Stephen Healy

Western Sydney University · Institute for Culture and Society (ICS)

Solidarity economies, characterized by diverse practices of cooperation and mutual support, have long played pivotal but largely invisible roles in fostering shared survival and envisioning alternatives to racial capitalism globally and in the United States. This book maps the thriving existence of these cooperative networks in three differently si...

Urban wellbeing is an issue of global importance, as urban populations expand to incorporate more than 50 percent of the global population. Key urban challenges include crowded informal settlements in the Majority World (the Global 'South') and isolation and inequality in the Minority World (the Global 'North'). This chapter explores the potential...

Eka Nari Sanghathan (ENS), an Indigenous single women farmer's collective in Odisha, India and Norco Dairy in regional NSW, Australia are cooperatives undertaking collective action to ‘survive well’, securing agrarian livelihoods in the face of climate change. Striking differences in affluence and poverty separate these place‐based cooperatives whi...

The accessibility, availability and consumption of food in food and agriculture systems are key public health and food security concerns. We draw on empirical research from members of the Community Economies Research Network from Australia, New Zealand, India and Finland to reimagine food and agriculture systems as a planetary food commons (PFC). P...

Like Latour, we have treated COVID-19 as but one symptom of a larger phenomenon of the Anthropocene. In his book Down to Earth, Latour (2018) describes the Anthropocene as the site of a new class conflict pitting “globalists,” who aim to sever all bonds of solidarity and earthly concerns, against “terrestrials,” who affirm their interdependence and...

Ethan Miller’s Reimagining Livelihoods powerfully draws from, extends, and ultimately redesigns concepts central to Marxian economics—in particular, diverse economies and theories developing the concept of livelihood as postcapitalist political imaginary while engaging in dialogue with Deleuze and Guattarri, Latour, Escobar, and Haraway, among many...

This commentary was invited by the special editors of this issue and is partly based on the Community Economies session that the four authors organised at the Social Movements Conference III: Resistance and Social Change in Wellington, 2016. In the Community Economies session we reviewed the diverse-economies framework and showed how it translates...

There is a culture of manufacturing that is beyond business as usual in Australia. This report shows that there is a viable future for manufacturing in Australia in the 21st century that is being shaped by a culture that is beyond business as usual. This report counters ill-founded fears that manufacturing in Australia is not viable by presenting c...

About 6,000 financial cooperatives, called credit unions, with more than 103 million members manage over $1 trillion in collective assets in the United States but are largely invisible and seen as inferior to private banks. In contrast to banks that generate profit for outside investors and do not give voice to customers, these not-for-profit insti...

This report details our project funded by National Science Challenge 11 Building Better Homes, Towns, and Cities. We report on our main findings from one year of research with Cultivate Christchurch, an Urban Farm fostering youth wellbeing in Christchurch New Zealand. We develop a method for assessing a Community Economy Return on Investment.

This paper discusses our work with an urban farm in the context of developing a method to qualitatively assess or measure a Community Economy Return on Investment.

In a world beset by the problems of climate change and growing socioeconomic inequality, industrial manufacturing has been implicated as a key driver. In this article we take seriously Roepke’s call for geographic research to intervene in obvious problems and ask can manufacturing contribute to different pathways forward? We reflect on how studies...

What does it mean to be at home in a hot city? One response is to shut our doors and close ourselves in a cocoon of air-conditioned thermal comfort. As the climate warms, indoor environments facilitated by technical infrastructures of cooling are fast becoming the condition around which urban life is shaped. The price we pay for this response is hi...

Deepening ecological crisis alongside a half century of widening inequality and economic instability are evidence that Business as Usual cannot go on. Transformation is required, particularly in the realm of corporate activity, the business of business. Shareholder primacy is a powerful social norm that constrains transformation. It positions publi...

In debates over post‐capitalist politics, growing attention has been paid to the solidarity economy (SE), a framework that draws together diverse practices ranging from co‐ops to community gardens. Despite proponents’ commitment to inclusion, racial and class divides suffuse the SE movement. Using qualitative fieldwork and an original SE dataset, t...

Commoning as a postcapitalist politics Today the planet faces a genuine tragedy of the unmanaged “commons” (like air, climate, water). In this article, we explore how the process of commoning offers a politics for the Anthropocene. To reveal the political potential of commoning, however, we need to step outside of the capitalocentric ways that the...

This article is available via subscription (sorry folks!) at: https://aq.magazine.com.au/ There is a growing recognition that economic business-as-usual cannot continue and an increasing interest in better ways of organising economies, politics and society. Yet already there are businesses and manufacturers around the world that are implementing p...

This report develops our methodology for Community Economy Return on Investment.

Deepening ecological crisis alongside a half century of widening inequality and economic instability are evidence that ‘Business as Usual’ cannot go on. Transformation is required, particularly in the realm of corporate activity, the business of business. Shareholder primacy is a powerful social norm that constrains transformation. It positions pub...

