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Building Dignified Worlds examines how contemporary collectives are designing alternative economies. Contemporary collectives differ markedly from previous groups associated with revolutionary politics. Instead of assembling large groups of workers around labor issues, these new collectives creatively arrange diverse peoples, animals, natural environments, and technologies around economic concerns. Like older forms of leftist organizing, these collectives seek to bring about change. However, rather than working to overthrow and replace an underlying capitalist system with an equally totalizing alternative like socialism, they experiment with new forms of economic life. This book explores how socially and politically concerned groups actually establish alternative economies. Building Dignified Worlds investigates social movements that do not simply protest but actively forge functional alternatives. The market model described by many scholars and activists as the enemy of these recent social movements rarely exists in today’s world. As Gerda Roelvink notes, current markets are better conceptualized as dynamic social networks open to intervention by innovative social movements. Radical scholars have theorized social transformation as a performative act. They have provided extensive analysis of how discourse shapes the world through language and is materialized in bodies and practices. Until now, though, little has been written about the geographical nature of collective associations “performing” new worlds. Roelvink takes actor network and performativity theories of action as starting points for thinking about how contemporary collectives bring the new into being. This approach enables an understanding of how collectives initiate change and begins to map the forces through which they operate. Roelvink’s work reveals, in particular, how the relational and geographical nature of performative action is central to the ways in which hybrid collectives strive to create alternative economies.
The twenty-first century has witnessed a resurgence of economic inequality, racial exclusion, and political hatred, causing questions of collective identity and belonging to assume new urgency. In Making Worlds, Claudia Breger argues that contemporary European cinema provides ways of thinking about and feeling collectivity that can challenge these political trends. Breger offers nuanced readings of major contemporary films such as Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Biutiful, Fatih Akın’s The Edge of Heaven, Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation, and Aki Kaurismäki’s refugee trilogy, as well as works by Jean-Luc Godard and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Through a new model of cinematic worldmaking, Breger examines the ways in which these works produce unexpected and destabilizing affects that invite viewers to imagine new connections among individuals or groups. These films and their depictions of refugees, immigrants, and communities do not simply counter dominant political imaginaries of hate and fear with calls for empathy or solidarity. Instead, they produce layered sensibilities that offer the potential for greater openness to others’ present, past, and future claims. Drawing on the work of Latour, Deleuze, and Rancière, Breger engages questions of genre and realism along with the legacies of cinematic modernism. Offering a rich account of contemporary film, Making Worlds theorizes the cinematic creation of imaginative spaces in order to find new ways of responding to political hatred.
The transformational possibilities of everyday hygiene and care practices In order to mitigate the worst forecasts of climate change, many of us need to make drastic adjustments to how we live and what we consume. For Kelly Dombroski, these changes must also happen in the home: in rethinking routines of care and hygiene that still rely on disposable and plastic products. Caring for Life examines the remarkable evolution in Asia-Pacific hygiene practices and amplifies the creative work of ordinary people guarding human and more-than-human life in their everyday practices of care. Dombroski develops the concept of “guarding life,” a viewpoint that counters homogenous cultural practices and imposed sanitation standards and instead embraces diverse hygiene practices that are networked across varying wisdoms and bodies. She traces how the Chinese diaper-free infant toilet training practice of baniao has traveled to Australia and New Zealand, and she explores the practice of elimination communication, in which babies learn to communicate to their caregivers when they need to eliminate, thus removing the need for diapers. A mother herself, Dombroski conducted ethnographic research while mothering to examine how collectives of mothers draw on Chinese knowledge and their own embodied practices of childcare to create new hybrid forms of infant care. Caring for Life is a call to action, a theory of change, and a fascinating account of the transformational possibilities of care practices. It shows how experiments in personal care can lead to collective, widespread change, ultimately providing a practical and hopeful vision for environmental action. Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.
“Timely and important . . . It should be our North Star for the recovery and beyond.” —Hillary Clinton “Sperling makes a forceful case that only by speaking to matters of the spirit can liberals root their belief in economic justice in people’s deepest aspirations—in their sense of purpose and self-worth.” —The New York Times When Gene Sperling was in charge of coordinating economic policy in the Obama White House, he found himself surprised when serious people in Washington told him that the Obama focus on health care was a distraction because it was “not focused on the economy.” How, he asked, was the fear felt by millions of Americans of being one serious illness away from financial ruin not considered an economic issue? Too often, Sperling found that we measured economic success by metrics like GDP instead of whether the economy was succeeding in lifting up the sense of meaning, purpose, fulfillment, and security of people. In Economic Dignity, Sperling frames the way forward in a time of wrenching change and offers a vision of an economy whose guiding light is the promotion of dignity for all Americans.
