subjectivity

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

Solidarity economy is at once an economic framework, a social movement, and an intervention into and away from the ontological foundations of colonial capitalism. This short essay briefly outlines and traces the history and development of solidarity economy as a formal, named project. Drawing from fifteen years of engaged activist ethnography in Massachusetts, the essay then explores the expansion of solidarity economy discourse in the United States and beyond, concomitant with the violence of neoliberalism and the increasing incoherence and unraveling of the dominant order.

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.

The paper reflects on the pedagogical practices of the Community Economies Institute Summer/Winter School on the theme of Researching Postcapitalist Possibilities. It is based on three years (2022, 2023, 2024) of having run the ten-day program with 120 participants.

If communities are constituted by commoning, what are some of the tensions in this idea for thinking about communities of care, where care labour is gendered, classed and colonised? This article reflects on these tensions through the idea of the 'nitty-gritty' of care in communities, using two examples from Aotearoa New Zealand: Te Hiko Centre for Community Innovation in Porirua, and Life in Vacant Spaces in Ōtautahi Christchurch. 

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. 

In this essay, I envision the university, not simply as a discreet institution with formal boundaries to attend to and defend from neoliberal and conservative assaults, but as a location of possibility from which to locate and advance projects that connect students and others to the possibility of other economic worlds.

The burgeoning literature on diverse and community economies has been relatively hopeful, exploring how people learn, enact new and reclaim other ways of meeting their needs outside of capitalist practices. For good reasons, much of this work has sought to avoid a conventional critical-leftist orientation, instead adopting what Gibson-Graham call a ‘weak theory’ approach ‘that welcomes surprise, entertains hope, makes connection, tolerates coexistence and offers care for the new’.

In this paper, I consider the role of public engagement in the management of urban environments and its ability to undermine post-political discourses. In particular, I explore the ways in which the ethical propositions of an apoliticized environment are variously taken up uncritically, challenged, and sometimes modified through the public’s engagement with de-politicized discourses of environment management.