This research article outlines a provocation for diverse and experimentally open, situated approaches to exploring care and caring. The diversely positioned authors discuss this idea using the subject of soil, in the place and context of Aotearoa New Zealand. Little is known about the diversity of ways that everyday people value, or, have caring relationships for/with soil, among a plethora of research that positions soil ‘care’ around, for example, commercial food production, waste-sinking, or property land value. To study diverse care in relation to soil, as with many relational subjects, requires equivalent diversity in the ways in which we might explore it. Here we outline the basis for diverse, situated methodologies that necessarily lead to a diversity of methods.
Articles
While degrowth as a plural and decolonial movement actively invites the Global South to be part of its transformative project, the current North-South dichotomy threatens to miss the variety of semi-peripheral contexts. Against this backdrop, we aim to contribute to dialogues on degrowth from the often-overlooked ‘East’ – specifically post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Instead of being viewed as a site for transformative examples and inspiration for degrowth-oriented socio-ecological transformation, CEE is often portrayed as ‘lagging behind’. Problematising such reductionist narratives, this essay explores CEE as a lively and rich site of postcapitalist alternatives.
When talking about prefiguration what is often talked about is the creation of formal anti-oppression protocols, sometimes critiqued as the self-bureaucratization of anarchist social movements. The result is what I refer to as the protocolization of daily life, a situation where the day-to-day is formalized into defined rules or norms. In doing so, activists often reproduce the control found at the heart of mainstream organizational forms. Such control often works to the detriment of the democratizing goals of social movements, excluding minorities and working-class people, generating the often-critiqued homogenization of social movements. This paper explores an antonym of such protocolization, what I refer to as the prefigurative feel.
Given calls to decolonise engagement with Indigenous communities, this article explores how allied researchers can participate in self-determined learning with Indigenous Peoples. Drawing on over a decade of experience within an action-research collective in a Mapuche context, the authors suggest that allied researchers can accompany Indigenous-led co-design in a manner that not only strengthens genuine Indigenous participation but also fosters mutual and collective learning from within the co-creative processes themselves.
As ecological and social crises mount, academic work which explores the transformation of unsustainable socio-ecological systems has flourished. Surprisingly, however, there have been few, if any, concerted attempts to consider the resonances and divergences between two of the most prominent approaches to rethinking the economy as we know it: degrowth, and diverse and community economies (DCE), respectively. In this Critical Review, I reflect on resonances and similarities, as they emerge from the academic literature. I argue that sites of dissonance, disjuncture or discomfort also emerge which have not been reflected on in the respective literatures thus far, primarily relating to questions of essentialising capitalism and growth imperatives.
This paper identifies characteristics of a 'composting ethic' and grassroots community contexts and skills supporting its emergence.
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.
I wrote this piece for a special issue on emerging methodologies in care and care-giving in Asia Pacific. In it, I reflect on some of the embodied aspects of ethnographic methods that we sometimes overlook. I use Anna Tsing's idea of awkward engagements, but apply it as an embodied method for sensing and responding to different pluriversal realities. The context is myself as a Pākehā New Zealand European person doing research work in the multicultural far west of China.
This paper critically examines the dominant role of concrete in the modernization of Asian cities since the mid twentieth century. While builders, architects, planners and citizens have long praised the advantages of concrete, we argue that concrete can no longer be seen as socially and environmentally neutral in the Anthropocene. When concrete cracks, it does so literally and metaphorically. The cracks manifest not only in the actual material but as socioecological concerns. We employ the concept of “shadow places” to explore the underside of concrete production where those cracks emerge.
Over the past three decades West Virginians have experienced a deepening economic crisis. Divestment in coal and manufacturing has resulted in widespread unemployment, state, county and municipal revenue losses, and cascading effects on social services, households, livelihoods and community life. For 10 years, FJL has conducted ethnographic research, coordinated cooperative experiments, and built pedagogical tools to democratize knowledge about West Virginia’s food system amidst this crisis. Working in a so-called red state, we have fostered conversations about food justice with rural, often socially conservative communities, and have worked to raise up human resources for meaningful community-led food justice organizing in Central Appalachia.
