Diverse Economies

Precarity Pilot is an online platform and a series of nomadic workshops that aim at addressing in inventive ways issues faced by precarious designers.

Shaken by the concerns that emerged from our earlier investigations, namely Designers’ Inquiry (2012-2013) and Designing Economic Cultures (2011-2013), Precarity Pilot wants to support designers in re-shaping, re-orienting and taking ownership of the course their working lives.

In collaboration with Caterina Giuliani. The website has been funded by Akademie Schlos Solitude.

How can one walk the line between some sort of financial sustainability and the production of design work t hat critically challenges accepted power structures and discourse? How can one organise a design practice t hat creates space for work that is socially- and politically-engaged and aims for social transformation?

In heterodox economic geography, there is an ongoing debate as to how our economic, social, and environmental needs may be better addressed by organizing the economy differently, through more equitable and more sustainable practices. This calls for further studying and discussing alternative economic practices in a diverse economy. In this article, existing alternative economic practices within agrifood systems—specifically alternative forms of connecting producers and consumers—are explored, primarily on a conceptual but also an empirically grounded level. The article makes two conceptual contributions: First, it offers a comprehensive review of the literature and, with an emphasis on contributions by economic geographers, clarifies the meaning of alterity in alternative food systems. It reveals the hitherto limited focus on either alternative products or alternative distribution networks. In light of this limitation and the ongoing incorporation of characteristics of alternative food by conventional food industries for profit purposes, second, it extends those insights by reconceptualizing alterity—namely, by introducing alternative economic practices as an important third pillar of alternative food networks (AFNs). Empirically, by presenting two newly emerging models of AFNs from Berlin and Frankfurt—which go beyond just offering alternative food stuffs or using alternative distribution networks and instead aim at de-commodifying the food system—the article provides a closer view on existing alternative economic practices, highlighting the ways in which they think and perform the economy otherwise.
50 free online copies here: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/YWYSSKGRDQIBHVNUAZMG/full?target=10.1080/00130095.2019.1701430

A resurgence of agrarianism has motivated new farmers to enter farming, not for profit, but for lifestyle and socio-ecological values which are frequently associated with diverse economies. Proponents of diverse economies argue for an ontological reframing that accounts for non-capitalist forms of economic exchange. However, these perspectives have not fully addressed the conditions-often structured by race and class-that facilitate participation in diverse economies. This paper is based on mixed-methods research on the life cycle of new farmers in Hawai'i that include participants of farmer training programs. We investigate what drives new farmers into farming, by what mechanisms they are able (or not) to establish a farm, and what limits the duration of their participation. Our analysis reveals three contradictions of diverse economies in agriculture: (1) the inadvertent undervaluation of farmwork that undermines broader efforts to improve the welfare of farm labor; (2) the tension between the value of scaling up and the vulnerability of cooptation; and (3) the ways in which the duration of new farmers' engagement is structured by their ability to mobilize unpaid labor and external resources. These contradictions challenge long-term and inclusive participation in diverse economies in ways that constrain their emancipatory potential.

En el escenario actual de emergencia de discursos y prácticas de transición civilizatoria en América Latina ante la expansión de la crisis socio-ecológica, el presente artículo analiza los hallazgos de un estudio de caso realizado en el territorio de Norte del Cauca, Colombia, sobre la experiencia del Centro Universitario de Bienestar Rural (CUBR) de FUNDAEC, basada en la combinación entre contenidos espirituales y materiales en una variedad de ámbitos de los procesos de vida rural, entre ellos los económicos. El estudio releva la semántica emergente de esta iniciativa, basada en una noción de transformación centrada en la interacción entre sistemas de conocimiento y la participación de las poblaciones en el aprendizaje sobre senderos de bienestar desde su propia realidad, identificando algunos aprendizajes relevantes a través de un estudio fenomenológico en una comunidad.

This practice-based research sets out to investigate and intervene in the tense relation between the production of socially as well as politically relevant design work and the socio-economic precariousness many designers experience. Starting from an engagement with the precarious working conditions of designers, their genealogy over the last 30+ years and the role precarisation plays in forming docile creative subjects, the research moves on to a wider critique of the political economy and of its precarising value practices. Based on this analysis, it then considers the strategic use that can be made of concepts around the commons in order to undo procedures of precarisation.

The trajectory of this process of exploration is shaped through a series of practical experiments constructed around the inhabitation of support structures that allowed for a collective engagement with the issues and strategies researched. These inhabitations took as their starting point the resources my own design practice Brave New Alps was offered throughout this research. Thus, they took the form of two collectivised residencies, one of three months in Warsaw (My castle is your castle) and a second of two months in Milan (Cantiere per pratiche non-affermative), out of which a design collective emerged that still works together. The experiences from living through these support structures are the decisive elements that direct the engagement with theory in order to find elements helpful in overcoming blockages and loops in practice.

The core elements that emerged as helpful in moving this research forward were characterised by the practical as well as theoretical engagement with how designers are trained to accept and reproduce the conditions that precarise them, with how this training inserts itself in the wider logic of a capitalist economy and, finally, with how noncapitalist values can serve as points of orientation for constructing de-precarising design practices. Moving along these key points, the aim of this research is to provide a series of conceptual as well as practical tools for designers that can be mobilised in the creation of economic cultures that defy precarisation within and beyond the field of the profession. However, the research is not primarily concerned with stabilising precarious design practices as they are, it is rather concerned with creating the conditions in which it is possible for designers to imagine and actuate what they could become if not pressured by precariousness to conform to the needs of the market.

