Articles

In Transcending Capitalism Through Cooperative Practices, Mulder shows how exploitation, and non-exploitation, can be analytically discerned, and she describes some various contexts in which non-exploitation exists. Mulder's analysis, analytical approach, and contextual descriptions, surface and prompt important questions around the conditions of possibility for imagining and actualizing economic difference and transformation. To help elaborate and begin to address these questions, I turn to a growing movement in Massachusetts in which communities are crafting and organizing around their own conditions of possibility in innovative and powerful ways.

Realizamos una reconstrucción histórica y geográfica del surgimiento y desarrollo de la pedagogía de la alternancia tal como se fue generando en diferentes continentes, centrándonos en las experiencias de Francia, Brasil y Canadá. Interpretamos la forma en que diversos actores sociales se han auto organizado en distintos países para abrir y sostener en el tiempo escuelas rurales de alternancia. Nos hemos preguntado: ¿en qué momentos y lugares se configuran procesos de auto organización comunitaria para abrir escuelas que permitan a los jóvenes de ámbitos rurales continuar con sus estudios luego de la educación primaria? ¿Qué actores sociales participan en cada caso y a qué tipos de demandas responden?

In the paper I argue that in a world where our lives are intricately interconnected and our environments are rapidly changing, commoning produces ecological imaginaries and understandings of places that could build a sense of global commons based on mutuality, reciprocity, and relationality. In exploring commoning in the international class room, my paper contributes to on-going dialogues community economies and feminist political ecology in the Community Economies Research Network (CERN), and the newly formed EU project Well-being, Ecology, Gender and cOmmunity (WEGO). In the article I first set out how I use commoning in my teaching. In section two I present my methodology, followed by section three where I present the community economies research network.

Editorial for the special feature.

We document and interrogate our collective experimentation with disruptive academic practices as early- and mid-career women researchers in Aotearoa New Zealand. We grapple with our disruptions and attempted interventions to do academic work differently. We find that, in our efforts to resist, and attempts to promote different norms within a neoliberal university setting, we exercise a commitment to care: for colleagues, students, our friends, families and selves. This ethic of care emerged as we interrogated our gendered experiences in a set of experimental interventions designed to disrupt gendered neoliberal practices.

Public fridges are open-access community-stewarded spaces where food can be freely and anonymously shared. As such, they are fertile ground for understanding the obstacles and opportunities for governing food as a commons. This paper examines the governance strategies that have developed within and around Foodsharing.de, a grassroots food-rescue network in Berlin, to manage food as a commons. Analyzing the commoning of food in Foodsharing.de provides a novel entry point into the multi-scalar and multi-stakeholder governance processes that shape our broader food system. In this paper, I further develop the concept of urban food commons to specifically analyze the governance of food and risk.

Food sharing and food commons have both been raised as possible solutions to unsustainable and unjust urban food systems. This paper draws upon ethnographic research conducted in Berlin and New York to examine self-organizing in community food initiatives that are to varying degrees creating urban food commons by opening up urban space and its fruits to community use, sharing, and governance. In New York, the organization 596 Acres has developed an interactive map of vacant land to help community members self-organize to gain access to, steward, and protect the “lots in their life” for urban growing.

In this article I analyse beekeeping expertise as situated knowing in the precarious conditions of multispecies livelihoods. Beekeeping is knowledge-intensive: distinct expertise is required to keep colonies alive and thriving, to produce honey, and to support pollination – that is, to maintain livelihoods. The conditions in which beekeeping expertise is developed and enacted are precarious due to close entanglements with ultimately unintelligible non-human others and their changing habitats. Using ethnographic and interview data collected among urban beekeepers in Finland, I first describe the precariousness embedded in beekeeping as sharing lifeworlds and becoming with non-human others, particularly in an epoch characterized by severe environmental disturbances.

Planning for climate change is complex. There is some uncertainty about how quickly the climate will change and what the anticipated localised effects will be. There are also governance questions, for instance, who has the mandate to make decisions around the management of collective resources (like council infrastructure) and private property. Underlying these questions are issues of justice, equity and agency – who pays for the costs of adaptation and mitigation, and how do decision-makers engage with communities when what is ultimately needed is transformational socio-economic change?