As climate change has increasingly become the main focus of environmentalist activism since the late 1990s, the global economic drivers of CO2 emissions are now a major concern for radical greens. In turn, the emphasis on connected crises in both natural and social systems has attracted more activists to the Climate Justice movement and created a common cause between activists from the Global South and North. In the absence of a pervasive narrative of transnational or socialist economic planning to prevent catastrophic climate change, these activists have been eager to engage with advanced knowledge and ideas on political and economic structures that diminish risks and allow for new climate agency. This book breaks new ground by investigating what kind of economy the Climate Justice movement is calling for us to build and how the struggle for economic change has unfolded so far. Examining ecological debt, just transition, indigenous ecologies, social ecology, community economies and divestment among other topics, the authors provide a critical assessment and a common ground for future debate on economic innovation via social mobilization. Taking a transdisciplinary approach that synthesizes political economy, history, theory and ethnography, this volume will be of great interest to students and scholars of climate justice, environmental politics and policy, environmental economics and sustainable development.
This book envisages a different form of our economies where care work and care-full relationships are central to social and cultural life. It sets out a feminist vision of a caring economy and asks what needs to change economically and ecologically in our conceptual approaches and our daily lives as we learn to care for each other and non-human others. Bringing together authors from 11 countries (also representing institutions from 8 countries), this edited collection sets out the challenges for gender aware economies based on an ethics of care for people and the environment in an original and engaging way. The book aims to break down the assumed inseparability of economic growth and social prosperity, and natural resource exploitation, while not romanticising social-material relations to nature. The authors explore diverse understandings of care through a range of analytical approaches, contexts and case studies and pays particular attention to the complicated nexus between re/productivity, nature, womanhood and care. It includes strong contributions on community economies, everyday practices of care, the politics of place and care of non-human others, as well as an engagement on concepts such as wealth, sustainability, food sovereignty, body politics, naturecultures and technoscience. Feminist Political Ecology and the Economics of Care is aimed at all those interested in what feminist theory and practice brings to today’s major political economic and environmental debates around sustainability, alternatives to economic development and gender power relations.
Non-cognitive expressions of the life of the subject – feeling, motion, tactility, instinct, automatism, and sentience – have transformed how scholars understand subjectivity, agency and identity. This collection investigates the critical purchase of the idiom of affect in this ‘post-humanist’ thinking of the subject. It also explores political and ethical questions raised by the deployment of affect as a theoretical and artistic category. Together the contributors to this collection map the theoretically heterogeneous field of post-humanist scholarship on affect, making inspiring, and at times surprising, connections between Spinoza’s and Tomkins’s theories of affect, the concept of affect and psychoanalysis, and affect and animal studies in art and literature. As a result, the concepts, vocabulary, compatibility, and attribution of affect are challenged and extended. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Angelaki.
A powerful new understanding of cooperation as an antidote to alienation and inequality From the crises of racial inequity and capitalism that inspired the Black Lives Matter movement and the Green New Deal to the coronavirus pandemic, stories of mutual aid have shown that, though cooperation is variegated and ever changing, it is also a form of economic solidarity that can help weather contemporary social and economic crises. Addressing this theme, Practicing Cooperation delivers a trenchant and timely argument that the way to a more just and equitable society lies in the widespread adoption of cooperative practices. But what renders cooperation ethical, effective, and sustainable? Providing a new conceptual framework for cooperation as a form of social practice, Practicing Cooperation describes and critiques three U.S.-based cooperatives: a pair of co-op grocers in Philadelphia, each adjusting to recent growth and renewal; a federation of two hundred low-cost community acupuncture clinics throughout the United States, banded together as a cooperative of practitioners and patients; and a collectively managed Philadelphia experimental dance company, founded in the early 1990s and still going strong. Through these case studies, Andrew Zitcer illuminates the range of activities that make contemporary cooperatives successful: dedicated practitioners, a commitment to inclusion, and ongoing critical reflection. In so doing he asserts that economic and social cooperation must be examined, critiqued, and implemented on multiple scales if it is to combat the pervasiveness of competitive individualism. Practicing Cooperation is grounded in the voices of practitioners and the result is a clear-eyed look at the lived experience of cooperators from different parts of the economy and a guidebook for people on the potential of this way of life for the pursuit of justice and fairness.
An investigation of the practice of “commoning” in urban housing and its necessity for challenging economic injustice in our rapidly gentrifying cities Provoked by mass evictions and the onset of gentrification in the 1970s, tenants in Washington, D.C., began forming cooperative organizations to collectively purchase and manage their apartment buildings. These tenants were creating a commons, taking a resource—housing—that had been used to extract profit from them and reshaping it as a resource that was collectively owned by them. In Carving Out the Commons, Amanda Huron theorizes the practice of urban “commoning” through a close investigation of the city’s limited-equity housing cooperatives. Drawing on feminist and anticapitalist perspectives, Huron asks whether a commons can work in a city where land and other resources are scarce and how strangers who may not share a past or future come together to create and maintain commonly held spaces in the midst of capitalism. Arguing against the romanticization of the commons, she instead positions the urban commons as a pragmatic practice. Through the practice of commoning, she contends, we can learn to build communities to challenge capitalism’s totalizing claims over life.