Publications

This research article outlines a provocation for diverse and experimentally open, situated approaches to exploring care and caring. The diversely positioned authors discuss this idea using the subject of soil, in the place and context of Aotearoa New Zealand. Little is known about the diversity of ways that everyday people value, or, have caring relationships for/with soil, among a plethora of research that positions soil ‘care’ around, for example, commercial food production, waste-sinking, or property land value. To study diverse care in relation to soil, as with many relational subjects, requires equivalent diversity in the ways in which we might explore it. Here we outline the basis for diverse, situated methodologies that necessarily lead to a diversity of methods.

Book review of Brian Burke. 2023. Social Exchange: Barter as Economic and Cultural Activism in Medellín. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. 224

While degrowth as a plural and decolonial movement actively invites the Global South to be part of its transformative project, the current North-South dichotomy threatens to miss the variety of semi-peripheral contexts. Against this backdrop, we aim to contribute to dialogues on degrowth from the often-overlooked ‘East’ – specifically post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Instead of being viewed as a site for transformative examples and inspiration for degrowth-oriented socio-ecological transformation, CEE is often portrayed as ‘lagging behind’. Problematising such reductionist narratives, this essay explores CEE as a lively and rich site of postcapitalist alternatives.

When talking about prefiguration what is often talked about is the creation of formal anti-oppression protocols, sometimes critiqued as the self-bureaucratization of anarchist social movements. The result is what I refer to as the protocolization of daily life, a situation where the day-to-day is formalized into defined rules or norms. In doing so, activists often reproduce the control found at the heart of mainstream organizational forms. Such control often works to the detriment of the democratizing goals of social movements, excluding minorities and working-class people, generating the often-critiqued homogenization of social movements. This paper explores an antonym of such protocolization, what I refer to as the prefigurative feel.

Given calls to decolonise engagement with Indigenous communities, this article explores how allied researchers can participate in self-determined learning with Indigenous Peoples. Drawing on over a decade of experience within an action-research collective in a Mapuche context, the authors suggest that allied researchers can accompany Indigenous-led co-design in a manner that not only strengthens genuine Indigenous participation but also fosters mutual and collective learning from within the co-creative processes themselves.

As ecological and social crises mount, academic work which explores the transformation of unsustainable socio-ecological systems has flourished. Surprisingly, however, there have been few, if any, concerted attempts to consider the resonances and divergences between two of the most prominent approaches to rethinking the economy as we know it: degrowth, and diverse and community economies (DCE), respectively. In this Critical Review, I reflect on resonances and similarities, as they emerge from the academic literature. I argue that sites of dissonance, disjuncture or discomfort also emerge which have not been reflected on in the respective literatures thus far, primarily relating to questions of essentialising capitalism and growth imperatives.

This paper identifies characteristics of a 'composting ethic' and grassroots community contexts and skills supporting its emergence.

This article came out of many years of thinking and talking together about our earlier work in an urban youth garden in Ōtautahi Christchurch, Aotearoa New Zealand. We were really interested in the way youth talked about the changes in themselves as people who could learn to care for each other and shared spaces (commons). We had the opportunity to publish in a special issue of Cities on storying the 'counter-city', so we used our thinking about changes in subjectivity to write and think about what this might mean for postcapitalist countercities already present in place. 

I wrote this piece for a special issue on emerging methodologies in care and care-giving in Asia Pacific. In it, I reflect on some of the embodied aspects of ethnographic methods that we sometimes overlook. I use Anna Tsing's idea of awkward engagements, but apply it as an embodied method for sensing and responding to different pluriversal realities. The context is myself as a Pākehā New Zealand European person doing research work in the multicultural far west of China.

This paper critically examines the dominant role of concrete in the modernization of Asian cities since the mid twentieth century. While builders, architects, planners and citizens have long praised the advantages of concrete, we argue that concrete can no longer be seen as socially and environmentally neutral in the Anthropocene. When concrete cracks, it does so literally and metaphorically. The cracks manifest not only in the actual material but as socioecological concerns. We employ the concept of “shadow places” to explore the underside of concrete production where those cracks emerge.

Executive Summary

The concept of the commons has gained traction across multiple disciplines as researchers explore ways we might live ‘in common’ with other people and the world around, and with consideration for the wellbeing of current and future generations. This chapter traces how the work of human geographers builds on research in other fields, including ecology, political science and history. It shows how human geographers attend to processes of commoning with examples drawn from commons on land, air and sea. 