This commentary is part of a series initially presented at the Waste/Economies/Ecology hybrid international symposium at the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University, Australia in February 2023. The symposium was part of the research project ‘Investigating Innovative Waste Economies: Redrawing the Circular Economy’funded by the Australian Research Council. The symposium brought together academics and artists from around the world who are thinking with waste to enable novel responses to its ethical and political challenges. We thank all our contributors to this special commentary section for their participation and thinking.
This commentary is part of a series initially presented at the Waste/Economy/Ecology hybrid international symposium at the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University, Australia in February 2023. The symposium was part of the research project ‘Investigating Innovative Waste Economies: Redrawing the Circular Economy’funded by the Australian Research Council. The symposium brought together academics and artists from around the world who are thinking with waste to enable novel responses to its ethical and political challenges. We thank all our contributors to this special commentary section for their participation and thinking.
Calls to transform food systems along more ethical and sustainable lines are mounting alongside debates about what constitutes transformative change and strategies needed to achieve it. Civil society organizations (CSOs) have argued that transforming food systems requires transforming the governance of food systems, as dominant “productivist” approaches to governance have narrowly invested in corporate priorities while marginalizing the many small-scale food workers that animate our food system. In this paper, we examine the possibilities and unexpected pathways of food system transformation through the case of the Voluntary Guidelines for Securing Sustainable Small-Scale Fisheries (SSF Guidelines).
En este artículo analizamos las situaciones de acceso al lugar de emplazamiento actual de varios grupos pre-cooperativos que encuadran en la denominación de “cooperativas sociales” que se nuclean en un entramado más amplio, el de una Asociación Civil denominada Integración Comunitaria por la Salud Mental Una Movida de Locos (MdL), situada en la Ciudad de La Plata, Provincia de Buenos Aires, Argentina. En este texto proponemos
In my commentary, I take up the challenge of finding an academically fuelled strategy to make the necessary deep inroads into the Sustainable Development Goals by looking at lessons learnt from the struggles of the transnational feminist movement involved in UN multilateral debates and the transformative work of feminist political ecology on the ethics of care and caring-with others, including more-than-human others. I propose these feminist strategies offer some insights in how to shift dominant knowledge systems.
We build a rationale for a nuanced approach to raising public awareness of ecological threats through interweaving art, science, and Mātauranga Māori (Indigenous Māori knowledge). The thinking we present emerges from the first phase of a transdisciplinary project, Toi Taiao Whakatairanga, which explores the ways the arts can raise public awareness of two pathogens that are ravaging native trees in Aotearoa New Zealand: Phytopthora agathidicida (kauri dieback) and Austropuccinia psidii (myrtle rust). One of our first steps in the project was to explore understandings of "public” and “awareness” and their relevance to Aotearoa’s ecological, cultural, and political context.
Mainstream biodiversity conservation continues to emphasise the rapid disappearance of charismatic megafauna. Fungi are ignored, partially because many are invisible. However, their conservation is of growing concern because their decline signals a decrease in overall biodiversity and losses in ecosystem integrity and function. Social science engagement with microbes is of growing interest because the diverse characteristics of fungal bodies create new entry points for conservation. Using data collected over three years from literature review, lab ethnography, and interviews, this paper develops two new concepts intended to operate at the intersection of these discussions. A review of the fungal conservation literature finds mainstream species conservation an ill fit for fungi.
Participation of Indigenous peoples and local communities is encouraged in calls for sustainable transitions and transformations. The term ‘community’ is widely used yet nebulously defined. Conservation that removes people from their communities of land invokes epistemological authority and displaced relationships. We relate our work to the articles in this special issue to rethink the relationship between humans and nature in conservation. We propose expanding the term ‘local communities’ to include more than just humans. By decentring the human subject, we rethink what it means to participate in community and place-making, further unpacking the ethical motivations of emplacement.
As the Covid pandemic and unprecedented ecological change unsettle our lives, the growing public awareness of care is reshaping economic thinking and practice as we emerge from the pandemic but find ourselves in deepening social reproduction crises and the ongoing climate crisis. Feminist economists have long identified that unpaid care work forms the basis for social reproduction or the unseen work through which capitalist economies and societies are reproduced. Even if the act of care is central to relationships and fundamental to our survival and wellbeing, it is too often taken for granted, invisible, not counted as productive or profitable, and carried out mostly by women, people of colour, immigrants, or other marginalised groups.
