Books

This book celebrates a decade of Life in Vacant Spaces, affectionately known as LiVS, and the collection of over 700 projects that LiVS have supported in the ten years since the devastating Canterbury earthquakes of 2010/2011. The projects supported by LiVS have varied in shape, scale, location, aims, outputs, participants and people reached.

This book captures just some of the diverse impacts of the projects supported by LiVS, using qualitative research and a series of questions developed by Community Economies researchers to help capture the diversity of impacts. The book is organised around these questions:

¿Es el capitalismo la única realidad existente, una única posibilidad en la que no caben alternativas, tal y como insistentemente se repite? ¿Qué futuro podemos esperar bajo este modelo económico que también busca controlar todo lo que es político, social, y personal? J.K. Gibson-Graham es el pseu­dónimo conjunto usado por dos geógrafas económicas feministas que, desde principios de los años 1990, vienen mostrando que una visión alternativa al capitalismo es perfecta­mente posible. Su trabajo se basa en demos­trar que el capitalismo no es, ni de lejos, la única vía, que existe una extraordinaria diver­sidad de praxis económicas y que las perso­nas, a través de nuestras prácticas cotidianas individuales y colectivas, somos agentes de cambio efectivo. J.K.

From the crises of racial inequity and capitalism that inspired the Black Lives Matter movement and the Green New Deal to the coronavirus pandemic, stories of mutual aid have shown that, though cooperation is variegated and ever changing, it is also a form of economic solidarity that can help weather contemporary social and economic crises. Addressing this theme, Practicing Cooperation delivers a trenchant and timely argument that the way to a more just and equitable society lies in the widespread adoption of cooperative practices. But what renders cooperation ethical, effective, and sustainable?

The worldwide social and ecological unravelling of the 21st century presents an unprecedented challenge for thinking and practising liveable economies. As life support systems are annihilated in view of the sustainable accumulation of capital, social and economic alternatives are rapidly emerging to shelter possibilities for life amidst the ruins. Postcapitalism has gained increasing attention as an invitation to amplify existing alternatives to systemic scale. The transformations required are the focus of social movements, political projects and academic research that demand the theorisation and organisation of alternatives to capitalist realism today.

A short collection of tricks, loops, swerves and contemplation on the administrative, edited by Kate Rich and Angela Piccini.

During a three-day gathering in the Italian Alps in 2019, we wanted to explore how practices of community economies are being activated by people coming from an art and design background in a variety of local contexts. This practice exchange was an occasion to bring together practitioners and theorists to work together on concrete case studies of artist and designers activating community economies in diverse places across Europe. Another objective was to support several local projects in developing or strengthening their community economies approach.

Icebergian Economies of Contemporary Art offers reflections on art and economy, stimulated by J.K. Gibson-Graham’s representation of the economy as an iceberg. Themes include visible/invisible; blue line or the surface; the gloss over the dark matter; me versus the many; and art world/s.

An online version of the book is available here. The book was a contribution to a larger project, Cyber-PiraMMMida, which explores the pyramidal spectres and structures which haunt the worlds of architecture, art, academia and the everyday.

Economic diversity abounds in a more-than-capitalist world, from worker-recuperated cooperatives and anti-mafia social enterprises to caring labour and the work of Earth Others; from fair trade and social procurement to community land trusts, free universities and Islamic finance. The Handbook of Diverse Economies presents research that inventories economic difference as a prelude to building ethical ways of living on our dangerously degraded planet.

Urbanism without Guarantees is an ethnographic account of the contemporary everyday urban challenges of living in the far West Side of Midtown Manhattan in New York City, an area known as Clinton/Hell’s Kitchen.

This is the fifth book in the Diverse Economies and Liveable Worlds Series, and has featured in Community Economies News.

An investigation through texts, interviews, and documentation of the complex relationship between the urban, the rural, and contemporary cultural production.

Book translation of Veaux's & Rickert's More Than Two: A guide to ethical polyamory (Thorntree Press, 2014), translated from English to Finnish by Eeva Talvikallio, published by Basam Books, 2019.

An updated and adapted Finnish language version of Take Back the Economy: An Ethical Guide for Transforming Our Communities by J.K. Gibson-Graham, Jenny Cameron, and Stephen Healy, University of Minnesota Press, 2013.

Click here for the website that can be used in conjunction with the English language version of the book.

Applied Theatre: Economies addresses a notoriously problematic area: applied theatre's relationship to the economy and the ways in which socially committed theatre makers fund, finance or otherwise resource their work.

Part One addresses longstanding concerns in the field about the effects of economic conditions and funding relationships on applied theatre practice. It considers how applied theatre's relationship with local and global economies can be understood from different theoretical and philosophical perspectives. It also examines a range of ways in which applied theatre can be resourced, identifying key issues and seeking possibilities for theatre makers to sustain their work without undermining their social and artistic values.