This paper stages an encounter between Relational Poverty Theory (RPT) and the solidarity economy movement. RPT understands poverty as the dynamic product of economic exploitation, political exclusion and cultural marginalization. The solidarity economy movement can be seen as a transformative political response to these dynamics aiming to replace...

Matters of Care feels at once like a new beginning for ethics and politics in more than human worlds, yet also the logical outcome of many years of work in new materialist and feminist thought. It is a masterfully lucid and challenging theoretical exposition in which a feminist ethic of care is extended through speculation on its limits. My own int...

Journal of Design Strategies. Cooperative Cities issue.

In June 2015, we launched the call for articles for this special issue in an attempt to catalyze the rising awareness, both within the critically oriented and the broader organization studies community, that we are today witnessing epochal changes, which are fundamentally redefining the social, economic, political, and environmental realities we li...

Online at: http://thenextsystem.org/cultivating-community-economies/ In Volume 5’s final paper, Cultivating Community Economies: Tools for Building a Liveable World, J.K. Gibson-Graham and Community Economies Collective (CEC) members present their vision of “Community Economies” as an “ongoing process of negotiating our interdependence.” In order...

Childbirth has been transformed by increased use of life-saving medical technologies, greater understanding of the complex interplay between care environments, emotional states, complex biophysical processes and ongoing physical and mental health for babies and mothers. Maternity care has also been subject to broader changes in healthcare economies...

This paper considers the relevance of Franciscan monastic practice to contemporary postcapitalist politics in the time of the Anthropocene. Giorgio Agamben’s reflections on the monastic revolution of the eleventh and twelfth centuries explore the different relationships between the rules governing monastic life and materiality, wherein the renuncia...

“The tragedy of the commons” is a well-known phrase that has captured people’s imaginations for generations. Unfortunately these few but powerful words have been used to justify the enclosure and erasure of many well-functioning commons that benefit both people and the environment. Less well-known is Garrett Hardin’s qualification in 1998—some 30 y...

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We would like to thank the residents of Western Sydney who participated in this study as members of three focus groups for their time and generous inputs. We would also like to thank Karen Brown at St Marys Corner Community and Cultural Precinct, Suzy Baker and Linda Wilson at Nepean Area Disabilities Organisation (NADO) and Caroly...

This is a response to Paul Mason's new book, PostCapitalism. See https://theconversation.com/after-capitalism-what-comes-next-for-a-start-ethics-44975

This paper is based on a talk I delivered at Rethinking Marxism's 2013 international conference in conversation with Jodi Dean at a plenary session entitled “Crafting a Conversation on Communism.” I attempt to clear up a point of confusion in Dean's reading of postcapitalist politics and the work of the Community Economies Collective (of which I am...

This essay responds to the generous commentaries on the talks Jodi Dean and I delivered during the 2013 Rethinking Marxism International Conference. It offers further reflections on communism as a political project, on its relation to postcapitalist practices, and on Dean's desire to “return to the party,” making two distinct interventions. First,...

https://theconversation.com/pursuing-happiness-its-mostly-a-matter-of-surviving-well-together-42892

In a recent essay Michael Hardt gives voice to a widespread discontent with the left-academic project of critique, stemming from its failure to deliver on its emancipatory promises. Scholarship, in geography and many other social science disciplines is dominated by a pre-occupation with charting the intricate connections between neoliberal governan...

If the Global Finance Crisis has taught us anything, it’s that economics as we know it is not working. If global warming means anything, it’s that we have to rethink how we live on this shared planet. Take Back the Economy is about making the economy work for people and the planet. It is intended for academic researchers, activists, students, commu...

This chapter explores the variety of ways that people secure the goods and services they need to survive. It shows how markets are being reshaped to address the wellbeing of producers and environments across the globe, and it shows how alternative markets closer to home are also addressing similar concerns.

The announcement of a partnership between the United Steelworkers Union and the Mondragón Cooperative Corporation, along with earlier news of a Mondragón-inspired, large-scale cooperative development in Cleveland, Ohio, sparked an exchange among members of the Rethinking Marxism community about the potential of worker cooperatives and the communal...

In this article I recount the ways that key concepts in Lacanian psychoanalytic theory—the relationship between language and desire, fantasy and subject formation, ethics and the traversal of fantasy—have enabled a novel methodological approach to activist research. Psychoanalysis allows us to recast research as a process of encountering and traver...

It is increasingly recognized that the work of (unpaid) informal caregivers constitutes an important contribution to care delivery in the United States and in many other societies. Accounting for the range of social, economic and political circumstances in which this care is produced has become the focus of a number of academics and others theorizi...

This piece explores practices within some cooperative firms as attempts to foster a subject who has a particular relationship with work and with the community economy. We call this relationship identifying or working in the gap: deriving satisfaction from engaging with the various antagonisms, conflicts, and contingencies that attend the cooperativ...