If communities are constituted by commoning, what are some of the tensions in this idea for thinking about communities of care, where care labour is gendered, classed and colonised? This article reflects on these tensions through the idea of the 'nitty-gritty' of care in communities, using two examples from Aotearoa New Zealand: Te Hiko Centre for Community Innovation in Porirua, and Life in Vacant Spaces in Ōtautahi Christchurch.
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.
In this essay, I envision the university, not simply as a discreet institution with formal boundaries to attend to and defend from neoliberal and conservative assaults, but as a location of possibility from which to locate and advance projects that connect students and others to the possibility of other economic worlds.
The burgeoning literature on diverse and community economies has been relatively hopeful, exploring how people learn, enact new and reclaim other ways of meeting their needs outside of capitalist practices. For good reasons, much of this work has sought to avoid a conventional critical-leftist orientation, instead adopting what Gibson-Graham call a ‘weak theory’ approach ‘that welcomes surprise, entertains hope, makes connection, tolerates coexistence and offers care for the new’.
In this paper, I consider the role of public engagement in the management of urban environments and its ability to undermine post-political discourses. In particular, I explore the ways in which the ethical propositions of an apoliticized environment are variously taken up uncritically, challenged, and sometimes modified through the public’s engagement with de-politicized discourses of environment management.
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The authors offer new and compelling ways to look at class through examinations of such topics as sex work, the experiences of African American women as domestic laborers, and blue- and white-collar workers. Their work acknowledges that individuals may participate in various class relations at one moment or over time and that class identities are multiple and changing. Taken together, the essays in this book will prompt a rethinking of class and class subjectivity that will expand social theory.
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In this creatively argued follow-up to their book The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It), J. K. Gibson-Graham offer already existing alternatives to a global capitalist order and outline strategies for building alternative economies. A Postcapitalist Politics reveals a prolific landscape of economic diversity—one that is not exclusively or predominantly capitalist—and examines the challenges and successes of alternative economic interventions.
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.
The first paper published during my PhD studies, this article explores how the movement to obtain citizenship rights for highland minorities in Thailand is carefully engaging with dominant discourses of Thai-ness in ways that open up the incompleteness of Thai state hegemony.
In this article, the dynamics through which social processes are being increasingly individualized are called into question, and alternative constructions are offered. When subjectivity and ethics are reconceptualized, new paths for ethical engagement and non-unitary subjects begin to emerge.
