Browse by title

This chapter discusses how research can be part of a social action agenda to build new economies. This research is based on collaborations between researchers and research participants, and involves three interwoven strategies. The first focuses on developing new languages of economy; the second, on decentring economic subjectivity; and the third, on collective actions to consolidate and build economic initiatives. The chapter illustrates how these strategies feature in three research projects. The first project was based in the Philippines and involved working with an NGO and two municipalities to pilot pathways for endogenous economic development. The second project was based in the US Northeast and used participatory mapping techniques to reveal the use and stewardship of marine resources. The third project was based in Australia and focused on environmentally sustainable and socially and economically just forms of manufacturing. These projects resulted in collective actions that created new economic options.

This chapter looks at social enterprise through a lens inspired by community economies and post-development. Without refuting that any trading enterprise must take form in one way or another, the authors look beyond essentialist models towards the embodiment of ‘social enterprising’; a term capturing various processes and intuitions that enact the social through bold economic experiments and that help multispecies communities to live well together. ‘Decolonial love’ and Buddhist teachings of ‘loving kindness’ (Mettā) are mobilized as a way of framing context in Eastern Cambodia and a University Town in Central Canada. Practices of mundane maintenance also offer an alternative to the developmental discourse premised on innovation, while a ‘reparative stance’ and attention to small narratives helps avoid undue pessimism about the significance of this mundane work.