J. K. Gibson-Graham

Diverse economies: performative practices for `other worlds'

How might academic practices contribute to the exciting proliferation of economic experiments occurring worldwide in the current moment? In this paper we describe the work of a nascent research community of economic geographers and other scholars who are making the choice to bring marginalized, hidden and alternative economic activities to light in order to make them more real and more credible as objects of policy and activism. The diverse economies research program is, we argue, a performative ontological project that builds upon and draws forth a different kind of academic practice and subjectivity. Using contemporary examples, we illustrate the thinking practices of ontological reframing, re-reading for difference and cultivating creativity and we sketch out some of the productive lines of inquiry that emerge from an experimental, performative and ethical orientation to the world. The paper is accompanied by an electronic bibliography of diverse economies research with over 200 entries.

An ethics of the local

ions, without which we could not begin to orient ourselves, while the second embroils us in the dirt and danger of location, interpersonal engagement, and the labors of becoming.

Re/Presenting Class: Essays in Postmodern Marxism

Re/presenting Class is a collection of essays that develops a poststructuralist Marxian conception of class in order to theorize the complex contemporary economic terrain. Both building upon and reconsidering a tradition that Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff—two of this volume’s editors—began in the late 1980s with their groundbreaking work Knowledge and Class, contributors aim to correct previous research that has largely failed to place class as a central theme in economic analysis. Suggesting the possibility of a new politics of the economy, the collection as a whole focuses on the diversity and contingency of economic relations and processes. Investigating a wide range of cases, the essays illuminate, for instance, the organizational and cultural means by which unmeasured surpluses—labor that occurs outside the formal workplace‚ such as domestic work—are distributed and put to use. Editors Resnick and Wolff, along with J. K. Gibson-Graham, bring theoretical essays together with those that apply their vision to topics ranging from the Iranian Revolution to sharecropping in the Mississippi Delta to the struggle over the ownership of teaching materials at a liberal arts college. Rather than understanding class as an element of an overarching capitalist social structure, the contributors—from radical and cultural economists to social scientists—define class in terms of diverse and ongoing processes of producing, appropriating, and distributing surplus labor and view class identities as multiple, changing, and interacting with other aspects of identity in contingent and unpredictable ways. Re/presenting Class will appeal primarily to scholars of Marxism and political economy. Contributors. Carole Biewener, Anjan Chakrabarti, Stephen Cullenberg, Fred Curtis, Satyananda Gabriel, J. K. Gibson-Graham, Serap Kayatekin, Bruce Norton, Phillip O’Neill, Stephen Resnick, David Ruccio, Dean Saitta, Andriana Vlachou, Richard Wolff

Rethinking the Economy with Thick Description and Weak Theory

In this paper I rehearse the thinking steps J. K Gibson-Graham developed in order to theorize diverse economies and reveal a landscape of economic difference. Reading with and against Clifford Geertz’s 1973 essay “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” I discuss how “thick description” of diverse economic practices can be combined with weak theory to produce a performative rethinking of economy centered on the well-being of people and the planet. I discuss the difficulties of resisting the influence of “strong theory”—that is, powerful discourses that organize events into understandable and seemingly predictable trajectories. I outline the diverse economy, a reframing that allows for a much wider range of social relations to be seen to bear on economic practices including, to name just some, trust, care, sharing, reciprocity, cooperation, coercion, bondage, thrift, guilt, love, equity, self-exploitation, solidarity, distributive justice, stewardship, spiritual connection, and environmental and social justice. In the complexly overdetermined field of a diverse economy, we are invited to trace multiple dynamics at play. It is in the apprehension of these diverse determinations that ethnographic thick description comes into its own and leads the way toward rethinking the economy. For ethnographers today, no task is more important than to make small facts speak to large concerns, to make the ethical acts ethnography describes into a performative ontology of economy and the threads of hope that emerge into stories of everyday revolution.