OTHER NOTES

PhD funded through a Design Fellowship at Goldsmiths, University of London, 2011-2013.

First supervisor: Dr. Jennifer Gabrys
Second supervisor: Prof. Bill Gaver

External examiner: Prof. Doina Petrescu (School of Architecture, University of Sheffield)
Internal examiner: Prof. Matthew Fuller (Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths)""

"In recent years there has been increasing academic interest in theorising and exploring the postcapitalist, interstitial economic spaces that exist within or beyond capitalism, typified by the work of J. K. Gibson-Graham. Such spaces, it is argued, represent not only sites of resistance but are spaces from which ‘alternative’ economic development strategies can proliferate. This thesis seeks to explore the conditions under which such ‘grassroots’ postcapitalist institutions might flourish. Some of the existing literature on postcapitalist institutions indicates that places with a reputation for countercultural activity might be productive sites for the emergence of grassroots postcapitalism. However, this thesis argues that such countercultural places are themselves an under-researched and under-theorised phenomenon.

To address these deficits this thesis develops a broader conception of the countercultural and explores the tendencies that have led to the case study area (Totnes, Devon) becoming a ‘New Age’ or ‘Alternative’ centre. It describes the processes that led to the formation of a self-sustaining localised countercultural milieu within the area. In particular, it identifies homophily, the desire to be amongst similar people, to be significant, previously unrecognised factor. It then explores the significance of postcapitalist institutions within the locality. Whilst the density of activity supports the hypothesis that such places are sites of postcapitalist activity, little evidence is found that the locality increases their economic viability. This argument is made through an exploration of the local organic marketscape.

The thesis also explores a paradox that emerged through the research: That those places which are productive for the emergence of new ideas and the shifting of ontological frames might not be the best places in which to also build collective community based entities. Thus it argues that there is a generally unrecognised relationship between some countercultural places and processes of social innovation, and it explores the spaces that support such innovation as well as the factors that undermine collective projects. Ultimately, the research did not find substantive evidence to support interstitial postcapitalist strategies or theories. However, it concludes with some reflections on how approaches to interstitial postcapitalism might be theoretically and practically strengthened.
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Recently parallels have been drawn between Bitcoin and Yapese stone money. The analogy between Bitcoin and Yapese stone money is based on proposed commonalities that are inaccurate, ill-defined, and/or trivial. However, this does not signal a need to refine the comparison, but rather a need to reconsider the rationale for attempting it in the first place. Recent attempts to redescribe Yapese stone money using the vocabulary and concepts from the field of cryptocurrency participate in a longer textual history, whereby Anglophone writers have misrepresented Yap for pedagogic or polemic convenience. This history features frequent colonialist troping of Yap and the erasure of histories of colonial violence and power. This paper uses desk research to provide an overview of this textual history. It celebrates broad scholarly exploration of more-than-capitalist practices, but recommends greater caution in the study and pedagogic representation of Yapese economies.

Anarchism and geography have a long and disjointed history, characterized by towering peaks of intensive intellectual engagement and low troughs of ambivalence and disregard. This paper traces a genealogy of anarchist geographies back to the modern development of anarchism into a distinct political philosophy following the Enlightenment. The initial rise of geographers’ engagement with anarchism occurred at the end of the nineteenth-century, owing to Élisée Reclus and Peter Kropotkin, who developed an emancipatory vision for geography in spite of the discipline’s enchantment with imperialism at that time. The realpolitik of the war years in the first half of the twentieth-century and the subsequent quantitative revolution in geography represent a nadir for anarchist geographies. Yet anarchism was never entirely abandoned by geographical thought and the counterculture movement of the 1970s gave rise to radical geography, which included significant interest in anarchist ideas. Unfortunately another low occurred during the surge of neoliberal politics in the 1980s and early 1990s, but hope springs eternal, and from the late 1990s onward the anti-globalization movement and DIY culture have pushed anarchist geographies into more widespread currency. In reviewing the literature, I hope to alert readers to the ongoing and manifold potential for anarchist geographies to inform both geographical theory and importantly, to give rise to more practice-based imperatives where building solidarities, embracing reciprocity, and engaging in mutual aid with actors and communities beyond the academy speaks to the ‘freedom of geography’ and its latent capacity to shatter its own disciplinary circumscriptions.

This volume shines a light on Sustainable Community Movement Organizations (SCMOs), an emergent wave of non-hierarchical, community-based socio-economic movements, with alternative forms of consumption and production very much at their core.

Extending beyond traditional ideas of cooperatives and mutualities, the essays in this collection explore new geographies of solidarity practices ranging from forms of horizontal democracy to interurban and transnational networks. The authors uniquely frame these movements within the Deleuzian concept of the ‘rhizome’, as a meshwork of alternative spaces, paths and trajectories. This connectivity is illustrated in case studies from around the world, ranging from protest movements in response to austerity measures in Southern Europe, to the Buen Vivir movement in the Andes, and Rotating Savings and Credit Associations (ROSCAs) in the Caribbean and Canada. Positioning these cases in relation to current theoretical debates on Social Solidarity Economy, the authors specifically address the question of the persistence and the durability of the organizing practices in community economies.

