Publications

Dominated by conflict, Turkey’s Kurdish Question has transformed over time, opening up new areas of inquiry. Under the Democratic Autonomy project ongoing since the mid-2000s, Turkey’s Kurdish Movement has promoted cooperatives and communes—a post-capitalist marketization project—in Northern Kurdistan. Drawing upon economization studies and diverse and community economies studies’ engagement with assemblage thinking, this article scrutinizes the retailers’ cooperative model the Movement experimented with and explains the practices linked to post-capitalist marketization: creating inclusive platforms for debate, incorporating ordinary actors as experts, and upscaling post-capitalist marketization through building relations with other cooperatives.

This article advances a framework for the study of community economies as assemblages constituted and shaped by three primary dynamics: relations, resources and constraints, and processes of stabilization and destabilization. Drawing on diverse and community economies scholarship, assemblage theory and actor-network theory, we develop a framework that will contribute significantly to understandings of the emergence of community economies and the strategies that make them more resilient and sustainable. The conceptual framework is illustrated through a case study from Turkey’s Kurdish region – a women’s cooperative that remained resilient in the face of armed conflict and political violence.

Increasing small-scale vegetable production is a key target for growing a more sustainable food system. At first glance, meeting this target seems straightforward. On closer inspection, particularly in contexts experiencing the on-going effects of climate uncertainty and economic uncertainty, it can be hard to achieve. Community education has a vital role to play.

Invasive Tourism and Mapuche Tourism: indigenous territory and entrepreneurship with identity in Lake Icalma, Higher Biobio - This qualitative research explores the economic agency of Mapuche tourism entrepreneurs at the intersection between Development with Identity discourse and the touristification of Mapuche-Pewenche territory in Southern Chile.

This chapter focuses on alternative economies in a European post-socialist country, the Czech Republic, looking for transitions not towards, but beyond capitalism. After a brief historical excursion, the authors use the concept of eco-social enterprise and a five-dimensional, sliding-scale research framework to expand the EU social enterprise definition imported to post socialist-countries. The criteria include: 1. other-than-profit goals; 2. using profits to replenish nature and community; 3. democratic and localized governance and ownership; 4. rootedness in place and time; 5. non-market production, exchange and provisioning.

The community-economies approach eschews explanatory frameworks premised on structural analysis, arguing that such approaches prematurely foreclose the progressive potential of existing ethically oriented economic practices and enterprises. Several scholars have argued, however, that to activate the political potential and broader significance of noncapitalisms, it is necessary to trace their articulations with far-reaching political assemblages. To explore this point, this essay examines the genealogical orientation of some diverse- and community-economies research in conversation with the Nietzschean tradition of critical, constructive analysis and the notion of power as ontogenetic.

This chapter explores how analysing the formation of economic assemblages from a Nietzschean/Foucauldian genealogical perspective has allowed diverse economies researchers to account for power in its many forms, without falling victim to the melancholic narrative of capitalist domination that a focus on power too often engenders. The goal of genealogy is to cast the taken-for-granted as contingent, contested, and often fraught with instability. This approach enables other ways of being in the world and a methodology for what Foucault called the ‘ethical cultivation of the self’.

In this introduction, we briefly frame the impetus behind this special issue focused on theorizations of power in diverse- and community-economies research. Catalyzed by a panel session at the 2017 Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers, this collection of essays reflects broader, ongoing discussions about how to grapple analytically and practically with power—in all of its forms—as a feature of economic formations. We outline here how each of the contributors to this issue, unsatisfied with a division of labor between theorists concerned with power’s constraining force and those focused on its enabling or generative force, offers new paths for critique that neither reify existing power relations nor turn away from them.

The COVID-19 pandemic and associated response have brought food security into sharp focus for many New Zealanders. The requirement to “shelter in place” for eight weeks nationwide, with only “essential services” operating, affected all parts of the New Zealand food system. The nationwide full lockdown highlighted existing inequities and created new challenges to food access, availability, affordability, distribution, transportation, and waste management. While Aotearoa New Zealand is a food producer, there remains uncertainty surrounding the future of local food systems, particularly as the long-term effects of the pandemic emerge.

The accessibility, availability and consumption of food in food and agriculture systems are key public health and food security concerns. We draw on empirical research from members of the Community Economies Research Network from Australia, New Zealand, India and Finland to reimagine food and agriculture systems as a planetary food commons (PFC). PFCs situate food-futures in relation to a broader post-capitalist commons sociality.

