Publications

This paper considers the relevance of Franciscan monastic practice to contemporary postcapitalist politics in the time of the Anthropocene. Giorgio Agamben’s reflections on the monastic revolution of the eleventh and twelfth centuries explore the different relationships between the rules governing monastic life and materiality, wherein the renunciation of property and the practice of highest poverty give the greatest expression of a collective, monastic form of life. The embodied connection between having a rule and living it contrasts starkly with emergent Church doctrine that introduced a cynical split between the sacred and the material: good or bad, the priest only need say the words.

Over the past 20 years, the term “solidarity economy” (SE) has come to refer to economic activities that seek to promote overall quality of life within a community, as opposed to prioritizing private profit maximization in a competitive market. The organizations and enterprises comprising the solidarity economy tend to be collectively and democratically run for the benefit of their members. The activities associated with the solidarity economy do not preclude turning a profit (or generating surplus), nor do they necessarily require disengaging entirely from market exchange. But they usually exhibit a substantial alignment with ethical principles of social equity and solidarity, environmental sustainability, and pluralist democracy.

In this paper we use the concept of surviving well to reframe happiness.

Class is one of the most important, widely used, and complicated concepts in human geography and the social sciences. It underpins economic geographies and intersects with geographies of gender, race, and sexuality. Different notions of class have been in use, along the spectrum from neoclassical to Marxist economic theories. These theories have also been reworked by feminist, postcolonial, and poststructuralist scholars in order to augment critiques of class-related inequalities and to construct possibilities for imagining and producing progressive geographies of class. The contemporary global and neoliberal economy has given rise to high levels of concentration of wealth and economic insecurity that cut across the class divisions and social safety nets of the twentieth century.

In less than a decade, qualitative GIS became widely used not only in geography but across social sciences and humanities. Following critical GIS debates and feminist GIS interventions, qualitative GIS has emerged as a field that pioneered ways to map new types of data derived from qualitative interviews, historical archives, literary texts, and, more recently, social media, neogeography, and artistic visions of place. It also advanced integration of qualitative research methods with geospatial analysis in order to account for nonquantifiable, uncounted, and conceptually marginalized but important experiences and socioeconomic practices. Qualitative GIS, therefore, constructs new imaginaries of place and space that can contribute to inclusive citizenship.

Translation and response to 'From authoritarian personality to neoliberal personality'

El artículo se inscribe en una investigación etnográica realizada en Argentina con organizacionesorientadas por la autonomía como proyecto. Desde el marco conceptual del análisis institucionaly las economías comunitarias, presenta una metodología que permite analizar prácticas,discursos y signiicados en tres experiencias autogestionarias. Analiza los modos que asumenel trabajo, la propiedad y la subjetividad en estas experiencias y concluye que: 1) su quehacerfunda una propuesta ética y estética ligada al sostenimiento y disfrute de la vida y 2) sus formasde producir la existencia interpelan los sentidos del capitalismo actual.

We present an analysis of two self-organized educational experiences in Argentina that respond to concrete needs regarding the supply of education in certain geographical locations: alternative rural schools, jointly managed by families, the state, and local communities; and an educational center that is self-managed by the employees and directed to homeless teenagers and adults. We use the notion of inhabiting space as an expression of social, cultural, and aesthetic relations, contrasting this notion with that of space as an object. The analysis shows that these experiences establish innovative educational institutions, in spite of their location within current administrative rationality, through articulation with ideological and geographical neighbors over time.

This article analyzes the progression from traditional to current pastoralist practices and the contemporary diversification of livelihoods of the Jie group of the Karimojong in the Kotido district in Karamoja (Uganda). the focus is on changes of land use, framed by the commons debate. We identify factors that have forced the Karimojong to abandon their traditional mobile pastoral lifestyle and to adopt new income-generating activities, including charcoal production and brick-making, which may have detrimental effects on local forest and soil cover. These have included repeated enclosure of common grazing lands by colonial and postcolonial governments. We conducted empirical research (interviews and focus group discussions) in 2012.

Urban commons are characterised in the literature as collectively shared property in the city shaped by a context of scarce resources, population density, and the interaction of strangers. In the broader commons literature, commons appears as a verb, a noun, and a process made by practices of commoning—albeit still with a focus on property. In this paper, I argue that an understanding of urban commons as more-than-property is needed to recognise how present but elusive urban commons are. I use examples from interviews and observations conducted at a Women's Library to discuss how the access, use, benefit, care, responsibility, and ownership of this urban commons bring it into being through particular practices of commoning.

This paper uses an assemblage framework to examine the Crowd Grown Feast, an “alternative food initiative” that engaged 100 participants in a collective food growing and eating event in Auckland's city centre. Assemblage thinking here derives from the intersecting theoretical and political interests of multiplicity and uncertainty. It offers a generative framework for a feminist ethnography concerned with the transformative potential of actually existing practices. Studying the case of the Crowd Grown Feast within this framework allows us to explore tensions in agrifood scholarship created by the challenge issued to dominant traditions of political economy by recent relational accounts of alternative foods, “food bodies” and affect.