This article is a manifesto for anarchist geographies, which are understood as kaleidoscopic spatialities that allow for multiple, non-hierarchical, and protean connections between autonomous entities, wherein solidarities, bonds, and affinities are voluntarily assembled in opposition to and free from the presence of sovereign violence, predetermined norms, and assigned categories of belonging. In its rejection of such multivariate apparatuses of domination, this article is a proverbial call to nonviolent arms for those geographers and non-geographers alike who seek to put an end to the seemingly endless series of tragedies, misfortunes, and catastrophes that characterize the miasma and malevolence of the current neoliberal moment. But this is not simply a demand for the end of neoliberalism and its replacement with a more moderate and humane version of capitalism, nor does it merely insist upon a more egalitarian version of the state. It is instead the resurrection of a prosecution within geography that dates back to the discipline’s earliest days: anarchism!

This article outlines a novel framework for investigating complex intersections among divergent approaches to enacting environmental governance. I term this the study of ‘‘diverse ecologies.’’ The framework builds on J.K. Gibson-Graham’s influential ‘‘diverse economies’’ perspective but seeks to integrate this with research in political ecology that devotes greater attention to issues of structural power. In particular, the article draws on growing analysis of environmental governance
as a form of ‘‘environmentality’’ building on Foucault’s influential governmentality analytic. While early literature in this area overlooked the multiple forms of environmentality that may intersect within a given context, more recent research emphasizes this diversity. Integrating multiple environmentalities and diverse economies perspectives thus provides the grounding for the "diverse ecologies’’ framework outlined herein. The framework’s application is illustrated through analysis of a popular payment for environmental services program in Costa Rica.

As ecologically and socially oriented food initiatives proliferate, the significance of these initiatives with respect to conventional food systems remains unclear. This paper addresses the transformative potential of alternative food networks (AFNs) by drawing on insights from recent research on food and embodiment, diverse food economies, and more-than-human food geographies. I identify several synergies between these literatures, including an emphasis on the pedagogic capacities of AFNs; the role of the researcher; and the analytical and political value of using assemblage and actor-network thinking to understand the far-reaching forces and power disparities confronting proponents of more ethical and sustainable food futures. Drake for their invaluable feedback. All shortcomings of the work however are my responsibility alone.

This is a preview of my 2019/2020 book on Argentina's worker-recovered companies, also known as worker-recuperated/recovered companies/factories/businesses, or worker-recuperated enterprises as I prefer to call them, a more accurate translation of the Spanish term empresas recuperadas por sus trabajadores.

2022 Joyce Rothschild Book Prize - Honourable Mention (adjudication organized by the Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing at Rutgers University)

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In Workers’ Self-Management in Argentina, Marcelo Vieta homes in on the emergence and consolidation of Argentina’s empresas recuperadas por sus trabajadores (worker-recuperated enterprises or ERTs, also known as worker-recovered companies or WRCs in English), a workers’ occupy and recuperation movement that surged at the turn-of-the-millennium in the thick of the country’s neo-liberal crisis. Since then, around 400 companies have been taken over and converted to cooperatives by almost 16,000 workers. Grounded in class-struggle Marxism and a critical sociology of work, the book situates the ERT/WRC movement in Argentina’s long tradition of working-class activism and the broader history of workers’ responses to capitalist crisis. Beginning with the voices of the movement’s protagonists, Vieta ultimately develops a compelling social theory of autogestión – a politically prefigurative and ethically infused notion of workers’ self-management that unleashes radical social change for work organisations, surrounding communities, and beyond.

Leiden and Chicago: Brill Academic Publishers and Haymarket Books
Historical Materialism Book Series, Volume 199. Available October 24, 2019 with a 2020 publication date via, softcover available January 5, 2021 with Haymarket Books.

Brill: ISSN 1570-1522 | ISBN 978-90-04-26896-8 (hardback) | ISBN 978-90-04-26895-1 (e-book)

Haymarket: ISBN 978-1-64259-339-6

Endorsements

David McNally
Cooperative enterprises, workers’ self-management and new forms of industrial democracy— these are the stirring themes animating Marcelo Vieta’s original and exciting book. Using a stunning set of interviews, buttressed by historical investigation and deep theoretical inquiry, Workers’ Self-Management in Argentina illuminates movements of occupation, recuperation and autogestión in Argentina in recent years. There is virtually nothing like this book when it comes to the study of lived practices of workers’ control today. Everyone searching for alternatives to neoliberalism and the domination of labor will relish this powerful and important work.
~ David McNally is Cullen Distinguished Professor of History and Business, University of Houston. He is the author of Against the Market: Political Economy, Market Socialism, and the Marxist Critique (Verso, 1992) and Global Slump: The Economics and Politics of Crisis and Resistance (PM Press, 2010).