Avec d’autres chercheuses et chercheurs engagés, je lutte pour rompre avec une conception universaliste du monde et opérer une transition vers un vivre-ensemble « centré sur le plurivers constitué d’une multiplicité de mondes enchevêtrés et co-constitutifs, mais distincts ». Dans le sillon de Dardot et Laval3, je comprends la révolution comme un moment d’accélération, d’intensification et de collectivisation d’une activité autonome et auto-organisée dans toutes les sphères de la vie économique, sociale, politique ou culturelle. Avec eux, je crois que le principe du commun est au coeur de ce projet révolutionnaire…

It appears that an almost unquestioned development pathway for achieving gender equity and women’s empowerment has taken centre stage in mainstream development. This pathway focuses on economic outcomes that are assumed to be achieved by increasing women’s access to material things, including cash income, loans, physical assets, and to markets. Gender equity indicators, which measure progress toward these outcomes, cannot escape reinforcing them. We argue that far from being neutral; indicators are embedded in political and ideological agendas that serve as guides to the appropriate conduct of those whose performance or behaviour is being measured.

Policy proposals about social change and well-being shape the implementation of applied theatre projects through technologies such as evaluation practices and funding applications. Representations of projects can, in turn, effect public discourse about who participants are and why they are or are not ‘being well’. Like public policy, applied theatre for social change has to establish a problem that needs to be solved. Drawing on debates about change in applied theatre literature, we consider how funders, governments, and communities call on applied theatre practitioners to frame particular issues and/or people as problematic.

This paper examines the geography of local food through a spatial analysis of farms and farmers’ markets. It draws on two themes in the geo-graphical literature on local food, which focus on territorial and prox-imity definitions on one hand and on relationality on the other. Through GIS analysis, this paper explores spatial patterns of ninety-one farmers’ markets in Los Angeles County, California, USA; spatial patterns of 282 farms that supplied a sample of thirty-three markets; and intra-urban patterns of those supply chains. The results show an uneven geography of farms across California that supplied the sampled markets, but also show that farms travel just as far to markets in working-class neighborhoods as to wealthier neighborhoods.

This paper discusses the Inpaeng Network, an alternative farmers' organization in Northeastern Thailand, and its cooperative ventures with state institutions. The primary aim is to show how by drawing on state development discourse participants in community economies can make use of government assistance and resources for their projects.

We use two Christchurch case studies to think about the temporality of commoning, concluding that even transitional and temporary commoning can help normalise and make visible the practice, thus enabling commoner subjectivities.

What does it mean to be at home in a hot city? One response is to shut our doors
and close ourselves in a cocoon of air-conditioned thermal comfort. As the climate
warms, indoor environments facilitated by technical infrastructures of cooling are
fast becoming the condition around which urban life is shaped. The price we pay for
this response is high: our bodies have become sedentary, patterns of consumption
individualized, and spaces of comfortable mobility and sociality in the city, termed
in this paper as “infrastructures of care,” have declined. Drawing on the findings
of a transdisciplinary pilot study titled Cooling the Commons, this paper proposes
that the production of the home as an enclosed and private space needs to be

This article addresses the current restructuring of academia in Turkey through the example of the Academics for Peace petition and the institutional mechanisms of repression it instigated. We focus on the Solidarity Academies as alternative spaces of education and a unique form of collective resistance against the academic purges. We provide an empirically informed analysis of Solidarity Academies as spaces of commoning, the collective production and sharing of knowledge by emergent communities of struggle.

We are thrilled by Vicky Lawson’s deeply appreciative response to the Roepke Lecture and the written article. In her response, Vicky does more than we could ask for by inviting economic geographers to think with us about ways of reworking manufacturing (and other economic activities) that center on care for the well-being of people and of the planet. Vicky goes to the heart of our project by highlighting the importance we place on looking for the ethical openings that arise in the current context of climate change and growing socioeconomic inequality. As she identifies, part of our armory includes tactics of attending to already existing possibilities that are hidden from view and reframing understandings of what an economy is for.

In a world beset by the problems of climate change and growing socioeconomic inequality, industrial manufacturing has been implicated as a key driver. In this article we take seriously Roepke’s call for geographic research to intervene in obvious problems and ask can manufacturing contribute to different pathways forward? We reflect on how studies have shifted from positioning manufacturing as a matter of fact (with an emphasis on exposing the exploitative operations of capitalist industrial restructuring) to a matter of concern (especially in advanced economies experiencing the apparent loss of manufacturing). Our intervention is to position manufacturing for the Anthropocene as a matter of care.

