Articles

This piece was written for a Rethinking Marxism (2025) Symposium on The Handbook of Diverse Economies.

Community and charitable reuse organisations provide significant social infrastructure that facilitates the redistribution of discarded items to new owners, but are often overlooked in circular cities initiatives. Drawing on a survey of 34 reuse organisations from across Australia and recorded interviews and site visits to 10 of these between 2021 and 2023, we characterise the processes, practices and types of organisations across the sector. We then examine three spatially distinct domains of social interaction involved, and show how diverse economies of materials reuse are enacted through various forms of labour, and relationships between workers, donors and recipients of goods, that are meaningful in different ways to those involved.

En este texto reflexionamos sobre los aportes de los denominados materialismos a la concepción epistemológica de nuestro programa de investigación. Nos orientan las siguientes preguntas: ¿qué puntos comunes podemos identificar entre autores de las corrientes denominadas materialistas, tales que enriquecen nuestra construcción epistemológica, con efectos metodológicos y teóricos? y ¿qué aspectos de nuestro trabajo de investigación precisamos mantener abiertos, flexibles, no del todo estabilizados, si queremos profundizar en la colaboración y la co(e)laboración como metodología y epistemología? En la primera sección del texto presentamos la perspectiva socio-material a través de la obra de dos autores de referencia: Latour y Bennett.

Locating justice in the city can be a difficult task. Urban theory has focused on exposing injustice and critiquing the multiple occurrences of injustice in cities. But what role could uncovering practices of actually existing justice in the city play in critical theory? How would we begin to look for actually existing justice in the here and now? By adopting a performative ontology and a politics of possibility, I argue that it is possible to expose, propose and amplify (Iveson, 2010) actually existing justice practices in the everyday city. A shift in thinking and research approach may be needed to make theoretical and ontological space for justice. In this paper I discuss research approaches that assist in locating justice in the city.

Public spaces support and frame the economic, cultural, ecological and political lives of city dwellers. Much emphasis has been placed on how public spaces can be designed well to generate conviviality, as well as facilitate wellbeing and economic activity. At the same time, exclusion from public space can be ‘built in’ at the level of infrastructure. This article positions public spaces as infrastructures of care. Drawing on a series of vignettes reflecting on experiences of public space during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, we develop an expansive understanding of public space as relational and performed, and as supporting infrastructures of care (or, at times, creating barriers to access care).

There has been a longstanding concern about the relationships between policy, funding and theatre practice in educational and community settings. Past scholarship has made evident the varied ways a relationship with policy can manifest and play out in the political, pedagogic, aesthetic and ethical values, approaches and outcomes of applied theatre practices. This includes the ways theatre can play a part in producing the problems it intends to address. This article argues for the use of critical theories to interrogate and rethink the policy-funding-practice relationship, to generate nuanced understandings and open up a space of possibility.

“Icebergian Economies of Contemporary Art” by Kathrin Böhm and Kuba Szreder (Centre for Plausible Economies) offers reflections on art and economy, stimulated by J. K. Gibson-Graham’s representation of the economy as an iceberg. Just as the capitalist economy is the peak of the iceberg, the glossy world of celebrity art dominates over the vast—yet invisible—realm of artistic dark matter, the realm of artistic labour that sustains the social gravity of the artistic universe, just as physical dark matter prevents the cosmos from collapsing. Themes include visible/invisible; blue line or the surface; the gloss over the dark matter; me versus the many; and art world/s.

Circular economy initiatives in Australia increasingly reference reuse, yet dominant recycling-led approaches continue to reproduce business-as-usual. This paper asks what kinds of worlds are made through reuse by examining Substation 33 and St Kilda Mums (now Our Village). Drawing on Karatani’s reading of surplus value, we develop “reuse value” as a parallax concept that captures both the embodied potential of discarded materials and the relational forms of care through which they re-enter circulation. These cases show how reuse reconfigures relations between people, materials, and places, generating social and ecological benefits that exceed conventional CE framings. We argue that recognising reuse value reveals postcapitalist possibilities within circular-degrowth trajectories.

This paper interweaves fragments of our digital epistolary exchanges with the exercises and prompts we practiced during long-distance online meetings. We reflect on our first conversation, sparked in a taxi en route to an abandoned construction site in Oaxaca—once meant to be a luxury hotel, now reclaimed by a local arts collective. Amidst its post-apocalyptic remains, we found ourselves fervently discussing class hierarchies in the UK, from supermarket rankings to the neoliberalisation of higher education. Our shared frustrations as feminist scholars navigating colonial academia led us to seek alternative ways of thinking, writing, and creating.