In the early 2000s the minority world turned towards the creative sector to revitalize regional economies. The resulting development policies ultimately led to gentrification and social exclusion based on race, ethnicity, class and gender. These exclusions also apply to artists and artisans, occupational groups whose economic activity and needs have been paradoxically erased from dominant creativity-based development prescriptions. This chapter draws on an action research project that aimed to reframe artists and artisans as active subjects of a regional economy so that they could take a more active role in shaping the nature of redevelopment. The project employed the practice of reframing as used in post-structuralist participatory action research.

Many formulations of economy, even those that substantially challenge the narrow confines of market-centered economism, tend to assume a discrete human subject at the center of the action. Whether maximizing, optimizing, making ethical decisions, or just “getting by,” rational or quasi-rational humans enact the economy through their work of making a living—laboring, producing, transacting, saving, investing, and negotiating various forms of care and access. Recent developments in posthumanist and radical ecological thought, however, challenge this image. This chapter unpacks some key implications of these ideas for diverse economies theory, challenging the conceptual, material, and ethical viability of distinguishing between an “economy” and an “environment.” 

In this paper, I reflect on multiple “failures” I encountered during my fieldwork on agricultural cooperatives in Kyrgyzstan: from my own “failure” to comply with a linear research design to the alleged “failure” of farmers to cooperate within the formal boundaries of cooperatives. I then suggest how a feminist research practices based on a performative ontology enables a reframing of these experiences that opens space for more hopeful affects. 

My doctoral thesis investigates cooperation practices within and beyond agricultural cooperatives. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a village in Kyrgyzstan, it unravels local and international discourses of nostalgia, contempt and pride linked to cooperation practices in socialist and postsocialist times, and reflect on the subjectivities entangled with these discourses. It thereby proposes a postcapitalist reading of postsocialism as a concept and space. 

We comment on Bruno Latour's post-COVID futures essay and his book on terrestrial politics with reference to Aotearoa New Zealand and grounded Indigenous politics of place. We seek postcapitalist possibilities in a number of key events of 2020.

Mushroom-foraging in Finland is often done in forests that live according to a cycle of clearing, planting and thinning. In this article, forest management that prioritizes short-rotation timber production is termed ’plantationocentric’, following critiques of capitalocentrism in feminist economic geography. In plantationocentric discourses and practices, plantations, characterized by simplification, forced multispecies labour and temporal disturbances, are taken as the model for all primary production. This in turn subordinates various actual and potential livelihood practices, including foraging.

Fair trade certified exchanges are often cast as an ethical purchasing choice compared to those conducted as part of free trade. Producers are cast as members of marginalized communities who can ‘lift themselves out of poverty’ by producing for the certified market. Third-party certifiers claim that consumers can empower producers, reduce poverty, and improve communities through their purchases. Here, fair trade exchanges may be read as a site of ethical encounter. In this chapter I argue that despite attempts to cast fair trade as an ethical encounter, these claims are mired in a capitalocentric worldview that puts profit ahead of people.

The neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) is a site of medical treatment for premature and critically ill infants. It is a space populated by medical teams and their patients, as well as parents and family. Each actor in this space negotiates providing and practicing care. In this paper, we step away from thinking about the NICU as only a space of medical care, instead, taking an anti-essentialist view, re-read care as multiple, while also troubling the community of care that undergirds it. Through an examination of the practice of kangaroo care (skin-to-skin holding), human milk production and feeding, as well as, practices related to contact/touch, we offer a portrait of the performance of the community of care in the space of the NICU.

This chapter looks at social enterprise through a lens inspired by community economies and post-development. Without refuting that any trading enterprise must take form in one way or another, the authors look beyond essentialist models towards the embodiment of ‘social enterprising’; a term capturing various processes and intuitions that enact the social through bold economic experiments and that help multispecies communities to live well together. ‘Decolonial love’ and Buddhist teachings of ‘loving kindness’ (Mettā) are mobilized as a way of framing context in Eastern Cambodia and a University Town in Central Canada.

In answering the following research question: What design features allow for both comfort and mobility in the hot city, and what design features detract from this? What climate-resilient social practices are these features enabling and disabling? this report develops a new approach to understanding and designing cool cities: cool commons. The report sets out the new conceptual approach of Cool Commons. It moves beyond current technocentric approaches to cool urban futures, recognising that a combination of material, social and institutional strategies are required to support climate adaptation, including community-led adaptive practices. ‘Cool commons’ view the city not as a collection of private spaces, but as an environment for convivial social life.