Publications

When the United Nations (UN) proposes that it is the social and solidarity economy (SSE) that will lead the way towards a well-functioning, prosperous and inclusive economy, it is time to identify the bold steps needed to normalize all forms of economic activity that put people and the planet before private profit making. Through a critique of capitalocentrism, this chapter counters certain perceptions of the SSE's capacity for radical leadership and transformation as limited. Drawing on Diverse Economies scholarship and my action research to build Community Economies, I argue that the SSE could join forces with movements focused on decommodifying basic needs and commoning access to what supports livelihoods.

This piece was written for a Rethinking Marxism (2025) Symposium on The Handbook of Diverse Economies.

Community and charitable reuse organisations provide significant social infrastructure that facilitates the redistribution of discarded items to new owners, but are often overlooked in circular cities initiatives. Drawing on a survey of 34 reuse organisations from across Australia and recorded interviews and site visits to 10 of these between 2021 and 2023, we characterise the processes, practices and types of organisations across the sector. We then examine three spatially distinct domains of social interaction involved, and show how diverse economies of materials reuse are enacted through various forms of labour, and relationships between workers, donors and recipients of goods, that are meaningful in different ways to those involved.

This paper examines the circular economy’s application in addressing sustainability challenges, focusing on organic waste and peri-urban futures. Critically reflecting on the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s definition of circularity, we explore how waste minimization and ecosystem regeneration align with Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) like climate action and responsible production. Realising this more ambitious and transformational version of circularity involves us in a process of redrawing the “circle” and in the process reimagining economies. We explored this possibility through a case focused on redirecting organic waste, in particular spent coffee grounds, from urban centres to peri-urban farms.

En este texto reflexionamos sobre los aportes de los denominados materialismos a la concepción epistemológica de nuestro programa de investigación. Nos orientan las siguientes preguntas: ¿qué puntos comunes podemos identificar entre autores de las corrientes denominadas materialistas, tales que enriquecen nuestra construcción epistemológica, con efectos metodológicos y teóricos? y ¿qué aspectos de nuestro trabajo de investigación precisamos mantener abiertos, flexibles, no del todo estabilizados, si queremos profundizar en la colaboración y la co(e)laboración como metodología y epistemología? En la primera sección del texto presentamos la perspectiva socio-material a través de la obra de dos autores de referencia: Latour y Bennett.

Many, if not all, of the foods humans consume on a daily basis (from kimchi to yogurt and beer) are the result of both human and nonhuman labor. Nonhuman labor refers to “work” that is done by nonhuman actors to produce food and other valuable products. This labor can take many forms, including living, eating, growing, reproducing, and metabolizing nature to meet one’s biophysical needs. Although labor is a social and relational process that cannot be understood outside of human economies, there are merits to extending this concept to nonhumans, whose labor is often rendered invisible, natural, or instinctual. Even the ability to digest food is a more-than-human accomplishment, realized in collaboration with gut bacteria.

Locating justice in the city can be a difficult task. Urban theory has focused on exposing injustice and critiquing the multiple occurrences of injustice in cities. But what role could uncovering practices of actually existing justice in the city play in critical theory? How would we begin to look for actually existing justice in the here and now? By adopting a performative ontology and a politics of possibility, I argue that it is possible to expose, propose and amplify (Iveson, 2010) actually existing justice practices in the everyday city. A shift in thinking and research approach may be needed to make theoretical and ontological space for justice. In this paper I discuss research approaches that assist in locating justice in the city.

Public spaces support and frame the economic, cultural, ecological and political lives of city dwellers. Much emphasis has been placed on how public spaces can be designed well to generate conviviality, as well as facilitate wellbeing and economic activity. At the same time, exclusion from public space can be ‘built in’ at the level of infrastructure. This article positions public spaces as infrastructures of care. Drawing on a series of vignettes reflecting on experiences of public space during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, we develop an expansive understanding of public space as relational and performed, and as supporting infrastructures of care (or, at times, creating barriers to access care).

There has been a longstanding concern about the relationships between policy, funding and theatre practice in educational and community settings. Past scholarship has made evident the varied ways a relationship with policy can manifest and play out in the political, pedagogic, aesthetic and ethical values, approaches and outcomes of applied theatre practices. This includes the ways theatre can play a part in producing the problems it intends to address. This article argues for the use of critical theories to interrogate and rethink the policy-funding-practice relationship, to generate nuanced understandings and open up a space of possibility.

