Chapters

Creative arts-based methods and methodologies are, of recent, seeing a (re)surgence in human geography. Much less explored by geographers, however, are creative arts-based methods and methodologies as agents of sociopolitical change or as modalities overlapping with the intensifying work of place-based engagements by critical, racialized, queer, feminist, anti-colonial, Indigenous, differently-abled and/or activists, artists, and scholars. This paper provides a broad historical overview of creativity and arts practice in geography. It then interrogates some of the shortcomings of current scholarship about creativity (in practice and theory) in the discipline.

This essay reflects on two chapters on the theme of 'social entrepreneurship, relationality and the possible.' The essay explores how these chapters take a relational view of the world by featuring the importance of the relationships between people, and between people and ‘things’. What emerges from the two chapters are insights into social entrepreneurship as a social change practice not so much for finding accommodations in what is already present but for shifting the frame of what is thinkable and doable. The two chapters document strategies for social change while also recognising that social change is an unpredictable and uneven process that involves responding to the unexpected.

This book chapter outlines the basics of diverse economies and the idea of capitalocentrism for an audience in international political economy.

In this paper we use the concept of surviving well to reframe happiness.

Class is one of the most important, widely used, and complicated concepts in human geography and the social sciences. It underpins economic geographies and intersects with geographies of gender, race, and sexuality. Different notions of class have been in use, along the spectrum from neoclassical to Marxist economic theories. These theories have also been reworked by feminist, postcolonial, and poststructuralist scholars in order to augment critiques of class-related inequalities and to construct possibilities for imagining and producing progressive geographies of class. The contemporary global and neoliberal economy has given rise to high levels of concentration of wealth and economic insecurity that cut across the class divisions and social safety nets of the twentieth century.

In less than a decade, qualitative GIS became widely used not only in geography but across social sciences and humanities. Following critical GIS debates and feminist GIS interventions, qualitative GIS has emerged as a field that pioneered ways to map new types of data derived from qualitative interviews, historical archives, literary texts, and, more recently, social media, neogeography, and artistic visions of place. It also advanced integration of qualitative research methods with geospatial analysis in order to account for nonquantifiable, uncounted, and conceptually marginalized but important experiences and socioeconomic practices. Qualitative GIS, therefore, constructs new imaginaries of place and space that can contribute to inclusive citizenship.

Ce texte est un exercice de réflexion. Plutôt que de travailler avec des étiquettes idéologiques, j’ai envie de faire de la gymnastique mentale avec des concepts et des pratiques qui m’inspirent. Pour en arriver à proposer une méthode d’organisation qui soit porteuse d’espoir (un autre vivre ensemble est possible) tout en étant ancrée dans un pragmatisme mobilisateur. Je commencerai par expliciter mon point de vue sur l’exploitation et l’oppression des humains et de la nature. Puis, je reviendrai sur les idées mises de l’avant par Murray Bookchin et sur l’application de ses concepts d’écologie sociale et de municipalisme libertaire par le collectif anarchiste la Pointe libertaire. Ensuite j’aborderai les propositions de J. K.

This chapter, written for the Thinking in the World Reader (Bloomsbury Press), seeks to challenge and think beyond a key blockage in contemporary life: the conventional distinction between economy and ecology. As we argue, the distinction between these two domains severs us from transformative, ethically-infused encounters with our constitutive interdependencies. We explore one possible way to affirm and expand the politicization of this interdependence: a notion of "ecological livelihoods" linked with an ethics and politics of commoning.

In 1980, R. W. Butler published his tourism area cycle of evolution model graphing a correlation of number of tourists on the y-axis and time on the x-axis. Although a location’s capacity for number of tourists and the specific number of sustainable years may vary from location to location, Butler proposed that every tourist location evolves through a common set of stages: exploration, involvement, development, consolidation, stagnation, and then some variation of rejuvenation or decline. Butler’s model frames the resources that enable a region to become a tourist destination as finite and ultimately exhaustible.

Community food system thinking requires attention to the interrelationships that shape the needs, resources, and opportunities within a physical and social context. A comprehensive community food security strategy starts by clarifying the needs and existing resources within a community and developing a suite of strategies—food policy councils, farmers markets, educational programs, urban gardens, and so forth—that will address issues of access, affordability, cultural appropriateness, and ongoing sustainability (Kaufman and Bailkey 2000; Winne 2008; Raja, Born, and Russell 2008).