Pablo Fuentenebro et al.’s ‘Geographies of Super-Philanthropy: Disaggregating the Global Philanthropic Complex’ describes the power of contemporary philanthropy. Their piece is highly insightful, and I appreciate their deep engagement with a topic central to how communities might address climate change and other pressing global challenges. While the comparison is wildly inappropriate, James Ferguson’s (2015) description of tech sector wealth as a ‘great gusher’, like an oil field to be tapped for the benefit of humanity, comes to mind. The philanthropic ‘gushers’ discussed here represent the kind of power that could contribute to the global climate reparations envisioned by Olúfẹ´mi O. Táíwò (2022).

The book Global Libidinal Economy addresses the question of what psychoanalysis contributes to political economy and contemporary social theory. The authors engage with Marxian political economy, asserting that the libidinal dimension—encompassing desire, drive, and fantasies—shapes the social world, including the economy. Throughout, the authors provide a provocative answer to this question by identifying the libidinal stakes across a range of issues, including economic development, trade, environmental governance, technological innovation, and the rivalry between the United States and China, a shift of emphasis that opens the economy to political possibilities.

This chapter proposes to recast the “supply chain” as a commons via an extended description of the shared social, intellectual, and regulatory resources currently producing an experiment in a circular economy for organic waste in Sydney, Australia. Organic waste, once composted, finds its way into high value-added crops like heirloom garlic which are then sold back to consumers in Sydney. By foregrounding the practices of social learning and information sharing that is making this “circularity” possible, our chapter illustrates how creating a material commons often depends upon creating a knowledge commons to make it cohere, as well as upon creating commoner-subjects who will do the work of caring for both. 

The ways social theorists conceptualize the material world influences their approach to conceiving and addressing the environmental challenges of the Anthropocene. This article uses panpsychist theory, which holds that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous property of the natural world, as a way of conceptualizing and developing responses to these challenges. This is done by contrasting panpsychist conceptions of materiality and consciousness with those of vital materialism and property dualist historical materialism. It is argued that the latter theories have difficulties effectively analyzing the relationship between humans and the nonhuman world in the context of the Anthropocene.

This article analyzes the digital field and the historical processes in which it was
privatized (enclosures), while alternatives of co-operative and solidary uses were
developed. The paper delves into the aspects related to the digital-virtual terri-
tory, proposing a literature survey that accounts for both privatization actions
and the so-called platform co-operativism (different from the privative). The no-
tions of common and communalization are introduced as distinct from those of
enclosure and accumulation, through a survey of classic critical social science
literature. Based on all this conceptual repositioning, the creation of a Popular
Memory Archive in a neighborhood of the City of Buenos Aires is described and

This paper develops a multidimensional framework for sustaining care-full public spaces. We open by engaging with key understandings of the affective and relational dimensions of both public spaces and urban care scholarship. We then set out the elements of a framework for conceptualising the possibility of care-full public spaces. Writing from feminist and decolonial standpoints, we review emerging and foundational research to delineate three key components of such an approach: (1) governance, (2) materialities and design, and (3) performing public spaces. We then apply the framework, grounding our analysis of care in public spaces in a case study of caring for and as Country in Sydney, Australia.

This paper introduces the Strengths, Gender, and Place (SGP) framework, a novel evaluative tool designed to assess community engagement in development programmes. Developed in response to calls for decolonized and locally-led development in the Pacific and beyond, the SGP framework comprises fifteen indicators across three dimensions. These dimensions evaluate the extent to which programmes leverage local strengths, address gender inequities, and implement place-based approaches that respect local knowledge and practices. The framework was applied to thirty project reports from four major development organisations in Papua New Guinea's Western Province. The study also incorporated insights from twenty semi-structured interviews with key informants, which further enriched the findings.

En este trabajo examinamos de manera crítica el papel dominante del hormigón en la modernización de las ciudades asiáticas desde mediados del siglo XX. Ya hace tiempo que constructores, arquitectos, urbanistas y ciudadanos destacan las ventajas del hormigón. Sin embargo, sostenemos que, en el Antropoceno, ya no es posible pensar el hormigón como un material neutro en términos sociales y medioambientales. Las fisuras del hormigón son tanto físicas como metafóricas; no solo se manifiestan en el material, sino también como problemas socioecológicos. Exploramos el lado oculto de la producción de hormigón, donde emergen esas fisuras, por medio del concepto de "lugares sombra".

