Researching Postcapitalist Possibilities

Tag: updates

  • Introducing a new project: Reduce, Reuse, Repair: Emerging waste subjectivities for postcapitalist economies

    Introducing a new project: Reduce, Reuse, Repair: Emerging waste subjectivities for postcapitalist economies

    By Dr Lila Laird, Postdoctoral Researcher, Massey University

    What is the project about?

    We are embarking on a project that traces how groups of people move up the ‘waste hierarchy’ and how such transformations shape people’s sense of self in relation to waste. This matters because issues like microplastic pollution, environmental contaminant leaching, and dwindling landfill space continue to negatively impact ecosystems and communities. In order for Aotearoa to avoid further waste crises, our use and disposal of material goods must change. Despite warnings and ample evidence, plastic, metal, organic material, food, excrement and building waste continue to grow.

    Shifting  towards ‘circular economies’ is often proposed to stop such crises and to avoid the linear take-make-dispose model. Instead, a circular economy keeps resources in use for as long as possible, and the waste hierarchy (pictured below) conveys the kinds of actions that are most beneficial in circulating materials for reuse. Near the top of the waste hierarchy includes reduce, reuse and repair, and these are the forms of circular economy we are most interested in investigating.

    The Waste Hierarchy — we should be doing more the top and less of the bottom!

    Circular economy research often points to high tech advancements, hoping to deal with our waste and also create business value from it. However, these ‘solutions’ do not often lead to less waste! Instead, they often end up adapting to the current flows of waste being produced. Social scientists researching circular economy practices have found that in order to reduce, reuse, and repair materials, large amounts of often invisible or undervalued labour is required.

    In simple terms, it takes a fair amount of people-power to wash, sort, clean, store and transport resources for their reuse. Or to undertake research, connect with knowledgeable people, upskill oneself, and foster patience to repair an item to keep it in use. And it takes a significant amount of effort to avoid waste altogether. Therefore, because a circular economy is a matter of who is engaged and what kinds of action they are taking, our research is interested in meeting with people focused on being less wasteful and keeping their items in use.

    Waste  is a culturally situated concept. Different cultural groups have different norms and taboos with regards to waste, including what is considered necessary waste. Different cultural groups also have different kinds of relationships to land and the ways land is currently used to ‘deal with’ waste. For example, in te ao Māori, understandings of tapu and noa might guide waste disposal in different ways from western norms. All of this difference is an important part of the ways people approach waste, and what moving up the waste hierarchy may look like for them. And these differences provide important insights into the challenges and solutions to current waste crises.

    What does the project involve?

    We have partnered with three important organisations who help people in Aotearoa to become less wasteful.

    Para Kore is a Māori zero-waste organisation. Para Kore educates and advocates from a Māori worldview for zero carbon and zero waste in Māori communities and beyond. They run sustainability programs across Aotearoa, working with marae, iwi, early childhood centres, churches, community organisations, businesses and more.

    Repair Network Aotearoa is a charitable trust that works with repair cafes and similar projects like tool libraries and maker spaces across Aotearoa, advocating for the right to repair legislation in Aotearoa.

    Zero Waste Aotearoa is  an organisation that supports over 150 groups across Aotearoa that are working towards zero waste in their local community.

    To explore our interests in waste and identity, we are undertaking field work with our research partners and collectives engaged in practices at the top of the waste hierarchy. We will also be undertaking cooperative inquiry groups that enable us to bring together like-minded people to explore their practices relating to waste and to items that could become waste, their concerns and feelings surrounding waste,  and what they would like to change in relation to waste practices for themselves and their wider collectives.

    Who is this research for?

    By the end of the project, we will have co-created an action plan with our community partners that identifies how government and community can invest in social innovations needed for circular economies in Aotearoa. The action plan will support practices at the top of the waste hierarchy and will be directed at waste decision-makers in community and government. As many people grapple with the waste that enters their households, workplaces, marae, community centres and the nature surrounding them, we hope that our action plan can help to bring us one step closer to a waste-less Aotearoa.

    What’s next?

    We are currently connecting with collectives on the ground who are engaged in actions of reduce, reuse and repair. This includes repair cafes, textile recovery groups, resourceful-craft organizations, makerspaces, tool libraries, community composters, and more. We look forward to keeping you informed of what we find out in the process!