History, including contemporary history, is as much about time as it is about space, place, and territory. Not accidentally, historians have long used paper maps as their data (maps made at different time periods) and as a form of analysis (e.g., historical atlases, maps of historic battles, etc.). Maps have always been an incredibly succinct and visually powerful way to tell a story. On the one hand, therefore, turning to digital mapping technologies is continuous with this tradition. On the other hand, geospatial technologies created new ways of analyzing and representing by connecting digital maps to data behind the map.

Women and the Politics of Place (WPP) is a project of narrating and theorizing a globally emergent form of localized politics — one that is largely of if not necessarily for women — with the goal of bringing this politics into a new stage of being. What is truly distinctive about WPP is the vision of a place-based yet at the same time global movement (Osterweil 2004). Indeed this distinctive vision is what first attracted us to the project, for we were already imagining and fostering an economic politics with the same locally rooted yet globally extensive structure.

In the early 1990s, a group of housing activists from Washington, D.C. traveled to Johannesburg to help start the first housing cooperatives in South Africa’s history. These activists were from Washington Innercity Self Help, or WISH, a community-based group that directed much of its work towards helping low-income tenants purchase their buildings from their landlords and form limited-equity housing cooperatives – collectively owned housing that, because of restrictions placed on resale prices, would be affordable to poor people for years to come.

In this paper we use the concept of surviving well to reframe contemporary discussion of happiness and wellbeing in the context of international development discourse.  While the attempts to move beyond metrics that privilege economic growth as the singular indicator of progress, it's equally true that our understanding of happiness and wellbeing needs to move beyond individual notions of contentment and towards a measure that allows people to thinking about their own needs in relation to others and in relation to planetary wellbeing. 

Today the planet faces a genuine tragedy of the unmanaged “commons.” For decades an open access and unmanaged resource has been treated with the same sort of disregard as Hardin’s pasture was treated. The planet’s life-supporting atmosphere has been spoiled by “‘help yourself’ or ‘feel free’ attitudes” (Hardin 1998: 683). We are now faced with the seemingly impossible task of transforming an open access and unmanaged planetary resource into a commons which is managed and cared for. With the cause and impacts of global warming now beyond debate, we are being pressed to take responsibility and to act in new ways. But how are we to do this? What type of politics is called for?

In preparing for the talk associated with this paper I was invited to consider two things—the future of the arts in the era of austerity and restructuring and what the arts community might learn from the environmental movement. My thoughts on how to respond to this positioning is directed by my involvement with the Community Economies Collective (CEC) an international group of activist-scholars interested in enacting post-capitalist economies.  And it is in this context that the concept of the Big Society provides us with an interesting point of departure.

This chapter focuses on urban-based enterprises that are building direct links with rural producers and taking seriously the idea that urban consumers have a role to play in stewarding our agricultural environments and securing livelihoods for farmers. When these sorts of concerns are placed at the heart of the enterprise we find that economic innovations follow, and that along with producing benefits for farmers these innovations are also impacting employees and consumers. This results in businesses that are very different from the mainstream model of enterprise--the capitalist firm in which profit-maximization is at the heart.

This chapter reflects on the role that an experimental social research approach might play in coming to terms with a future in which the certainties of the past have gone and the future lies before us unknown. This experimental approach means setting aside the idea of research as a neutral and objective activity in which there is critical distance between the researcher and the object of study. Instead, research would entail making a stand for certain worlds and for certain ways of living on the planet, and taking responsibility for helping to make these worlds more likely and these ways of living more widespread.

In this chapter, Jenny Cameron and Robert Pekin (from Food Connect, an innovative Community Supported Agriculture initiative operating in South East Queensland, Australia) reflect on the diverse economic practices that can be used to support sustainable and ethical food economies.

In this book chapter, we consider what it would mean to see the sites and practices of 'life's work' as potential areas that spark change in economies and subjectivities.

Although communities are constantly undergoing processes of becoming the Powell River community on Canada’s Pacific coast is in a unique transitional moment when it comes to possibilities for post-industrial economic pathways. With the downsizing of its main industry and employer over the past 3 decades, community members are currently exploring a diverse range of economic possibilities that extend beyond strictly capitalist options. Reading for economic diversity can help us to identify and pursue existing and potential economic pathways that enhance wellbeing for human and nonhuman community members.