Over the past three decades West Virginians have experienced a deepening economic crisis. Divestment in coal and manufacturing has resulted in widespread unemployment, state, county and municipal revenue losses, and cascading effects on social services, households, livelihoods and community life. For 10 years, FJL has conducted ethnographic research, coordinated cooperative experiments, and built pedagogical tools to democratize knowledge about West Virginia’s food system amidst this crisis. Working in a so-called red state, we have fostered conversations about food justice with rural, often socially conservative communities, and have worked to raise up human resources for meaningful community-led food justice organizing in Central Appalachia.

Community food initiatives (CFIs) bring people together to reconfigure their relations with food, place, and one another. Such initiatives are driven by the specific needs, values, and concerns of people in different places who take collective action to re-design and challenge systems of food provisioning. They span the rural and urban, consumption and production, alternative and mainstream, charity, mutual aid, and (social) entrepreneurship. While agri-food scholars use different theoretical lenses, concepts, and ways of knowing as entry points to study CFIs, such initiatives have largely been described in terms of their hopes and possibilities or troubles and failures.

This commentary is part of a series initially presented at the Waste/Economies/Ecology hybrid international symposium at the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University, Australia in February 2023. The symposium was part of the research project ‘Investigating Innovative Waste Economies: Redrawing the Circular Economy’funded by the Australian Research Council. The symposium brought together academics and artists from around the world who are thinking with waste to enable novel responses to its ethical and political challenges. We thank all our contributors to this special commentary section for their participation and thinking.

This commentary is part of a series initially presented at the Waste/Economy/Ecology hybrid international symposium at the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University, Australia in February 2023. The symposium was part of the research project ‘Investigating Innovative Waste Economies: Redrawing the Circular Economy’funded by the Australian Research Council. The symposium brought together academics and artists from around the world who are thinking with waste to enable novel responses to its ethical and political challenges. We thank all our contributors to this special commentary section for their participation and thinking.

Calls to transform food systems along more ethical and sustainable lines are mounting alongside debates about what constitutes transformative change and strategies needed to achieve it. Civil society organizations (CSOs) have argued that transforming food systems requires transforming the governance of food systems, as dominant “productivist” approaches to governance have narrowly invested in corporate priorities while marginalizing the many small-scale food workers that animate our food system. In this paper, we examine the possibilities and unexpected pathways of food system transformation through the case of the Voluntary Guidelines for Securing Sustainable Small-Scale Fisheries (SSF Guidelines).

Reseña del libro: Casellas Antònia. J.K. Gibson-Graham: Hacia una economía postcapitalista o cómo retomar el control de lo cotidiano. 2022. España. Icaria Editorial

En este artículo analizamos las situaciones de acceso al lugar de emplazamiento actual de varios grupos pre-cooperativos que encuadran en la denominación de “cooperativas sociales” que se nuclean en un entramado más amplio, el de una Asociación Civil denominada Integración Comunitaria por la Salud Mental Una Movida de Locos (MdL), situada en la Ciudad de La Plata, Provincia de Buenos Aires, Argentina. En este texto proponemos

Community Economies (CE) is a key term in the growing interdisciplinary subfield of diverse economies (DE) scholarship, a perspective that continually grew from the pioneering feminist political economy and economic geography scholarship of J.K. Gibson-Graham (2006). It defines ‘community’ as a space where humans negotiate the terms of our shared coexistence and in which ‘solidarity’ is one possible disposition.

In my commentary, I take up the challenge of finding an academically fuelled strategy to make the necessary deep inroads into the Sustainable Development Goals by looking at lessons learnt from the struggles of the transnational feminist movement involved in UN multilateral debates and the transformative work of feminist political ecology on the ethics of care and caring-with others, including more-than-human others. I propose these feminist strategies offer some insights in how to shift dominant knowledge systems.

We build a rationale for a nuanced approach to raising public awareness of ecological threats through interweaving art, science, and Mātauranga Māori (Indigenous Māori knowledge). The thinking we present emerges from the first phase of a transdisciplinary project, Toi Taiao Whakatairanga, which explores the ways the arts can raise public awareness of two pathogens that are ravaging native trees in Aotearoa New Zealand: Phytopthora agathidicida (kauri dieback) and Austropuccinia psidii (myrtle rust). One of our first steps in the project was to explore understandings of "public” and “awareness” and their relevance to Aotearoa’s ecological, cultural, and political context.