“Icebergian Economies of Contemporary Art” by Kathrin Böhm and Kuba Szreder (Centre for Plausible Economies) offers reflections on art and economy, stimulated by J. K. Gibson-Graham’s representation of the economy as an iceberg. Just as the capitalist economy is the peak of the iceberg, the glossy world of celebrity art dominates over the vast—yet invisible—realm of artistic dark matter, the realm of artistic labour that sustains the social gravity of the artistic universe, just as physical dark matter prevents the cosmos from collapsing. Themes include visible/invisible; blue line or the surface; the gloss over the dark matter; me versus the many; and art world/s.

Circular economy initiatives in Australia increasingly reference reuse, yet dominant recycling-led approaches continue to reproduce business-as-usual. This paper asks what kinds of worlds are made through reuse by examining Substation 33 and St Kilda Mums (now Our Village). Drawing on Karatani’s reading of surplus value, we develop “reuse value” as a parallax concept that captures both the embodied potential of discarded materials and the relational forms of care through which they re-enter circulation. These cases show how reuse reconfigures relations between people, materials, and places, generating social and ecological benefits that exceed conventional CE framings. We argue that recognising reuse value reveals postcapitalist possibilities within circular-degrowth trajectories.

This paper interweaves fragments of our digital epistolary exchanges with the exercises and prompts we practiced during long-distance online meetings. We reflect on our first conversation, sparked in a taxi en route to an abandoned construction site in Oaxaca—once meant to be a luxury hotel, now reclaimed by a local arts collective. Amidst its post-apocalyptic remains, we found ourselves fervently discussing class hierarchies in the UK, from supermarket rankings to the neoliberalisation of higher education. Our shared frustrations as feminist scholars navigating colonial academia led us to seek alternative ways of thinking, writing, and creating.

We re-visit our chapter, "Economy as Ecological Livelihood" ten years later to unpack many of the ways it has reproduced colonialism in its framing and articulation. Seeking to take responsibility for our mistakes, we hope this self-critique can be generative of further work to better align community economies and livelihoods thinking with anti-colonial and decolonial priorities and movements. 

This entry introduces the concept of food commons in the context of scholarship and activism on commons, commoning, and food systems transformation. I then draw out some key tensions and issues that have surfaced in research on food commons related to questions of materiality, scale, and urban-rural relations. I close with recommendations for approaches that future research can take to address these issues.

Pablo Fuentenebro et al.’s ‘Geographies of Super-Philanthropy: Disaggregating the Global Philanthropic Complex’ describes the power of contemporary philanthropy. Their piece is highly insightful, and I appreciate their deep engagement with a topic central to how communities might address climate change and other pressing global challenges. While the comparison is wildly inappropriate, James Ferguson’s (2015) description of tech sector wealth as a ‘great gusher’, like an oil field to be tapped for the benefit of humanity, comes to mind. The philanthropic ‘gushers’ discussed here represent the kind of power that could contribute to the global climate reparations envisioned by Olúfẹ´mi O. Táíwò (2022).

The book Global Libidinal Economy addresses the question of what psychoanalysis contributes to political economy and contemporary social theory. The authors engage with Marxian political economy, asserting that the libidinal dimension—encompassing desire, drive, and fantasies—shapes the social world, including the economy. Throughout, the authors provide a provocative answer to this question by identifying the libidinal stakes across a range of issues, including economic development, trade, environmental governance, technological innovation, and the rivalry between the United States and China, a shift of emphasis that opens the economy to political possibilities.

This chapter proposes to recast the “supply chain” as a commons via an extended description of the shared social, intellectual, and regulatory resources currently producing an experiment in a circular economy for organic waste in Sydney, Australia. Organic waste, once composted, finds its way into high value-added crops like heirloom garlic which are then sold back to consumers in Sydney. By foregrounding the practices of social learning and information sharing that is making this “circularity” possible, our chapter illustrates how creating a material commons often depends upon creating a knowledge commons to make it cohere, as well as upon creating commoner-subjects who will do the work of caring for both. 