George Cheney
Marcelo Vieta’s Workers' Self-Management in Argentina is one of the most important books on contemporary labour and democracy. The volume masterfully revisits and extends theory on autogestión (loosely translated as self-management in English) and places it in richly detailed historical, economic, and social contexts. The book employs three in-depth case studies of “worker recuperated” firms in today's Argentina and at the same time beautifully integrates those with an analysis of work and economy in Argentina especially over the past two decades. The comparisons of lessons from the experiences of workers in those firms for other national contexts gives the analysis an expansiveness seldom found in case-based studies of worklife and labour arrangements. Vieta’s longitudinal study and insightful commentary provide must reading for anyone interested in the intricacies of and possibilities for democratic revival from the shop floor and board rooms to communities and the global economy.
~ George Cheney is Professor of Communication, University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. He is the author of Values at Work:Employee Participation Meets Market Pressure at Mondragon (Cornell University Press, 2002) and co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Alternative Organization (Routledge, 2014).
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Peter Ranis
Marcelo Vieta’s book ranges far beyond the bounds of its Argentine analysis.  It is thoroughly researched and grounded in “class-struggle Marxist” theory and reflects a prolonged and deep understanding of and commitment to global working-class enterprise autonomy struggles.  In this Vieta provides a powerful and meaningful critique and alternative to neo-liberal capitalism.
~ Peter Ranis is Professor Emeritus in Political Science, Graduate Center, City University of New York. He is the author of Cooperatives Confronting Capitalism: Challenging the Neo-liberal Economy (Zed Books, 2016) and Argentine Workers: Peronism and Contemporary Class Consciousness (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992).

Nick Dyer-Witheford
I was consistently impressed by Vieta’s impeccable scholarship and deeply-thought argumentation. Theoretically, it this work is oriented around the perspective of class-struggle Marxism, but is also informed by a deep knowledge of the history and practices of trades unionism, cooperativism, and social and solidarity economics in Argentina, Latin America and internationally. The work situates empresas recuperadas (ERTs) within the history of the Argentine class-composition and workers movements. It shows how the ERT practice of “occupy, resist, produce” generated a series of “radical social innovations” affecting economic activities, political formations and trans-individual subject formation. From this study Vieta draws important conclusions about the circumstances in which the potential for self-directed worker activities is actualized in ways that point beyond the existing system of production relations. I want to reiterate how impressed I am by this work. It is a major contribution to scholarship on the global worker of the twenty first century.
~ Nick Dyer-Witheford is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at University of Western Ontario. He is the author of Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High Technology Capitalism (University of Illinois, 1999) and Cyber-Proletariat: Global Labour in the Digital Vortex (Pluto Press, 2015).

Marina Sitrin
This book is a tremendous gift. A must read for scholars, activists and all who want to learn how to retake our lives and create something new. Within these pages Vieta has detailed the history of class struggle in Argentina, bringing us to this historical moment, grounded in a new conceptualization of autogestión. Workers taking back – recuperating – their sense of worth and dignity though directly democratic workplace recuperations. Distinct from occupations, making demands on bosses and states, in recuperations workers re-claim what is theirs/ours. Vieta’s lens offers a unique insider/outsider perspective, as an Argentine scholar based in Canada. His methodological approach, also innovative, combines global ethnography, history, political science, economics and sociology. Most of all, in Workers’ Self-Management in Argentina, Vieta shows, by way of extended examples, that people can self-organize their work and life, in ways that are horizontal, effective and affective.
~ Marina Sitrin is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the State University of New York at Binghamton. She is the author of Everyday Revolutions: Horizontalism and Autonomy in Argentina (Zed Books, 2012) and They Can’t Represent Us! Reinventing Democracy from Greece to Occupy, co-authored with Dario Azzellini (Verso Press, 2014).

This thesis explores the engagement of a group of Mapuche-Pewenche communities with tourism in southern Chile. I argue that Trekaleyin, their tourism initiative, is part of a broader and long history of resistance and struggles for autonomy, territory and decolonisation, in which identity, development, agency and relations with other beings are negotiated, revitalised and re-produced.
From my experience working as a development practitioner with these communities in the beginnings of Trekaleyin, I became interested in understanding the ways in which, as a collective experience, it is embedded in and articulated with political concerns and contestation with regards to neoliberalism and multiculturalism. I also became interested in how the communities are incorporating and reactivating diverse and solidarity economies in their work on tourism, while at the same time reworking their relations with and the market economy itself. I suggest that through Trekaleyin, the communities are also re-producing a relational and open sense of place and connectivity, mobilising particular ways of knowing, being and relating to territory and more-than- human beings in a context of global neoliberalism, reshaping scales and their possibilities.
With this thesis I aim to explore how, through their engagement in tourism, community members are disrupting, expanding and hybridising discourses and practices around development, the economy, nature and cross-cultural relations, reworking them so as to craft a better position from where they can participate in them, but the consequences of which extend beyond the ―local‖, affecting us all, both indigenous and non-indigenous. Therefore, from an ethnographic site and poststructural, post-human and decolonising geographic approaches, this thesis brings new perspectives to the study of development, tourism and the environment, particularly among indigenous peoples, in which autonomy, hybridity, diversity and relational ontologies are articulated.

This article homes in on the recuperative and learning dimensions of Argentina’s empresas recuperadas por sus trabajadores worker cooperatives (ERTs, worker-recuperated enterprises). Drawing on the author’s sociological, ethnographic, and political economic work with Argentina’s ERTs since 2005, the article theorizes autogestión – the collective self-management of associated labour – from its take up by ERT movement protagonists. The article explores and theorizes how ERT workers come to practice autogestión, what they actually take back in the process of occupying and controlling the formerly capitalist workplaces that had employed them, and how their projects of cooperative production are ensconced in a ‘language of autogestión’ – recuperating and (re)learning other economic notions and practices against and beyond capitalocentric discourses. Grounded in a class-struggle Marxist perspective, the paper ultimately proposes that ERT workers collectively recuperate three overarching dimensions of productive life from capital: (1) the self-valorization of living labour, (2) cooperation in the labour process, and (3) the socialization of surpluses and wealth. These recuperations of autogestión, the article concludes, (their ‘language of autogestión’) offer evocative suggestions for envisioning less-exploitative forms of work, more socially just and democratic workplaces, and for challenging and beginning to move beyond neoliberal logics.