The climate crisis is full of marginalized human and more-than-human voices who are systematically silenced by solution-oriented, universalizing discourses. Listening as method is the opposite of silencing; it is an experiential form of knowledge production that conveys intention and care when done cautiously. We posit climate studies can learn from feminist listening practices how to listen rather than silence. Reviewing relevant theory and case studies, we situate listening among diverse actors as becoming-in-common in-place through sound, with a focus on Arctic waters. Heightened awareness of acoustic ecologies internalizes sound to place, affecting our understanding of possible actions to enable sustainable climate futures.

This paper combines two fast-developing perspectives on food provision: diverse economies and temporality. Building on an in-depth study of urban gardening in Czechia, we show that non-market economies play a central role in household food practices and that their specific temporality shapes how other parts of a household’s diverse food economy are mobilised at certain times and for certain purposes. Following the diverse economies approach of reading for difference and not dominance, this paper investigates the interrelations and hierarchies among market, alternative market, and non-market food economies on the household level.

As transformative visions for more just and sustainable societies multiply around the globe, the Diverse and Community Economies approach presents one of the most influential strategies to advance postcapitalist visions. In this paper, we contribute to this project based on our research and activism in the Global East, intended here as Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. We argue that engaging with the Global East is not only a matter of epistemic inclusivity but also a (too-often-neglected) opportunity to learn from a region with a history of dramatic economic transformation and diversity.

Editorial paper

Abstract: This special issue highlights grassroots and place-based modalities of learning. It contributes to pluriversal ways of thinking and living emanating from diverse contexts and place-based and culturally specific ways of knowing, being and doing. It is written against the backdrop of global crises and it highlights practices and possibilities emerging from diverse grassroots contexts as a way forward for human and Earthkin collective survival. Contributions in the special issue all speak to one or more of three key themes, threads that are woven in and across the collection. These are climate change adaptations, community food economies, and Indigenous language and communication tools that support grassroots living.

The paper reflects on the pedagogical practices of the Community Economies Institute Summer/Winter School on the theme of Researching Postcapitalist Possibilities. It is based on three years (2022, 2023, 2024) of having run the ten-day program with 120 participants. We argue that even though the school’s curriculum covers the distinctive Community Economies approach what is perhaps more important are the pedagogical exercises and principles that we use to help transform how participants think of themselves as activists, artists, practitioners, and researchers, and how they understand their role in making other economies possible.

Law and political economy (LPE) scholars have revived a longstanding debate over the relationship among law, capitalism, and postcapitalist possibility. Is law a creature of capitalism, destined to reproduce its dynamics of exploitation and dominance? Or are there moments of indeterminacy in law that function specifically as openings to a postcapitalist elsewhere?

The economic implosion in the late 1990s in Argentina created the conditions for the emergence of a series of alternative social organizations that were autogestionados, or created from the ground up by unemployed
workers, social activists, artists, and educators. Here, we describe one of these social organizations, Bachillerato Popular IMPA, which is located within an abandoned factory that was recuperated to form a workers’ cooperative.

Australia has a hidden but growing problem with household food insecurity, revealing the failure of conventional food infrastructures to support human flourishing. Disruptions to employment and livelihoods due to pandemic lockdowns have exacerbated household food insecurity, evincing the uneven geography of food access in countries globally, including Australia. Increasing demand for food relief had been observed prior to the COVID-19 pandemic and has been met by food relief providers, which we consider as infrastructures of care addressing growing levels of hunger. This paper reveals COVID-19’s many impacts on the food relief sector across Metropolitan Sydney, New South Wales.

As the planet moves further into the human-induced Anthropocene there is an urgent need to reconsider the values, practices, and politics leading to widespread ecological degradation. The prioritisation of economic growth by the most dominant political institutions encourages limitless expansion while minimizing awareness of the ecological vulnerability of the planet. Commoning presents an alternative political structure based on transformative practices of collective care or caring with. In this paper, we investigate how communities in Skouries of Halkidiki, Greece, are responding to the imposition of large-scale mining through three different commons initiatives. The women's collective, the chamomile commons, and the ten-day festival.

The differential impacts of climate change have highlighted the need to implement fit-for-purpose interventions that are reflective of the needs of vulnerable communities. However, adaptation projects tend to favour technocratic, market-driven, and Eurocentric approaches that inadvertently disregard the place-based and contextual adaptation strategies of many communities in the Global South. The paper aims to decolonise climate change adaptation guided by the critical tenets of ‘Decolonising Climate Adaptation Scholarship’ (DCAS). It presents empirical case studies from Fiji, Vietnam, and the Philippines and reveals the different ways that Indigenous and local knowledge (ILK) and strategies are devalued and suppressed by modernist and developmentalist approaches to climate adaptation.