Identity and Economic Plurality: Rethinking Capitalism and ‘Capitalist Hegemony’

In the work of Chantal Mouffe, society is seen as structured by a hegemonic articulation, but one that is only temporarily fixed and always under subversion. Following Mouffe, in this paper I pursue the implications of theorizing ‘the economy’ as a hegemonic formation rather than as a fixed capitalist totality. What might it mean to understand ‘the economic’ as a provisional articulation of capitalist and noncapitalist activities and relations? How might it open up the possibility of anticapitalist and noncapitalist economic interventions? Encouraged by feminist attempts to produce a discourse of sexual difference that is not subsumed to a binary gender hierarchy, I envision a discourse of economic difference that could destabilize and problematize the presumption of capitalist hegemony.

Being the Revolution, or, How to Live in a “More-Than-Capitalist” World Threatened with Extinction

Much of J. K. Gibson-Grahams work has been aimed at opening up ideas about what action is, both by broadening what is considered action (under the influence of feminist political imaginaries and strategies), and by refusing the old separation between theory and action. But the coming of the Anthropocene forced Julie and me to think more openly about what is the collective that acts. In this lecture I ask: what might it mean for a politics aimed at bringing other worlds into being to displace humans from the center of action and to see more-than-human elements as part of the collective that acts? The lecture proceeds with sections discussing (1) elements and limits of a feminist imaginary of possibility, (2) the synergies between a politics of building community economies and the political imaginary of actor-network theory, and (3) the materiality of emerging community economy assemblages.

Building Community Economies: Women and the Politics of Place

Women and the Politics of Place (WPP) is a project of narrating and theorizing a globally emergent form of localized politics — one that is largely of if not necessarily for women — with the goal of bringing this politics into a new stage of being. What is truly distinctive about WPP is the vision of a place-based yet at the same time global movement (Osterweil 2004). Indeed this distinctive vision is what first attracted us to the project, for we were already imagining and fostering an economic politics with the same locally rooted yet globally extensive structure. Rather than ‘waiting for the revolution’ to transform a global economy and governance system at the world scale, we were engaging with others to transform local economies here and now, in an everyday ethical and political practice of constructing ‘community economies’ in the face of globalization.

Dilemmas of theorizing class

Pushed by our reviewers to revisit perennial (meta)theoretical questions and choices, we confront once again the dilemmas of theorizing. Should we emphasize the emptiness or fullness of categories? What historical baggage comes with our theoretical categories and what violence does theory do to history and geography? Must we sacrifice the heterogeneity within categories to constitute differences between them? Can a category function simultaneously as a ground and a product of analysis? Is there a virtue in consistency? Should theory identify limits or explore possibilities, or should it always do both? What constitutes a broadening of the theoretical imagination?

‘After’ area studies? Place-based knowledge for our time

From today’s perspective, early 20th century ‘Area Studies’ texts represent a relic form of geographical research and writing. These compendiums of place-based knowledge present what we now consider to be a layperson’s understanding of ‘geography’ – details of landforms, climate, land use, economic activities, urban patterns and so on. This empirical content is described in language littered with the judgemental adjectives associated with hierarchical knowledge systems such as environmental determinism, economic stage theory and theories of modern state formation. In this essay I interrogate one subset of these texts, namely those that were written about Tropical or Monsoon Asia, as it was often referred to. I situate the publication of these geographies with respect to major shifts in human and earth systems and outline some preliminary ideas for how we could re-read these texts to recover place-based knowledge that might inform current research on economic resilience in Southeast Asia.

Re-embedding economies in ecologies: resilience building in more than human communities

The modern hyper-separation of economy from ecology has severed the ties that people have with environments and species that sustain life. A first step towards strengthening resilience at a human scale involves appreciating, caring for and repairing the longstanding ecological relationships that have supported life over the millennia. The capacity to appreciate these relationships has, however, been diminished by a utilitarian positioning of natural environments by economic science. Ecologists have gone further in capturing the interdependence of economies and ecologies with the concept of socio-ecological resilience. Of concern, however, is the persistence of a vision of an economy ordered by market determinations in which there is no role for ethical negotiation between humans and with the non-human world. This paper reframes economy–ecology relations, resituating humans within ecological communities and resituating non-humans in ethical terms. It advances the idea of community economies (as opposed to capitalist economies) and argues that these must be built if we are to sustain life in the Anthropocene. The argument is illustrated with reference to two construction projects situated in ‘Monsoon Asia’.