This paper performatively decentres the role of mainstream gay consumption in contemporary thought about the economic and social lives of lesbians and gay men in the Global North. It is simultaneously critical and reparative in outlook. This paper critically engages with recent writing on homonormativity, suggesting that this work presents `homonormativity' as an all-encompassing structure that becomes politically unassailable. In parallel with an analysis of contemporary lesbian and gay life as being complicit in the reproduction of various normativities, this paper takes the innovative and reparative stance of considering how such spaces and practices also produce inter-dependent relationships across social difference. Drawing on the recent work of Gibson-Graham (2006, A Postcapitalist Politics University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN) this paper considers the prospects for outlining the diversity of lesbian and gay economic practices, with the performative ambition of making existing noncapitalist practices more visible and viable. To this end, the paper examines a number of gay spaces and practices to consider the different forms of enterprise, transactions, and labour that take place within them. On the basis of its preliminary inventory of diverse gay economic practices and spaces, this paper proposes that there are many aspects of contemporary urban gay life that already offer alternatives to the homonormative practices of neoliberalism.

Increasing economic globalization in recent times has lead to unrestricted and unparalleled movement of people and products from one corner of the globe to another, giving rise to metropolitan culture and troubled identities. However, this phenomenon is ages old. Man has been changing cities, countries and citizenships since ancient times either to satisfy his basic needs of food, clothing and shelter or to satisfy higher order needs of discovery, fame and riches. This commingling of people of varied cultures not only enhanced interaction and mutual cooperation between nations, it also lead to people harmonizing between their native culture and that of the new setup. The people thus caught between push and pull of contrasting cultures, suffering with feelings of alienation, despair and nostalgia in foreign lands came to be known as 'Diaspora'. Bharati Mukherjee is one such well known novelist belonging to Indian diaspora who made her contemporaries envious in a comparatively short creative span. Her literary opus is manifested with her personal experiences and first hand knowledge of continents of birth and stay. This paper scrutinizes one of Mukherjee's protagonists Hannah's endeavors for genesis of identity in a cross-cultural scenario in The Holder of the World. The process of immigrants trying to imbibe foreign culture, in contrast to their native culture, in an alien land is turbulent and it has, more often than not, resulted in some psychological idiosyncrasies alien to both the cultures. The individuals do not feel fully accepted in any culture and are depicted as " on the border ". Bharati Mukherjee, an Indian diaspora writer, is the loud and very distinct voice in Indian and American literary canon. Since the publication of her first novel, The Tiger's Daughter (1972), she has been keenly engrossed in churning out fiction, analyzing the complexities of her choicest theme of migration experience. Mukherjee has changed citizenships and lived in distinct cultural milieus with disorienting rapidity due to her higher education and marriage with another academician and renowned author of Canadian origin, Clark Blaise. She has most vividly depicted in her novels, the cultural turmoil of South Asian, particularly Indian women upon their arrival in America and their genesis of identity. However, in The Holder of the World, the journey of the narrator protagonist of the main plot, Hannah Easton and the journey of the narrator protagonist of sub plot, Beigh Masters, a distant blood relative of Hannah, born centuries later, has been reversed. The novel illustrates the perturbed psyche of a young woman Hannah, who is a victim of alienation and male dominance. Hannah is able to evolve as a champion in the face of all odds due to sheer strength of her firm will power. The physical, mental and emotional hardships that Hannah undergoes transform her completely into a new and different personality. The plots set in distant time and spaces establish that cross-cultural consciousness has always had a universal relevance. Mukherjee delves deep into the history of the three continents and her protagonists travel from West to East in search of identity which they want to forge, enduring all the cultural shocks in the way. Here we witness a rare and interesting meeting of worlds, the England, America and Mughal India. In a shocking blend of history and imagination, Mukherjee illuminates the making and very nature of the American sensibility in this novel. Beigh, a 32-year-old very modern and sophisticated woman, born in New England in the mid-twentieth century, an " asset hunter " by profession who thinks of her job as a means of "uniting people and possessions " (5) gets set

The Vietnamese saying, tấc đất tấc vàng, ‘a piece of land is a piece of gold’, used to mean that if you have a piece of land, it would always provide you with enough food to eat. Today, it means that if you own land in the city, you will be rich. These two meanings—land as fertile and abundant, land as a source of profit—point to the contradiction of value in an age of hyper-accelerated real estate speculation. Communities that fight for green parks or community gardens, making their neighbourhood greener and safer, may get displaced as their neighbourhood increases in value—value that they helped to create. What drives this paradox, where people’s everyday activities may lead to real estate profits, which in turn erodes the community of long-term residents? To answer this question, this study explores how people respond to gentrification in the day-to-day—what is here called ‘material life.’ Drawing on research in the cities of Hanoi and Montreal, narrated through people’s foodways—the material and social use of food—I show how poor people facing gentrification turn to material life to survive and resist the process. Gentrification, even if it does not lead to direct displacement, may lead to ‘life displacement’—which cuts across social-ecological relations. I trace how urban elites take advantage of this material life, drawing from community wealth to brand the neighbourhood. I find that the two-faced nature of material life under gentrification—its fecundity and its potential for return on investment—is both a site of extraction and new forms of struggle. Drawing on subaltern urbanism, political ecology, urban geography, and value theory, I argue that gentrification can be understood as a value conflict, where different forms of wealth are struggled over and ultimately sequestered into capitalist value.

