Gradon Diprose

Negotiating interdependence and anxiety in community economies

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 Nancys 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 Nancys framing of the inoperative community and Gibson-Grahams engagement with his ideas as a lens to explore the ethical tensions involved in enacting community economies. I show how Nancys 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.

‘It’s who we are’: eco-nationalism and place in contesting deep-sea oil in Aotearoa New Zealand

ABSTRACT Given near consensus among the scientific community about the anthropogenic nature of climate change, there is pressing concern about how to mobilise enough people to care and demand wider socio-political change. In this article we explore this urgent issue, drawing on recent conflicts over deep-sea oil exploration and drilling in Aotearoa New Zealand. We explore how some activist groups are attempting to mobilise care and concern around deep-sea oil drilling and climate change through the use of narratives that entwine aspects of national identity with the non-human world. We suggest that these activist groups are not concerned about a retreat of the state, but rather, are in direct conflict with the state, and state interventionism, over fossil fuel development trajectories in Aotearoa New Zealand. In drawing upon eco-nationalism, and particularly a way of life related to place, activists have called into question the common sense of business as usual and thereby sought to expand space for ‘ordinary’ Aotearoa New Zealanders to care about climate change.

Contesting deep sea oil: Politicisation–depoliticisation–repoliticisation

Between 2010 and 2017, the New Zealand Government undertook a range of subtle yet disturbing tactics to create a legislative environment that enabled deep sea oil exploration. This included forms of public endorsement, policy documents and legislative change that prioritised further oil development in the country to create a certain common-sense around increased fossil fuel extraction. In response, a range of communities and autonomous Oil Free groups have emerged to contest both the legislative changes and this underlying common-sense. We draw on this example to respond to calls within geography and political science literature to situate analysis of contemporary politics in empirical contexts. We use Rancière’s thought combined with the frames of politicisation, depoliticisation and repoliticisation to explore the entangled nature of government and oil industry actions, and community climate change activism. We argue that while there were clearly attempts by government and the oil industry to close down spaces of dissent and limit debate around fossil fuel development to technocratic questions of health and safety, the effects of attempts at closure are paradoxical. Such attempts at closure are always incomplete and at times, mobilise people to contestatory action. We show how activists have strategically drawn on certain discourses to exert claims of, and for, equality in public debates around the pressing issue of climate change.

Radical equality, care and labour in a community economy

Abstract The reproductive and care work predominantly undertaken by women has historically been undervalued in traditional measures of the economy. However, calls for more work, or better work for women (and men) doesn’t necessarily solve the issues surrounding waged labour such as zero hour contracts, the ‘double work day’, and other forms of increasing precarity and competition. In this article I explore how alternative forms of labour exchange in the Wellington Timebank provide one way in which subjects can partially operate outside the waged economy. I draw on Jacques Rancière’s understanding of how a radical equality underpins a democratic politics to explore the everyday negotiations around labour that occur in this alternative economy. I connect work being done by the Community Economies Collective to ideas of radical equality and a feminist ethic of care to show how embodied and everyday practices like timebanking enable subjects to challenge the inequalities of waged work and in Rancière’s terms, partially construct alternative ‘distributions of the sensible’.