Chapters

Building on the concept of econo-sociality (Gibson-Graham and Roelvink 2009), I propose the related concept of econo-ecology to explore and interpret diverse knowledges and practices of the environment using a range of case studies centered on interrelationships between humans, plants and fungi in the United States and Scotland.

This book chapter challenges the conventional separations between "economy" and "ecology," proposing instead a perspective of "ecological livelihoods" in which sustenance is understood as an always-collective process of ethical negotiation involving humans and myriad living others. Drawing on and modifying Gibson-Graham's previous work on "ethical coordinates," we suggest some glimmers of what an ethical economics in an acknowledged more-than-human world might look like. [UPDATE: We also include here a 2025 addendum, "Challenging the Coloniality of Ecological Livelihoods: Critical Reflections Ten Years On." Please read this along with the original text]. 

This paper uses key concepts from psychoanalytic theory to explore the fantasies that structure social discourses around global warming and resource depletion as key features of the anthropocene. Forthcoming S. Pile and P. Kingsbury http://www.ashgate.com/default.aspx?page=4824&amp

Written with Robyn Dowling this chapter offers a discussion of theories of identity in human geography, and draws on recent research by each of the authors to elaborate new challenges to the way geographers think about identity. Includes consideration of the impacts of J.K. Gibson-Grahams thinking around subjectivity, collectivity, and social change to geographers engagements with identity across different fields.

A radio wave appears to be fleeting. It cannot be seen or touched, apparently ungrounded, an ethereal presence detached from the earth. Yet radio in its smallest forms can be deeply connected to the land. The particular geography of microradio can be a powerful tool for fighting for the right to be in a certain place: the right to stay put over time, to create culture, to dwell. Here, I examine the case of one contemporary microradio station in its struggles against neighborhood displacement, and consider the possibilities for the future.

This chapter discusses the activities of Inpaeng, a farmers’ network in Northeastern Thailand committed to empower farming households through a mix of homegrown strengths and acquired know-how. Based on on-site findings as well as secondary data the chapter demonstrates innovative strategies to maintain economic, social, and environmental sustainability in the region.

This chapter, drawn from previous writings by J.K. Gibson-Graham, is part of a collaboration with artist Sarah Browne for the Ireland exhibition in the 2009 Venice Biennale. The piece provides an overview of some of the core thinking that emerged in the 10 years between the publication of The End of Capitalism (1996) and A Postcapitalist Politics (2006).

Inspired by and written for the global #Occupy Movement, this text is part theory, part strategy and part call-to-action for the immediate and long-term work of identifying and seizing spaces of democratic practice (occupy!), linking them together in networks of mutual support and recognition (connect!), and drawing on our collective strength to actively create new ways of meeting our needs and making our livings (create!).

In this chapter I consider what identification is from a social geography perspective. Drawing on fiedwork with indigenous activists in Thailand I explore what identification is, what it means and how it works. Engaging with a range of social theorists such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Ernesto Laclau, Judith Butler and J.K. Gibson-Graham I discuss the processes through which we are identified in the systems of governance and power that prevail in the contemporary world and what these processes mean both for how we are subjected to the machinations of power in the world and how we may act within and upon them.

The chapters in this edited collection were envisioned as conversations between scholars and indigenous collaborators from around the world. My contribution was drawn from a round-table session with highland activists and community representatives who met in Chiang Mai in 2007 to discuss how to represent themselves as indigenous. 

If the rise of the World Social Forum is any indication, there is a groundswell of support for alternatives to capitalism. But within this movement that links North and South, ‘developed’ and less ‘developed’ nations worldwide, the debate as to what constitutes an economic alternative is fraught with judgments about the purity or contamination of what is on offer. Wholehearted experimentation with the premise that ‘other economies are possible’ is held back by the critical voices (many in our own heads) arguing that this or that element of an alternative project is no different from capitalism or is insufficient to withstand the colonizing forces of the ‘capitalist’ market. J.K.

This chapter appeared in a volume that brought together work on alternative economic and political forms. My piece is in the section on “Alternative spaces of social enterprise and development" and considers how post-development thinking, such as that present in the work of geographers like J.K. Gibson-Graham or Lakshman Yapa, can support concrete efforts for real change in the world.

A post-development approach to world-making has arisen from a critique of the idea that development, especially economic development, is yoked to capitalist growth. This approach extends the long tradition of critique that has accompanied the hegemonic rise of a mainstream development project focused on the 'problem" of less developed regions of the world. As we see it, the challenge of post-development is not to give up on development, but to imagine and practice development differently. Thus post-development thinking does not attempt to represent the world as it is, but the world as it could be.

An overview of concepts and strategic organizing practices of the emerging solidarity economy movement.

In this chapter we discuss empirical evidence of communal gardening projects through a 'realist governmentality' approach.

This chapter explores how Nuestras Raices and the Alliance to Develop Power, two community organizations in Western Massachusetts, are building community economies and unsettling traditional formulas for economic development.

Community-based social enterprises offer a new strategy for people-centred local economic development in the majority 'developing' world. In this chapter we recount the stories of four social enterprise experiments that have arisen over the last five years from partnerships between communities, NGOs and municipal governments in the Philippines, and university based researchers from Australia.

In this chapter we stage a conversation between two innovative and longstanding projects, (1) the multiphase European-based research project on local social innovation that is represented in this book and (2) the Community Economies project which is engaged in rethinking economy through action research in Australia, the Philippines and the US.

This article reviews current literature within geography focused on alternative economies, a term that has contradictory effects in a discipline fixated on a realist imagining of the link between 'capitalism" and state through neoliberal governance.

This paper addresses three topics: an easy-to-understand review of money and complementary currencies

This chapter explores how the idea of sustainable development might be transformed from an impossible dream (sabotaged at every turn by the force various identified as 'capitalism," 'the market," 'modernization," and 'development") into a realistic and attainable project for organizations and communities.

In recent years, development practitioners, anthropologists, geographers and others who are observers ‘on the ground’ of the failures of the one-size-fits-all model of development have begun to generate a ‘post-development’ discourse (Rahnema with Bawtree, 1997). By this, we mean a set of thinking and doing practices that are guided by a distinctive ethical stance. Post-development discourse is aligned with the long leftist tradition of critical analyses that accompanied the global consolidation, immediately after the Second World War, of a hegemonic mainstream development project.

This chapter introduces the focus group as a method for qualitative social research.

This chapter elaborates an economic and social policy responses to build on the skills and ideas of marginalised groups.

Offers a counter to the common denigration of local economic politics 'in the face of globalization'.

This chapter in the Companion to Economic Geography overviews three poststructural strategies: deconstruction; discourse analysis and genealogy; and performativity. It then uses examples to show how these strategies have been picked up in the work of economic geographers, and it concludes by focusing how economic geographers have used these strategies in research projects that have an explicit agenda to help shape positive change in the world. Overall, the chapter aims to give a sense of the powers and potentials of poststructural interventions.

Empirical studies conducted from a range of theoretical perspectives have all in some way affirmed the existence of women's experience as a source of privileged understandings, if not the basis of an alternative social science. With the turn to post-modernism many of the certainties of a feminist research practice have been dislodged. This has liberated a plethora of exciting philosophical, political and cultural endeavours that tackle the essentialism around women embedded in both feminist and non-feminist texts.