During the last five years, Facebook-based ridesharing has gained popularity as a way of coordinating shared car trips from one city to another. Amid the widespread hype and political
expectations around ‘the sharing economy’ (e.g. Sundararajan 2016; John 2017) and ‘the platform economy’ (e.g. Parker et al. 2016), this model of shared mobility stands out as strikingly homespun. While commercial services such as Uber are slowly gaining ground as an alternative for short-distance trips, there are few commercial services to date in Finland for individuals wishing to share a car for a longer journey. Thus, the self-made alternative that utilises Facebook as a noticeboard poses an attractive alternative for passengers seeking the cheapest way of getting around within the country, or for drivers seeking persons to split their fuel costs. On top of the economic benefits, ridesharing offers the possibility to meet interesting people, have someone to chat with, and to promote ecological values.

This chapter argues that we need to rethink ‘work’ from the perspective of the global majority for whom wage employment has never been the norm. It outlines three dominant ways of conceptualising work – as commodified, informal and precarious – and demonstrates the ways in which all three are constructed against a particular idea of wage employment. An alternative framework of ‘ordinary work’ is presented which de-centres the wage through a focus on everyday values and practices in diverse economies. This framework proposes to broaden the socioeconomic imaginary of work, opening up new possibilities for how work, identity and security might be woven together differently. The chapter ends by outlining the structure of the book, organised around three key themes: ruptures, struggles and possibilities.

This chapter is presented as an edited dialogue between the architect and theorist Doina Petrescu and the feminist economic geographer Katherine Gibson, whose long time collaboration with Julie Graham is known under the joint authorial persona of J.K. Gibson Graham. The dialogic form is of particular importance for these scholars and activists, Petrescu and Gibson, especially in relation to their participatory, community based project work, and their aspiration to imagine a post-capitalist world. The dialogue offers a means of listening to stakeholders within live project settings in order to acknowledge different points of view on an identified matter of concern, and subsequently to coordinate diverse expressions of expertise.
J.K. Gibson Graham’s deployment of asset mapping has proved specifically beneficial in enabling a community to recognise their shared capacities and share and coordinate their resources by means of ‘commoning’, likewise Doina Petrescu’s approach to mapping.
The dialogue form is also fitting here in that Petrescu and Gibson have previously collaborated together on atelier d’architecture autogérée’s (aaa) R-URBAN project in Colombes, France. R-URBAN is a project designed as a “bottom-up framework for urban regeneration” and will be the focus of the dialogue below.

In this chapter I discuss the possibilities of using decolonial thought to create diverse economic praxis through action research. Possibilities for social change arise when a small but growing moneyless economy of 1,200 people strives to be a daily manifestation of decolonial spaces and relationships. These praxes are realized in a multi-ethnic, women’s moneyless economy called El Cambalache (The Swap in English) that began in March, 2015 in San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico.  The project is situated within the multiple Indigenous economies that exist parallel to the capitalist economy in Chiapas. The participants in El Cambalache are not only Indigenous peoples, rather, the project self-consciously draws on anti-essentialist understandings of identity that brings people together across class, gender and ethnic positions as they are performed in practice. El Cambalache explores the kinds of communities, interdependencies and mutual aid arises when money is removed from economic exchanges.

La montée en puissance des problématiques liées à la durabilité a fait apparaître des nouvelles demandes sociétales. Désormais il ne suffit plus de produire, mais il faut le faire en prenant en compte le fonctionnement des écosystèmes. A l’île de La Réunion l’agroécologie est ainsi promue par une multitude d’acteurs, militants, scientifiques, institutionnels, comme une solution pour diminuer l’impact de la production agricole sur l’environnement et mobiliser les services écosystémiques rendus par les milieux naturels au bénéfice de pratiques plus respectueuses du vivant. Cette thèse s’intéresse au marché des fruits et légumes à l’île de La Réunion, en accordant une attention particulière à la spatialité des dynamiques des échanges. Dans un paysage agricole encore dominé par la canne à sucre, les fruits et légumes restent des productions marginales. Les espaces de circulation de ces produits s’insèrent dans l’histoire plus vaste de l’approvisionnement alimentaire. Les fruits et légumes sont étudiés comme objets de pratiques qui agencent des individus, des compétences et des dispositifs matériels. Ces agencements sont sans cesse reconfigurés au cours de l’histoire, si bien que les circuits peuvent entrer en confrontation, évoluer séparément ou s’hybrider. En suivant les acteurs qui font circuler les fruits et légumes, des producteurs jusqu’aux consommateurs, la thèse retrace de manière détaillée l’émergence des pratiques marchandes dans la période coloniale et leurs recompositions jusqu’à la période actuelle. Elle met en évidence le coexistence d’un régime de l’innovation fondé sur les promesses technoscientifiques et d’un régime d’innovation basé sur l’expérimentation collective. La thèse souligne la grande diversité et le foisonnement des activités déployées, et les investissements mobilisés pour organiser des échanges capables de satisfaire les attentes des parties prenantes. Au cours de cet itinéraire, des concepts et des modalités d’analyse originales offrent des moyens de compréhension et d’action pour déverrouiller les trajectoires existantes et ouvrir le champ des possibles, pour tous les acteurs qui ont à cœur de concrétiser les promesses de l’agroécologie.

