CERN Aotearoa New Zealand

CERN Aotearoa New Zealand meets the last Friday of each month, 1 to 3pm (NZ time), by Zoom. Members are from Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia and the wider Asia-Pacific region. Meetings start with members doing a ‘go round’ to catch up with each other and then there is discussion of a reading. We use a shared Google Docs to record the 'stand out' points from each readings.

We also run an online CERN AU and NZ Writing Group, on the first Friday of each month, 12 to 3pm (NZ time). This writing group is run in conjunction with CERN-Sydney. We use the Pomodoro Technique of writing in 25 minute blocks of time, followed by short breaks. At the outset we share information about what we are working on and we conclude with participants sharing screens to show what they achieved. Even though we sometimes don't achieve all that we want, we know that we have achieved 3 hours more of writing than when the session started!

2026 Readings

This year, the focus is on recently completed PhD and Masters work. We started with Ben Lilly's recent piece in New Zealand Geographer, "Left Behind, or Left Out? Toward Diverse and Inclusive Economies in Small Town Aotearoa, New Zealand" (based on Ben's Masters Thesis), click here. Theses we will be reading in 2026 include Lila Laird's Diverse perspectives on Work: Working towards resilient urban commons and Denise Gibran Nogueira's Social finance ecologies: Interrogating transformative implications in alternative food networks.

2025 Readings

We started with the 2024 book The Economic Politics of Decolonisation by CERN Aotearoa member Matthew Scobie and Anna Sturman. We were inspired to read the book after the 2024 CERN LIVIANA online conference session on this book. We also read sections of two recently completed PhD theses by CERN Aotearoa members: Jack Barrett's Diverse economies and economic possibilities for Kāinga housing in Aotearoa New Zealand (2024), click here; and Georgia McLellan's Whakapapa as episto-methodology: Decolonising economies through a place-based kin study of Whakatōhea kuku (green-lipped mussels) (2025), click here. And there was time to read a couple of draft pieces of writing by members of the group.  

2024 Readings

Our main reading was the 2024 book Caring for Life by CERN Aotearoa member Kelly Dombroski. We also read draft pieces of writing from members of the group.  

2023 Readings

For the second part of 2023, we read four open-access articles on diverse and community economies:

• Christina Jerne, The Diversity of Solidarity Economies: A View from Danish Minority Gangs, click here. The discussion helped to inform a CE News story on this article. 
• Michael Emru Tadesse and Esra Erdem, Postcapitalist Imaginaries of Finance: A Diverse-Economies Perspective on Equubs within the Ethiopian Diaspora in Germany, click here. The discussion helped to inform a CE News story on this article.
• Borja Nogué-Algueró et al, Limits to fishing: the case for collective self-limitation illustrated with an example of small-scale fisheries in Catalonia, click here.
• Gillette et al, Doing conservation differently: Toward a diverse conservations inventory, click here. 

For the first part of 2023, we read Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity's Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira (with a focus on doing the exercises in this book). For more on this reading, click here. We also ran a session on this book during the online 2023 CERN LIVIANA conference. For a recording of the session, click here. 

2022 Readings

We read articles from the 2022 Special Issue of Asia Pacific Viewpoint on ‘Surviving well: From diverse economies to community economies in Asia-Pacific.’ Many of the articles in the Special Issue were written by members of CERN Aotearoa New Zealand. For more on this special issue, click here.