This paper investigates food system resilience—conceptualized through the four dimensions of agency, buffering, connectivity, and diversification—from the perspective of rural–urban relations. We consider three cases that capture distinct actor and policy foci in the wider literature on urban–rural interactions. These are secondary cities and their development potential as central nodes in urban–rural food systems, the role of digital infrastructure in shaping food systems resilience, and finally, street food vendors as a particularly vulnerable yet crucial group of actors linking rural food supply with urban demand. We review existing literature within these themes, with a particular focus on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the food systems in middle- and low-income countries.
Aotearoa New Zealand is at a critical juncture in reducing and managing organic waste. Research has highlighted the significant proportion of organic waste sent to landfills and associated adverse effects such as greenhouse gas emissions and loss of valuable organic matter. There is current debate about what practices and infrastructure to invest in to better manage and use organic waste. We highlight the diversity of existing organic waste practices and infrastructures, focusing on Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch. We show how debates about organic waste practices and infrastructure connect across three themes: waste subjectivities, collective action in place and language.
This paper explores the multisensory dimension of urban manufacturing to interrogate the spatial possibilities for production in a small town in Switzerland. Together with a group of graduate students, we apply sensory methods to explore how production shapes urban sensescapes and how these sensescapes affect our relation to production. Our study sparks critical questions about mixed-use zoning and tentatively advances the concept of sensible production: a production that not only is perceptible and can actively be engaged with, but that also shows good sense, makes sense, and focuses on what we need.
This paper aims to tentatively explore the benefits of placing art’s knowledge-building tradition, with its capacity to disrupt and reframe, at the centre of how we look at alternative organizing and alternative economic spaces, positioning lived experience, its uncertainties intact, at the heart of researching and practicing social enterprise (SE). The paper explores indeterminacy through two case-study narratives, one of an academic arts-based research project and the other of a unique organization it encountered. It describes the way juxtaposition, encounter and drift value indeterminacy as central to generative processes, challenging the control central tomanagement and its research.
The term “solidarity economy” is most commonly deployed to describe altruistic and socially beneficial ways of doingbusiness, often in opposition to ones that are less so. Drawing on a year and a half of ethnographic fieldwork among Danish minority gangs, this article seeks to open the discussion on solidarity economies beyond these traditional understandings by addingthe perspective of gangs. It explores the more exclusive and violent aspects of solidarity economies, drawing on the analytical lenses of reciprocity and pooling. These dimensions afford the tracing of the conditions of solidarity within that group, rather than the mere verification of its absence orpresence.
(Open access article)
The article presents an exploratory study of the equub, a form of community-based finance in the Ethiopian diaspora in Germany. Equubs exemplify how People of African Descent in Germany organize against financial exclusion. Grounded in the theory of diverse economies and the method of "reading for difference", the article analyzes the characteristics of the equub as a nonmarket financial institution that contributes to building community economies. Processes of decommodification, collective governance, and ethical decision making around financial needs are discussed alongside the linkages to the diverse economy at large.
Alternative economic indicators are becoming policy in Vanuatu, particularly focusing on what national policy calls traditional economy. Although this acknowledges livelihoods and customary land in rural areas, urban places receive less attention. This article advances an argument that cities are also home to traditional economies. We draw on concepts of diverse economies and translocality to examine how economic practices typically associated with community activities on customary land are also found in cities where households lack direct access to customary resources. Empirical data come from the authors' fieldwork and participation in community-based organisations in Port Vila, Vanuatu, from 2017 to 2020.
Diferentes grupos, movimientos y coaliciones generan prácticas que buscan transformar las estructuras económicas, sociales y culturales tal como hoy las conocemos y, al hacerlo, amplían el acceso a derechos. Estas acciones suelen ser consideradas por esos mismos colectivos como acciones emancipatorias hacia transiciones más justas.
Drawing on literatures on food justice, and geographies of care and the concept of care-full justice, this aim of this paper is to develop the concept of care-full food justice as an analytical framework through which to view the work of community food provisioning initiatives in the meantime. The paper begins by developing the concept of care-full justice, outlining that it is based on three premises: the inter-dependence of care and justice; an understanding of who is taking responsibility for care in the meantime; and an appreciation of the ways in which the five dispositions of an ethics of care might individually or collectively facilitate responses to injustice.