In response to the limited success of command-and-control interventions to ensure environmental stewardship, policy makers and practitioners have turned to financial payments to incentivize conservation. Many scholars and practitioners, including ecological economists, have cautioned that market-based approaches might modify human ways of relating to nature that are counterproductive to long-term conservation goals. Moving beyond critique, this article invites attention to the reconceptualization of environmental care labor and human–environment relations using the ideas of gift, reciprocity, and affect. Using the case of forest conservation by rural communities in Odisha, India, I discuss how the paradigm of the gift helps us to rethink transactions in ecosystem services, which might lead to more equitable and empowering ways of sharing of the burden and joy of environmental care. I argue that instead of framing conservation as a burdensome activity that entails sacrifice and costs alone, we need to pay attention to the joyful and life-affirming aspects of conservation care labor and its transformative potential.

This dissertation explores the contours of artistic economic activity through participatory action research conducted with artists and artisans in the Greater Franklin County, Massachusetts. The creative economy has drawn significant attention over the past ten years as a principle economic sector that can stimulate the redevelopment of post-industrial cities. However, dominant creativity–based development strategies tend to cater to the tastes of an economically privileged, and implicitly white, “creative class,’ leading 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 data were collected as part of a collaborative research project in which twenty-two artists and artisans were hired from the region to conduct interviews to explore the economic lives of their peers. These peer-interviews were embedded in a collaborative research process, which generated two data streams: one hundred and thirty-two peer-interviews conducted by the research team and the ethnographic data
from the collaborative research process itself.

Through analyzing the peer-interview data, I find that regional artistic economic activity spans both the formal and informal economy and derives from a wide range of non-market logics. I argue that the multiple values of artists and artisans give rise to heterogeneous economic practices and logics, which fall outside the formal economy and
are thus largely ignored in existing entrepreneurial initiatives to support the arts. Within the already precarious situations of professional artists, I also find that these conventional initiatives intensify vulnerability for artists from marginalized groups.

Through analyzing the ethnographic data from the research process, this
dissertation also deepens understandings of community-based research methods. In particular, I extend the discussion of peer interviewing beyond how interviews are conducted to developing new ways to analyze the data produced by this method. I also illustrate the micro-political effects of conducting participatory action research on its subjects, arguing that this method offers an innovative model for transformative social change.

Agrifood scholars commonly adopt ‘a matter of fact way of speaking’ to talk about the extent of neoliberal rollout in the food sector and the viability of ‘alternatives’ to capitalist food initiatives. Over the past few decades this matter of fact stance has resulted in heated debate in agrifood scholarship on two distinct battlegrounds namely, the corporate food regime and the alternative food regime. In this paper I identify some of the limitations of speaking in a matter of fact way and of focusing on capitalist and neoliberal economies as the yardstick by which to assess all food economy initiatives. Using stories of bananas in Australia and the Philippines I advocate for a new mode of critical inquiry in food scholarship that focuses on matters of concern. Following Bruno Latour I use the term critical inquiry to refer to research methods and thinking practices that multiply possible ways of being and acting in the world. The new mode of critical inquiry I propose centres on enacting three broad research matters of concern. These are (1) gathering and assembling economic diversity (2) human actancy and (3) nonhuman actancy. I argue that through becoming critical minds in the Latourian sense researchers can play a key role in enacting economic food futures in the Anthropocene.

This article connects the recent flourishing of economic science fiction with the increasing technicity of contemporary financial markets, to pose questions about computational economies, both historical and fictional, and their ambiguous utopian currents. It explores examples of computational economies and societies in which economic resources are largely defined and allocated by computational systems to challenge—if not entirely dispel—assumptions about the inextricability of computation and the dystopian specters of capitalism, authoritarianism, and totalitarianism. The article puts insights from the histories of cybernetics, computer science, and economics into dialogue with sf novels that experiment with different sociopolitical configurations of computational economies. The novels that are the primary focus of the discussion are The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974) by Ursula K. Le Guin and If Then (2015) by Matthew De Abaitua. The article concludes with some thoughts about the use of history and fiction for expanding the imaginative horizons of the computable in economics.