When Critical GIS emerged in the 1990s and gained momentum in the 2000s, its potential for enabling progressive social change generated considerable excitement. By combining the powers of mapping, information technologies, and critical social theory, it promised new possibilities for acting upon the growing social contradictions of the neoliberal era. Critical GIS seemed to open a pragmatic plane of action by fusing progressive geographic imaginations with concrete and tangible maps. As I reflect on the state of critical GIS in the middle of the second decade of the 21st century, new configurations of class power, patriarchy, and racism are rapidly reshaping our social and geopolitical worlds and are precipitating environmental destruction.

El capitalismo, en tanto realidad histórica, se ha fundado desde una producción del espacio basada en la creación, naturalización y legitimación de lapropiedad privada. No obstante, dicha perspectiva se encuentra en tensióncon otros modos de pensar y hacer la vida que re-significan al espacio comobien de uso común y como lugar para habitar decidiendo en conjunto.

In this work we examine the potential contributions from collaborative ethnography in Education Sciences career, putting under discussion some aspects of academic university learning. Since collaborative ethnography in education posses a debate on who produces knowledge, when, how, for what and with what tools, it allows reflection on central elements of research teaching. We review some specific characteristics of this approach and describe the presentation made to university students of the Career of Educational Sciences of the National University of Rosario, Argentina. Through a virtual device, the potential contributions of the collaborative ethnography approach in education were then discussed.

This study analyzes a pedagogical experience in Buenos Aires City developed by a staff team and a group of volunteers that work with homeless children. The goal of the study was to identify learning opportunities obtained through narration from a sociolinguistic perspective, considering multi-mediated interactions as analytical units. Methodologically, the authors examined the availability, access and transposition of different semiotic systems. The outcomes of the research show that facilitating access to a variety of resources enables individual participants to speak up and express themselves and also enables the group to express itself as a collective.

This note explores examples of co-operative ways of organizing work and life that are rooted in a desire for radical eco-social change. We look at and unravel the politics of work and the ecology of support of Footprint, a worker-owned printing co-operative, which is located in Leeds (UK). The first part places special attention on the values and value-practices that inform the co-op’s daily activities, while the second part explores how the sustainability of Footprint’s radical working methods are interlinked with their participation in a (trans)local ecology of social and environmental activism.

In 2012, I was involved in the experimental study program, Campus in Camps, which is located in the West Bank and which brought together 15 third-generation refugees to study the contemporary condition of Palestinian refugee camps and to speculate about their potential futures. In this article, I draw on my experience at Campus in Camps in order to reflect on how design and speculation can be activated by designers and non-designers to speculate with care about the matters of their own lives. To explore the potential held by the design speculations produced at Campus in Camps, I draw on the work of feminist philosopher Marìa Puig de la Bellacasa around " matters of care ".

This article draws from and advances urban studies literature on ‘creative city’ policies by exploring the contradictory role of queer arts practice in contemporary placemarketing strategies. Here I reflect on the fraught politics surrounding Radiodress’s each hand as they are called project, a deeply personal exploration of radical Jewish history programmed within Luminato, a Toronto-based international festival of creativity. Specifically, I explore how Luminato and the Koffler Centre, a Jewish organisation promoting contemporary art, regulated Radiodress’s work in order to stage marketable notions of ethnic and queer diversity. I also examine how and why the Koffler Centre eventually blacklisted Radiodress and her project.

This contribution calls attention to the values of assemblage thinking for the study of contentious economies. A syntactical perspective can make visible social arrangements that are otherwise difficult to represent in traditional social movement categories. With the help of a jar of jam, an object that has meaningful entanglements in anti-camorra activism in Campania (Italy), the article begins by empirically illustrating instances of mobilisation that disrupt relationships of mafia dependency. The focus lies on the force of composition, the syntax of contention. The second section moves on to explore the theoretical backdrop of the analysis, and does so by suggesting some possible points of dialogue between social movement studies and assemblage thinking.

Despite the shortened commodity chain created for coffee through fair trade, there still exist a number of actors within certified commodity exchange. This chain is populated by disproportionately engaged actors, from a consumer looking for the certification seal, to coffee roasters working directly with coffee producing cooperatives, to producers striving to keep up with the standards for certification. Despite such disparities, connections are made between the roasters and the growers of coffee at multiple sites, from community-based projects to the transfer of knowledge and storytelling beyond the communities where coffee is cultivated.