The ways social theorists conceptualize the material world influences their approach to conceiving and addressing the environmental challenges of the Anthropocene. This article uses panpsychist theory, which holds that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous property of the natural world, as a way of conceptualizing and developing responses to these challenges. This is done by contrasting panpsychist conceptions of materiality and consciousness with those of vital materialism and property dualist historical materialism. It is argued that the latter theories have difficulties effectively analyzing the relationship between humans and the nonhuman world in the context of the Anthropocene.

This article analyzes the digital field and the historical processes in which it was
privatized (enclosures), while alternatives of co-operative and solidary uses were
developed. The paper delves into the aspects related to the digital-virtual terri-
tory, proposing a literature survey that accounts for both privatization actions
and the so-called platform co-operativism (different from the privative). The no-
tions of common and communalization are introduced as distinct from those of
enclosure and accumulation, through a survey of classic critical social science
literature. Based on all this conceptual repositioning, the creation of a Popular
Memory Archive in a neighborhood of the City of Buenos Aires is described and

Eco-communities envision and enact practices which make a double movement: away from the ecologically destructive tendencies demonstrated by contemporary societies, and towards shared, participatory alternatives which are socially and environmentally non-exploitative. In spite of this statement, Freetown Christiania has a complex relationship with environmental sustainability, lacking many of the common understandings of that concept which underlie pro-environmental collective action (Verco 2018; Winter 2016). It also consistently deviates from many of the usual tropes or imaginaries of an eco-community, given its location in the heart of a major capital city and the absence of community-based food production.

This paper develops a multidimensional framework for sustaining care-full public spaces. We open by engaging with key understandings of the affective and relational dimensions of both public spaces and urban care scholarship. We then set out the elements of a framework for conceptualising the possibility of care-full public spaces. Writing from feminist and decolonial standpoints, we review emerging and foundational research to delineate three key components of such an approach: (1) governance, (2) materialities and design, and (3) performing public spaces. We then apply the framework, grounding our analysis of care in public spaces in a case study of caring for and as Country in Sydney, Australia.

‘Earthcare’ is a term that is emerging in environmental humanities from feminist and indigenous research and practice that aims to capture the historical relations of care between humans and nature. By bringing together the terms ‘earth’ and ‘care,’ ’Earthcare’ refers to the life-making and life-sustaining activities that maintain humans and more-than-humans in their lifeworlds. I use the term ‘care’ to mean the social, political, ecological, and embodied processes necessary to nurture relationships, responsibilities, and accountabilities for flourishing lifeworlds. I use the term ‘Earth’ to refer to all aspects of life on the planet.

Toi Taiao Whakatairanga (TTW) is a three-year transdisciplinary artistic research project based in Aotearoa, New Zealand. TTW explores the ways arts practices can contribute to public awareness of two plant pathogens threatening native tree species – kauri dieback and myrtle rust. The project commissioned and curated Māori artists to create artworks through engaging with iwi (tribes), hapū (sub-tribes), communities, mātauranga Māori (Māori knowledge) and Western science. In this chapter, we discuss two art projects from Te Tai Rāwhiti, on the East Coast of New Zealand’s North Island.

This paper introduces the Strengths, Gender, and Place (SGP) framework, a novel evaluative tool designed to assess community engagement in development programmes. Developed in response to calls for decolonized and locally-led development in the Pacific and beyond, the SGP framework comprises fifteen indicators across three dimensions. These dimensions evaluate the extent to which programmes leverage local strengths, address gender inequities, and implement place-based approaches that respect local knowledge and practices. The framework was applied to thirty project reports from four major development organisations in Papua New Guinea's Western Province. The study also incorporated insights from twenty semi-structured interviews with key informants, which further enriched the findings.

En este trabajo examinamos de manera crítica el papel dominante del hormigón en la modernización de las ciudades asiáticas desde mediados del siglo XX. Ya hace tiempo que constructores, arquitectos, urbanistas y ciudadanos destacan las ventajas del hormigón. Sin embargo, sostenemos que, en el Antropoceno, ya no es posible pensar el hormigón como un material neutro en términos sociales y medioambientales. Las fisuras del hormigón son tanto físicas como metafóricas; no solo se manifiestan en el material, sino también como problemas socioecológicos. Exploramos el lado oculto de la producción de hormigón, donde emergen esas fisuras, por medio del concepto de "lugares sombra".