What people usually see as ‘art’ is only the peak of an iceberg. The international circuit of fairs, biennales and large museums, splashy displays, covers of lifestyle magazines – that is, the glittering mainstream art world, populated by celebrities, and dominated by seven figures transactions – is only the most visible one of many actually existing art worlds. In this chapter we discuss other ways of doing art, where business becomes a means to set up and culture up different economic relationships and economic underpinnings. We base our argument on the ongoing work by the Centre for Plausible Economies, a practice-led research cluster hosted by Company Drinks

The goal of this article is to inform practitioners and researchers alike about the emerging practice of collaboratively mapping alternative economies. The paper draws from an inventory of over 200 maps, action research, and semi-structured interviews to explore how collaborative mapping – a practice that is largely citizen-driven – may be leveraged for the co-production of (scientific) knowledge about alternative economies. An array of real and ideal types is proposed in order to help navigate the various dimensions of collaborative mapping. Four lines of discussion are proposed: (1) what can we learn from maps when reframed as mappings – as processes? (2) How performativity may bring light to evaluating the transformational nature of knowledge derived from collaborative? (3) How does collaborative mapping offer avenues for rethinking empowerment of citizens in producing knowledge about alternative economies? And, (4) what new challenges are emerging from acknowledging digital knowledge as a commons?

This article brings to light one aspect of alternative agri-food practices by exploring the values and meanings domestic food producers associate with their actions, thereby making a small contribution to increasing understanding of the act of urban backyard food production. While Australian backyards have long been productive spaces, there has been little examination of this phenomenon in the Australian context. Limited quantitative data give some insight into the extent of domestic production, and while there is an increasing interest in certain aspects of the local food system, including community gardens and farmers markets, there is a dearth of literature that explores the contemporary act of domestic production. This work seeks to situate the act of domestic production within the broader movement calling for change within the global food system, particularly that being articulated by the food sovereignty movement. Drawing on Gibson–Graham's diverse economies framework, and through interviews with eight domestic food producers in one Australian city, this work finds that the act of growing food at home offers space for hope – where small acts can be seen as part of the broader food sovereignty movement seeking to remake our food system.

This paper draws from research on small-scale maize production in Mexico’s Central Highland region to discuss the geopolitical implications of everyday agricultural practices. An overwhelming majority of maize farmers in this region, as well as in the country more broadly, continue to cultivate locally-adapted maize varieties they have bred themselves – criollo maize is the vernacular term – despite decades of concerted government attempts to effect the widespread adoption of commercially-bred and licensed hybrid varieties. This state effort to restructure agricultural systems and food security according to nationalist and capitalist priorities is one tactic in a long and violent struggle for control over peasant land and labor in Mexico. By integrating feminist scholarship in geopolitics and in political ecology, I am following the lead of geographers who regard the materialities of everyday life as a foundation for political tensions and conflicts that are constantly unfolding along intersecting lines of difference. Though geopolitics has rarely turned its attention directly to theories of intimate socio-ecological relations, I argue that the field has much analytical and political leverage to gain by engaging with political ecology, and that feminist geographic imaginaries provide a crucial space in which to do so.  This approach allows for an analysis of how a dominant geopolitics of land and agriculture is being undermined through the routine production of criollo maize, revealing new potential for creating broad political alliances with social movements that are currently working toward alternative visions of agriculture and food security.

Recently parallels have been drawn between Bitcoin and Yapese stone money. This article focuses on Fitzpatrick and McKeon's (2019) exploration of similarities and differences. The analogy between Bitcoin and Yapese stone money is based on proposed commonalities that are inaccurate, ill-defined, and/or trivial. However, this does not signal a need to refine the comparison, but rather a need to reconsider the rationale for attempting it in the first place. Recent attempts to redefine Yapese stone money using terminology from the field of cryptocurrency reproduces a longer textual history in which writers from the Global North have misrepresented Yap for pedagogic or polemic convenience. Examples include works by William Furness III, John Maynard Keynes, Milton Friedman, and influential macroeconomics textbooks, such as N. Gregory Mankiw's Macroeconomics. This history features frequent colonialist tropes of Yap as well as the erasure of histories of colonial violence and power. More caution should be exercised in the study and pedagogic use of Yapese economic cultures, and greater effort should be made to center Yapese voices, acknowledge colonial contexts, and reflect positionality and uncertainty.

The article outlines two modes of left intellectual and activist engagement with the concept of political economy and the economic realities of today. One common approach, so-called “politics of empire,” thinks the world as structured by capitalism and subjectivities crafted by its political and social processes, while an alternative one, that is, “the politics of place,” or diverse economies approach, constructs the world in the post-Marxist vein as the battleground of discourses competing to define the political and socio-economic fields. Critiquing the neorationalist approach, which, as Resnick and Wolff- or Gibson-Graham-inspired theorists argue, underestimates social experience and community economies, the author points to the hopeful openings for activist and intellectual praxis in what he calls postpostcapitalism, that is, a diverse economies-inspired approach using feminist and queer studies methodologies to deconstruct the contemporary political economy.

The alternative ‘diverse economies’ vision of J. K. Gibson-Graham and supporters regarding how people make a living outside the capitalist framework, lists street vendors and informal economies of the global South as potential components. This article critiques the relevance of this vision for street vendor livelihoods in a politically socialist locale, albeit one embracing neo-liberal modernity. In their drive to create a modern, ‘civilised’ capital, Vietnam’s central government and Hanoi’s municipal authorities have a particular image of security, orderliness and development. Street vendors disrupt this picture and since 2008 have been negotiating a ban in many preferred locales. Building upon urban livelihoods, everyday politics and resistance concepts, an analysis is made of in-depth interviews with itinerant and fixed-stall vendors to unravel their heterogeneous responses to such revanchist policies. Despite subtle covert and overt resistance tactics, the study reveals that celebrated ‘community economies’ and alternative economic visions remain rare in this
context.