Publications

This thesis is about the micropolitics of transforming food and agriculture governance institutions in a complex and uncertain world. For decades, food sovereignty movement actors have been mobilising to resist the privatisation of land, seeds, labour, culture and knowledge. Since 2010, they have been participating in policy negotiations inside the UN Committee on World Food Security (CFS) through an autonomous International Civil Society and Indigenous People’s Mechanism (CSIPM). The CFS is the only global food governance arena in which non-state actors have the formal right to participate in all stages of policy formation along with governments.

We work at a train station. Not at the ticket counter, the bar, or the toilets, but at a grassroots community academy called La Foresta, located right next to the office of the railway police. We have worked here since 2017, first around and now in our local train station, as a group of actively engaged citizens, freelance educators, researchers in the wild, and change-oriented feral entrepreneurs.

In this text, we share three vignettes and the respective key learnings of the collective process of creative and transformative instrastructuring that we are driving in and around the train station of Rovereto, a town with 40,000 inhabitants in the Italian Alps.

Climate change puts an inequitable and heavy burden on people who are forced to adapt to unjust socioenvironmental conditions created by the legacy of ongoing climate coloniality and historical settler and imperial colonialism. However, universalizing climate adaptation discourses fail to conceptualize these historical processes by framing climate change as external to complex social and human systems. A plural reconceptualization of adaptation instead asks us to question what it means to adapt to environmental changes not just under the guise of global climate change, but as embedded in coloniality and settler colonialism in place.

The rise of new device-based geospatial technologies has created space for a variety of different actors to participate in mapping the world. Participation can take place at many stages, from project design and data collection to map production and distribution. This chapter explores the potentials of these new technologies for different sorts of participation in social change.

The economic implosion in the late 1990s in Argentina created the conditions for the emergence of a series of alternative social organizations that were autogestionados, or created from the ground up by unemployed
workers, social activists, artists, and educators. Here, we describe one of these social organizations, Bachillerato Popular IMPA, which is located within an abandoned factory that was recuperated to form a workers’ cooperative.

In December 2023 a new president took office in Argentina. Since the return of democracy after a cruel and violent dictatorship (1976-1983), Argentina has been experiencing periods of public policies oriented towards securing access to basic rights, and periods of public policies oriented towards engrossing the already big fortunes of people who exploit other beings (humans and earthbeings). However, and even if there might be differences in orientation across these perspectives, one must acknowledge that ever since 1974, Argentina started to become a neoliberal nation-state, meaning that the differences in the distribution of income and surplus became more and more obscene.

Australia has a hidden but growing problem with household food insecurity, revealing the failure of conventional food infrastructures to support human flourishing. Disruptions to employment and livelihoods due to pandemic lockdowns have exacerbated household food insecurity, evincing the uneven geography of food access in countries globally, including Australia. Increasing demand for food relief had been observed prior to the COVID-19 pandemic and has been met by food relief providers, which we consider as infrastructures of care addressing growing levels of hunger. This paper reveals COVID-19’s many impacts on the food relief sector across Metropolitan Sydney, New South Wales.

As the planet moves further into the human-induced Anthropocene there is an urgent need to reconsider the values, practices, and politics leading to widespread ecological degradation. The prioritisation of economic growth by the most dominant political institutions encourages limitless expansion while minimizing awareness of the ecological vulnerability of the planet. Commoning presents an alternative political structure based on transformative practices of collective care or caring with. In this paper, we investigate how communities in Skouries of Halkidiki, Greece, are responding to the imposition of large-scale mining through three different commons initiatives. The women's collective, the chamomile commons, and the ten-day festival.

This chapter explores the possibilities of interweaving drama and storytelling with mātauranga Māori (Māori knowledge) and Western science to foster students’ ecological understanding and citizenship in relation to ngahere ora (forest health).

The differential impacts of climate change have highlighted the need to implement fit-for-purpose interventions that are reflective of the needs of vulnerable communities. However, adaptation projects tend to favour technocratic, market-driven, and Eurocentric approaches that inadvertently disregard the place-based and contextual adaptation strategies of many communities in the Global South. The paper aims to decolonise climate change adaptation guided by the critical tenets of ‘Decolonising Climate Adaptation Scholarship’ (DCAS). It presents empirical case studies from Fiji, Vietnam, and the Philippines and reveals the different ways that Indigenous and local knowledge (ILK) and strategies are devalued and suppressed by modernist and developmentalist approaches to climate adaptation.

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