Community Economies Project

Description

"The Community Economies project is a place where new visions of community and economy can be theorized, discussed, represented and enacted. The project grew out of J.K. Gibson-Graham's feminist critique of political economy that focused upon the limiting effects of representing economies as dominantly capitalist. Central to the project is the idea that economies are always diverse and always in the process of becoming. This project developed as a way of documenting the multiple ways in which people are making economies of difference and in the process building new forms of community.

This website includes information on how we are thinking the economy outside of a capitalocentric discourse that situates all non-capitalist activities as ultimately the same as, a complement to, the opposite of, or contained within capitalism." (http://www.communityeconomies.org/

Discussion

By Ugo Rossi and Theresa Enright:

"Another important source of inspiration for radical feminist scholarship on grassroots eco-nomic practices as privileged sites of the commons is Gibson-Graham’s diverse economies research. In their work non-capitalist forms of subjectivity, practice and politics exist alongside and often in conjunction with dominant capitalist dynamics (Gibson-Graham 1996, 2006).Their project to chronicle and imagine economic alternatives and experiments attempts to foment regimes of accumulation that entail solidaristic modes of organizing collective life: from cooperative enterprises to environmental and agricultural organizations; and from local currencies and non-profits to informal markets. In Gibson-Graham’s view, identifying alternative economies is part of a post-capitalist project aimed at taking on the task of “how we might perform new economic worlds, starting with an ontology of economic difference”" (https://www.academia.edu/28286361/Ambivalence_of_the_urban_commons)