Ep 13 - Community Economy: Experiences, Potentials and Challenges - Dr Stephen Healy - a podcast by Common Alternatives

The Community Economies Research Network (CERN) is an international network of 200 scholars, activists, and artists working in locations throughout the world to enact a post-capitalist politics in economies understood to be already more than capitalist.  Seeing the economic landscape as intrinsically heterogeneous changes the optics of post-capitalism directing our gaze away from a Utopian horizon to the possibilities for ethically negotiating and politically shaping our shared existence in an imperfect present.   A current research project with Australian CERN members uses a case example approach to imagine other futures for manufacturing in Australia studying enterprises of various sizes, operating across a range of scales and organizational forms—capitalist enterprises, as well as cooperative and social-enterprises—including two within the Hunter region. We selected these case examples based on the idea that they are already practicing what Julien Agyeman calls just-sustainability, attending to ecological concerns by means of social inclusion, and in so doing contributing to what Tony Fry terms the radical unmaking of unsustainability. Looking through a post-capitalist lens we can see how social innovations coming from non-capitalist social enterprises may be broadened into a re-imaging of a new culture of manufacturing that is sensitive to 21st century social and ecological challenges.    Dr Stephen Healy is a Senior Research Fellow at ICS. His research has concentrated on the relationship between economy, subjectivity and the enactment of new econo-socialities exploring various topics: health care reform policy, cooperative and regional development, and the solidarity economy movement. His current ARC project, with CIs Katherine Gibson, and Jenny Cameron  Reconfiguring the Enterprise: Shifting Manufacturing Culture in Australia re-imagines the future of manufacturing in Australia. He is co-author of Take Back the Economy an Ethical Guide for Transforming our Communities (UMP 2013), presently translated into Korean, Spanish and Finnish with planned translations into Greek and French.  Stephen has been published in Geoforum, Antipode, Gender, Place and Culture, Professional Geographer, New Zealand Geographer, Journal of Political Ecology and Rethinking Marxism and elsewhere and in numerous edited volumes. Stephen is a founding member of the Community Economies Research Network (CERN) (http://www.communityeconomies.org/).   

 Alternative Futures and Regional Prospects Symposium Working across Differences, beyond Carbon, Capital and Commodity  Thursday 22nd & Friday 23rd of November 2018 Organizers: The University of Newcastle Alternative Futures Network, Common Alternatives Network (http://thecommonalts.com/); hosted by The University of Technology Sydney

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