shear
Published: May 2014

In this introduction to a special section on non-capitalist political ecologies in the Journal of Political Ecology, we discuss how engaged researchers can significantly contribute to a meaningful "ecological revolution" by (1) examining the tremendously diverse, already-existing experiments with other ways of being in the world, (2) helping to develop alternative visions, analyses, narratives, that can move people to desire and adopt those ways of being, and (3) actively supporting and constructing economies and ecologies with alternative ethical orientations.

Jenny Cameron, Katherine Gibson, Ann Hill
Published: June 2014

In this paper authors Cameron, Gibson and Hill discuss two research projects in Australia and the Philippines in which we have cultivated hybrid collectives of academic researchers, lay researchers and various nonhuman others with the intention of enacting community food economies. We feature three critical interactions in the 'hybrid collective research method': gathering, reassembling and translating. We argue that in a climate changing world, the hybrid collective method fosters opportunities for a range of human and nonhuman participants to act in concert to build community food economies.

Robyn Dowling, Katharine McKinnon
Published: May 2014

Written with Robyn Dowling this chapter offers a discussion of theories of identity in human geography, and draws on recent research by each of the authors to elaborate new challenges to the way geographers think about identity. Includes consideration of the impacts of J.K. Gibson-Grahams thinking around subjectivity, collectivity, and social change to geographers engagements with identity across different fields.

Johanisova, Nadia, Tim Crabtree, Eva Fraňková
Published: January 2013