Is fair trade really fair? Who is it for, and who gets to decide? Fair Trade Rebels addresses such questions by shifting the focus from the abstract concept of fair trade--and whether it is "working"--to the perspectives of small farmers. It examines the everyday experiences of resistance and agricultural practice among the campesinos/as of Chiapas, Mexico, who struggle for dignified livelihoods in self-declared autonomous communities in the highlands, confronting inequalities locally while participating in a global corporate agricultural chain. Fair Trade Rebels draws on stories from Chiapas that have emerged from the farmers' interaction with both the fair-trade-certified marketplace and state violence.

Much of the debate over sustainable development revolves around how to balance the competing demands of economic development, social well-being, and environmental protection. “Jobs vs. environment” is only one of the many forms that such struggles take. But what if the very terms of this debate are part of the problem? Reimagining Livelihoods argues that the “hegemonic trio” of economy, society, and environment not only fails to describe the actual world around us but poses a tremendous obstacle to enacting a truly sustainable future.

Provoked by mass evictions and the onset of gentrification in the 1970s, tenants in Washington, D.C. began forming cooperative organizations to collectively purchase and manage their apartment buildings. These tenants were creating a commons, taking a resource—housing—that had been used to extract profit from them, and reshaping it as a resource that was collectively owned and governed by them. In Carving Out the Commons, Amanda Huron theorizes the practice of urban commoning through a close investigation of the city’s limited-equity housing cooperatives.

The book is titled Learn to Act, because that’s what we set out to do. The title is a clear proclamation towards a form of  learning which is both an act of commoning and a moment in which knowledge becomes relative, collective and applied. Learn to Act is about the near future, how to act, and how to support each other.

Book translation of Lester R. Brown's The Great Transition: Shifting from Fossil Fuels to Solar and Wind Energy (W. W. Norton & Company, 2015), translated from English to Finnish by Eeva Talvikallio, published by Into Kustannus, 2017.

As part of the neoliberal trends toward public-private partnerships, universities all over the world have forged more intimate relationships with corporate interests and more closely resemble for-profit corporations in both structure and practice.  These transformations, accompanied by new forms of governance, produce new subject-positions among faculty and students and enable new approaches to teaching, curricula, research, and everyday practices. The contributors to this volume use ethnographic methods to investigate the multi-faceted impacts of neoliberal restructuring, while reporting on their own pedagogical responses, at universities in the United States, Europe, and New Zealand.

Book #4 in the series:Your Money or Your Life: Feminist Perspectives on Economy #1-4.

As part of Your Money or Your Life: Feminist Perspectives on Economy
Edited by Bonnie Fortune and Lise Skou

This series of short essays presents research, ideas, and proposals from four scholars and artists on contemporary life lived in the throes of global capitalism. The four women authors are responsible for creative opinions and approaches as to how we, as a culture, might come to inhabit different economic realities.

Building Dignified Worlds investigates social movements that do not simply protest but actively forge functional alternatives. Gerda Roelvink takes actor network and performativity theories of action as starting points for thinking about how contemporary collectives bring the new into being.

Book outlining the ideas and ambitions behind Company Drinks.

What exactly constitutes an economy? Making Other Worlds Possible brings together a compelling range of projects inspired by the diverse economies research agenda pioneered by J. K. Gibson-Graham. Firmly establishing diverse economies as a field of research, Making Other Worlds Possible outlines an array of different ways scholars are enacting economies that privilege ethical negotiation and a politics of possibility.

What makes the book so special is that each of authors know the communities they speak of and they write with real passion — Antipode

Take Back the Economy dismantles the idea that the economy is separate from us and best comprehended by experts. It demonstrates how the economy is the outcome of the decisions and efforts we make every day. Full of exercises and inspiring examples from around the world, it shows how people can implement small-scale changes in their own lives to create ethical economies. Click here for a copy of the introduction (provided with the publisher's permission).

Click here for the website that can be used in conjunction with the book.

By widening our gaze to include the discursive, political, economic, and other dimensions of lived experience, human service practitioners and policy makers can engage in practices that prioritize the well-being of all community members, recognizing social justice as central to this development. Drawing from existing empirical research as well as personal narratives by community members and policy makers, this book argues that by blurring the lines between self and other, contextualizing practices, understanding change as ontological, reconceptualizing power, and recognizing justice as an ongoing and shared responsibility, we might collectively access and mobilize fruitful possibilities that are often obscured.

This book is a critical history of development practice and professionalism in nothern Thailand, exploring how a postdevelopment perspective informed by the work of J.K. Gibson-Graham can shed new light on the nature of development practice and hope for the future.

Non-academic book exploring 33 Australian social enterprises, based on in-depth interviews.

In this creatively argued follow-up to their book The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It), J. K. Gibson-Graham offer already existing alternatives to a global capitalist order and outline strategies for building alternative economies. A Postcapitalist Politics reveals a prolific landscape of economic diversity—one that is not exclusively or predominantly capitalist—and examines the challenges and successes of alternative economic interventions.

Living-and often thriving-in the cracks between the business world and the state system is an amazing variety of organisations which, according to some economists, theoretically shouldn’t exist. That’s because their goal is not to make profits but to meet social needs which both the market and government either can’t meet nearly as well or have totally ignored.