In debates over post-capitalist politics, growing attention has been paid to the solidarity economy (SE), a framework that draws together diverse practices ranging from co-ops to community gardens. Despite proponents’ commitment to inclusion, racial and class divides suffuse the SE movement. Using qualitative fieldwork and an original SE dataset, this article examines the geospatial composition of the SE within the segregated geography of Philadelphia. We find that though the SE as a whole is widely distributed across the city, it is, with the exception of community gardens, largely absent from poor neighborhoods of color. We also identify SE clusters in racially and economically diverse border areas rather than in predominantly affluent White neighborhoods.

Food production is a feminist issue, and feminist research offers many fruitful ways of examining its different sectors. In this article I incite a dialogue on food production between feminist theories on naturecultures and the economy. Using concepts of companion species and diverse economies I analyse weed management as multispecies relations and ask, how voluntary weeding practices open up space for

Social enterprise (or business driven by social objectives) is a prominent focus of development. In higher income countries it is a strategy for regional development or regeneration by creating optimal levels of social value from under-utilised resources. In developing countries, social enterprise offers hope for sustainable development by reducing dependency on aid and by developing markets and improving economic growth. Social enterprise is widely linked to ‘business at the bottom of the pyramid’, there is particular attention to heroic 'social entrepreneurs'. But critical literature shows a tension between the top-down ‘development’ driven view of social enterprise and a bottom-upwards grassroots community development approach driven by wellbeing.

Des mouvements sociaux partout sur la planète se révoltent contre la démocratie libérale et le capitalisme tout en expérimentant des manières d’être, de penser et de faire basées sur l’autonomie, le respect de la diversité et l’aide mutuelle. Dans cet article, les pratiques politiques, culturelles et économiques du Centre social autogéré de Pointe-Saint-Charles déployées durant la lutte pour l’appropriation collective du Bâtiment 7 sont examinées à l’aune du concept d’autonomie collective. En rendant visibles ces pratiques subversives, l’analyse permet de saisir la portée révolutionnaire de cette initiative libertaire située en marge de l’économie sociale au Québec.

Ce texte est un exercice de réflexion. Plutôt que de travailler avec des étiquettes idéologiques, j’ai envie de faire de la gymnastique mentale avec des concepts et des pratiques qui m’inspirent. Pour en arriver à proposer une méthode d’organisation qui soit porteuse d’espoir (un autre vivre ensemble est possible) tout en étant ancrée dans un pragmatisme mobilisateur. Je commencerai par expliciter mon point de vue sur l’exploitation et l’oppression des humains et de la nature. Puis, je reviendrai sur les idées mises de l’avant par Murray Bookchin et sur l’application de ses concepts d’écologie sociale et de municipalisme libertaire par le collectif anarchiste la Pointe libertaire. Ensuite j’aborderai les propositions de J. K.

This intervention contributes to feminist and queer responses to Brenner and Schmid’s ‘planetary urbanization’ thesis. I discuss the generative potential of their attempts to craft alternative urban research pathways and their critique of urban age discourse, a body of work that defines cities as static sites of ‘innovation’, ‘creativity’, and ‘sustainability’. However, echoing critics of the planetary urbanization approach, I contend that Brenner and Schmid’s research schema risks reproducing exclusionary analytical hierarchies by promoting a totalizing, ‘god-trick-like’ standpoint and ignoring marginalized feminist, queer, and praxis-oriented urban studies approaches. As a result, planetary urbanization ignores situated and relational knowledges and lived experience.

There is a well established body of feminist scholarship critiquing the methodological and epistemological limits of an “objective” view from nowhere in urban research and political economy frameworks. Recent developments, such as the planetary urbanization thesis, have reignited feminist efforts to counter patriarchal, colonial, and hegemonic ways of knowing. Here, we recount our frustrations with the reproduction of dominant political economic modes of “knowing” urban processes such as gentrification and culture-led regeneration in research that seeks to uncover the production of neoliberal spaces and subjectivities.

Some of the perennial tensions in applied theatre arise from the ways in which practice is funded or financed. They include the immediate material pressures and pragmatic dilemmas faced by theatre makers on the ground and the struggle to secure the resources needed to produce and sustain work or to negotiate the dynamics and demands of particular funding relationships. In the applied theatre literature, there are many examples of groups and organizations that have compromised their political, pedagogic, artistic or ethical principles to make their work economically viable. There are also ongoing debates about the nature of the relationship between applied theatre and the local, national and global economic conditions in which it is produced.

Fair trade certification is a mechanism used by coffee cooperatives to assist farmers with accessing cash income and securing a better price for their product. Third-party certifiers regulate the fair trade label, which is tied not only to price, but also to standards for production and development. In this paper I examine these standards as they are deployed in self-declared autonomous communities in the highlands of Chiapas, Mexico. I argue that third-party certifiers through enforcement of standards, and surveillance attempt to create a producer subject who becomes “fixed” through certification.

A review essay of three books that take up the urban commons: Dellenbaugh, Kip, Bieniok et al. (eds.), 2015, Urban Commons: Moving Beyond State and Market; Borch and Kornberger (eds.), 2015, Urban Commons: Rethinking the City; and Ferguson (ed.), 2014 Make_Shift City: Renegotiating the Urban Commons.