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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.
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.

Johanisova, Nadia, Tim Crabtree, Eva Fraňková
Published: January 2013
Naylor, Lindsay
Published: December 2013

At the same time as fair trade certified products are capturing an increasing market share, a growing number of scholars and practitioners are raising serious questions about who benefits from certification. Through a critique of north–south narratives, this paper draws on contemporary themes in fair trade scholarship to draw out different ways of thinking about fair trade outside of the dichotomous north–south framing. I argue that, through the creation of fair trade subjects of the ‘‘global north’’ and ‘‘global south,’’ certification has normalized and naturalized dichotomous power relations.

Luke Drake and Laura J. Lawson
Published: August 2013

Highlights

•Community gardens are often seen as temporary uses of vacant land.

•Gardeners see them as important parts of neighborhoods and cities.

•Local governments and organizations historically planned gardens to be temporary.

•Increasingly, gardeners reproduce those dominant narratives as well.

•Rethinking these transformations can lead to better policy toward vacant land.

 

Abstract

Leo Hwang
Published: January 2013

Artists and artisans have a crucial role in the sustainability of the creative economy. By utilizing a participatory action research approach seeded by the work of J. K. Gibson-Graham, Jenny Cameron, and Julie Graham's study of community economies in the Pioneer Valley, The Rethinking the Creative Economy Project demonstrates how a collaborative research methodology can reappropriate development from the exploitation of artists and artisans as a panacea for economically challenged communities and as a tool that can help perform a postcapitalist environment.

Leo Hwang-Carlos
Published: October 2013
The Rethinking the Creative Economy Project utilzed the Community Economies model and a participatory action research methodology to explore non-capitalist practices of artists and artisans in Franklin County, Massachusetts. This article begins a conversation about how to explore economic development of the creative economy in ways that strengthen artists and artisans in a postcapitalist framework.
Boone Shear, Brian J. Burke
Published: January 2013

This short essay considers the limitations of critical anthropological theory and in particular critiques of capitalism. We suggest that anthropology's emancipatory potential can be found in an approach that embraces anthropology's moral optimism and merges critique with a politics of possibility.

Boone Shear, Vin Lyon-Callo
Published: March 2013

This essay explores the discursive production of numerous, well-meaning efforts to respond to social and economic restructuring in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Drawing upon the work of Slavoj Zizek, we suggest that the focus on what is perceived to be reasonable, or realistic, is maintained by and helps to maintain, the normal workings of capitalist exploitation which appear as inevitable, natural, or altogether invisible.

Kelly Dombroski
Published: August 2013

In this short commentary, I engage with other economic geographers reflecting on whether there is an 'Antipodean' Economic Geography. I argue that this is less a matter of fact and more of a point of gathering: by naming and gathering something called an Antipodean Economic Geography, what possibilities do we enable and disable for new kinds of economies and geographies?

Nate Gabriel
Published: August 2013

This article engages with the notion of the city as capitalist space, focusing on the specific actors that come together to realign economically heterogeneous spaces into the monolithic, capitalist city.

Katharine McKinnon
Published: August 2013

Written as a response to a series of commentaries on 'Antipodean Economic Geography’ this piece draws on my fieldwork experience to question whether it is useful to invoke the ‘otherness’ of the Antipodes. I call for a habituation of the practice of looking for difference as a way of cutting across the Antipodean-Metropole binary invoked in the discussion.

Philip Ireland, Katharine McKinnon
Published: June 2013

Phil Ireland and I collaborated on this paper during his PhD studies while I was at Macquarie University. We sought to bring together his work on Climate Change Adaptation with my thinking on post-development. We argue that when it comes to efforts to support Climate Change Adaptation in the majority world, it is important to challenge technocratic approaches that dismiss the value of local innovations. Instead we draw inspiration from the work of J.K. Gibson-Graham and their injunction to refuse to know too much.

J.K. Gibson-Graham
Published: December 2013

Much of J.K. Gibson-Graham’s work has been aimed at opening up ideas about what action is, both by broadening what is considered action (under the influence of feminist political imaginaries and strategies), and by refusing the old separation between theory and action. But the coming of the Anthropocene forced Julie and I to think more openly about what is the collective that acts. In this lecture I ask: what might it mean for a politics aimed at bringing other words into being to displace humans from the centre of action and to see more-than-human elements as part of the collective that acts?

Esra Erdem
Published: October 2013

This introduction shows how J. K. Gibson-Graham's work continues to inspire current scholarship in the Marxian tradition. It provides an overview of articles published in Rethinking Marxism as Part I of a two-part symposium.

Joanne McNeill, Ingrid Burkett
Published: September 2013

Article for the Planning Institute of Australia (NSW) journal

Ethan Miller
Published: February 2013

This paper explores and elaborates on J.K. Gibson-Graham's concept of "community economy," refracting it into three interrelated dimensions of ontology, ethics and politics, and placing them in conversation with one another via comparative explorations of both community economy and solidarity economy as contemporary articulations for radically-democratic economic organizing.

Ceren Özselçuk, Esra Erdem, J.K. Gibson-Graham
Published: March 2013

The article discusses the theoretical openings accorded by the recognition of economic difference and contingency within the Marxist tradition, exploring their potential contributions towards imagining and enacting a postcapitalist politics of economic transformation and experimentation.

Johanisova, Nadia, Stephan Wolf
Published: November 2012
Kevin St. Martin
Published: September 2012

"The commons" is often represented in terms that place capitalism at the center of the story, thus making "a commons future" difficult to imagine. This paper examines this problematic through research on the common property management regime of New England fisheries, seeking to offer alternative representations of commons that might open up economic possibility.

Janet Newbury
Published: September 2012

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.