Anthony Ince

From Middle Ground to Common Ground: Self-Management and Spaces of Encounter in Organic Farming Networks

This article deploys the anarchist notion of self-management to critically investigate the global organic farming network World-Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms (WWOOF) as an initiative that offers insights into the possibilities and challenges of encounter. WWOOF facilitates the giving of food, accommodation, and hands-on learning experiences for volunteers, in exchange for their labor on organic farms. It operates as a moneyless sharing economy, designed as a site of mutual learning and cultural exchange. Literatures on encounter divide between brief tourist encounters of difference and everyday encounters in diverse, usually urban, communities. In linking these two bodies of work, I argue that the principle of self-management, as conceived by anarchist thinkers, can help develop a unified, critical framework for making sense of encounter event spaces. This adds important nuance to theorizations of encounter by recognizing the entwinement of the intimate and the structural, foregrounding the capacity of people to autonomously create shared spaces of interdependence. The case study indicates that structural contradictions and inequalities in voluntary relationships within statist-capitalist systems can seriously undermine otherwise promising interpersonal encounters. By articulating self-management as a tool for both analyzing and producing spaces of encounter, this article offers new possibilities for a more holistic and unified analytical framework.

The shape of geography to come

In this commentary, I offer, from an anarchist–geographic perspective, a constructive critique of certain elements of Simon Springer’s article. I welcome his article for bringing to light some of the more politically problematic elements of (orthodox) Marxist thought. Springer raises important points about the practicalities of social change, but he does so in a rather binaristic manner. Accordingly, I address several elements of Springer’s characterization of both anarchism and Marxism – especially on political organization and praxis – in order to nuance some of his arguments and draw out broader lessons for radical geographical scholarship and the future of the radical/revolutionary left in general.

Reading hospitality mutually

This article addresses debates in geography regarding the nature and significance of hospitality. Despite increasingly inhospitable policy landscapes across the Global North, grassroots hospitality initiatives persist, including various global travel-based initiatives and networks. Drawing from research with these travel networks, we argue that hospitality is fundamentally based on a pervasive, mutualistic sociality in a multitude of forms. Such initiatives, and hospitality more generally, can be better understood in terms of their relationship to these wider mutualities. we therefore use Peter Kropotkin’s anarchist-geographic concept of mutual aid – in conversation with Jacques Derrida and other thinkers – to reimagine hospitality as ‘mutual hospitableness’; systemic, spatio-temporally expansive and underpinned by a conception of self that is constituted through, and gains its vitality from, intertwinement with the other.