Negotiating interdependence and anxiety in community economies

Abstract

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'. Within this literature until recently, less attention has been given to how community economy collectives negotiate the everyday ethical dilemmas to enact interdependence. In this article, I draw on Jean Luc Nancy's understandings of subjectivity and what he terms an 'inoperative community' to explore the everyday anxieties and relational tensions in the Wellington Timebank, a community economy in Aotearoa, New Zealand. I use Nancy's framing of the inoperative community and Gibson-Graham's engagement with his ideas as a lens to explore the ethical tensions involved in enacting community economies. I show how Nancy's ideas help us to better understand the apparent contradictions experienced in communities, by exploring the tensions between community myths of diversity and labour equality, which are unworked and interrupted by everyday anxieties and fears. This is not to suggest that community economies like the Wellington Timebank are a failure, but rather that openly discussing such examples help us as researchers to better understand the everyday tensions collectives necessarily negotiate in enacting interdependence.

Historical commons as sites of transformation. A critical research agenda to study human and more-than-human communities

“…The CEC's research goal is not to explain but to identify, propose and strengthen commoning processes through proposing new and wider relations via action research projects (Table 1) (e.g. Cameron et al, 2014;Diprose, 2016;Safri, 2015). Through this, the CEC opens a new research agenda beyond ecosystem management directed to tackling the underlying reasons of the unsustainability of the Anthropocene (Gibson-Graham, 1996;Gibson-Graham and Roelvink, 2010).…”

“…Yet, while CI looks at how (community) relations drive individuals' actions, the CEC focuses on individuals' processes of becoming via their relationality to others, humans or non-humans. That is, following philosophers such as Bruno Latour, Nancy Jean-Luc, Val Plumwood or Gilbert Simondon, the CEC looks at processes of co-constitution and cobecoming arising with the sole experience of being in relation to others (Diprose, 2016;Gibson-Graham, 2006;Gibson-Graham and Roelvink, 2010;Roelvink and Gibson-Graham, 2009;Singh, 2018). The self is not seen as an autonomous subject acting in the world, but as a relational emergence responding to the world (Singh, 2018), questioning the Table 1 Research within the three schools on commons.…”

“…However, while other types of commons such as social, business or digital commons (see Bollier, 2014: 133) have transcended Ostrom's views of what commons mean and serve for,e.g. Time Banks (Diprose, 2016), Ecovillages (Esteves, 2016), Community Supported Agriculture (Vivero Pol, 2015), or open source software projects (Barron, 2013;Bradley, 2015) historical commons research seems to remain anchored to a scope of ecosystem management which defines commons as a collective property system or even as common-pool resource systems (Alló and Loureiro, 2016;Caballero, 2015;Domínguez García et al, 2014;Gómez-Vázquez et al, 2009;Grupo dos Comúns, 2006;Lopes, 2008;Marey-Pérez et al, 2010). A transformative research agenda requires that historical commons' research go beyond ecosystem management and be studied under the lens of larger sustainability transformations (Blythe et al, 2018;Göpel, 2016;O'Brien and Sygna, 2013;Popa et al, 2015).…”

Fair trade coffee exchanges and community economies

“…3. See: Buttle ( 2008), Cameron et al (2014), Diprose (2016), Dixon (2011), Dombroski et al (2016, Roelvink (2011), Healy (2014), Hill (2011), Krueger et al (2017), Miller (2014, North (2015), Roelvink et al (2015), Shear (2010), St. Martin (2007).…”

Everyday experiences of post-politicising processes in rural freshwater management

“…However, diagnoses of a 'post-political condition' have been critiqued for being totalising, top-down and overly state-centric (Chatterton et al, 2012;McCarthy, 2013;Raco and Lin, 2012). This article will build on these critiques by exploring post-politicising processes and resistance at a local scale through a Nancian approach to the construction of community; community meaning is formed and performed between people and requires constant work to try to fix a collective identity (Bond, 2011;Diprose, 2016;Mouffe, 2005). This work of fixing identity may also work to disavow dissent and difference.…”