    You can find out more about who is involved in the project here:

    Gradon Diprose | Kelly Dombroski | Lila Laird | Matthew Scobie

     

  • Introducing Ben — Researching changing economies in Taranaki

    Introducing Ben — Researching changing economies in Taranaki

    Ben is a co-funded Masters student studying economic change in the small town of Pātea, Taranaki. I’m part of his supervisory team and took a trip out to Pātea to meet up with Ben and have a look around South Taranaki.

    Tell us a bit about your background and how you got interested in economic geography

    I’m originally from North Taranaki, in fact I’m currently there now studying by distance. I went to study geography at Massey Manawatū straight out of school. I came to the topic because geography allows for academic diversity, being able to address topics and borrow ideas from other physical and social sciences. Economic geography is a particular interest as I can explore impacts of and solutions to capitalism’s flaws.

    What are you working on now?

    I’m currently completing my Masters’ thesis, where I am exploring people’s responses to change in the context of a small town, Pātea. This project includes a media analysis and semi-structured interviews with community leaders.

    What do you think the biggest challenges will be?

    One of the biggest challenges in my research is the interviewing. Having never done anything like this before, I have found it a difficult process to work through: planning interview questions, conducting interviews, and then discovering mistakes or oversights made, during transcription and analysis. It has definitely been one of those skills that can’t be just read about – it has to be continuously tried and improved for oneself, but I do think I am much better at interviews now than I was before my first.

    What are some of the surprising or interesting things you have discovered in your fieldwork so far?

    An interesting part of Pātea is the culture which stands in contrast to statistics and some media coverage. It has been evident with everybody I’ve talked to that they understand their community is sometimes called ‘lower socioeconomic’ by others. But they reject this as a sole identity and instead have embraced an engaging community lifestyle where local people and families can thrive peacefully and cooperatively. While there are certainly economic challenges, to identify a community like this only as ‘poor’ is to miss the point entirely. It is also clear that this identity is constantly shaped by the community leaders I talked to, who are passionate about their place, and inspire others to share in that passion.

    Ben Lily is researching people’s responses to change in Pātea as part of a Master’s project funded by the John McArthur Scholarship in Geography
  • PhD Scholarship awarded – introducing Swarnima Kriti

    PhD Scholarship awarded – introducing Swarnima Kriti

    Great news! We are now able to confirm the PhD scholarship in Transitioning to caring economies has been awarded to Swarnima Kriti.

    Swarnima is an action researcher in the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh. She has both lived and worked in a small Indigenous village with a group of young women interested in questions of gender, development and ecology. Together, Swarnima and the other young women have set up a cooperative called Chinhari: The Young India (www.chinhari.co.in). Swarnima has completed an MPhil in Development Practice, and published some articles. Her latest published article is “Hegel and India” at The GCAS Review. 

    Swarnima will join the caring economies project and be based at Massey Palmerston North, while living in Porirua and back in Chhattisgarh for parts of the PhD project. Her project includes enabling a creative and constructive exchange of learning between communities doing community-based economic innovation in India and New Zealand. Our research partners in Porirua are Te Hiko centre for economic innovation. I asked Swarnima a couple of questions in the lead-up to her big shift to Aotearoa New Zealand.

    What attracted you to the Transitioning to caring economies project? 

    The Transitioning to caring economies project attracted me because of two reasons. One, it gave me the opportunity to learn about collective economic subjects, their actions and institutions. And two, it focused on “writing rights” i.e. writing about efforts communities put into finding sustainable ways of life than  “writing wrongs”. These learnings become important for action researchers like me to create a confluence of alternatives nurturing post capitalist practices.

    What do you think the biggest challenges will be in completing your PhD at Massey?

    I believe my biggest challenge in completing this PhD would be my field work in New Zealand, especially building a relationship with communities there. My work in the past has been largely based on my strong relationships with the community. It may be challenging to juggle between understanding the community, living with them, creating relationships and minimizing the cultural gap. 

    We look forward to having Swarnima arrive and join us at Massey and the Community Economies Research Network NZ, beginning in November 2023!

    Swarnima is an accomplished action researcher interested in community-led economic innovation.
  • Evaluating holistic wellbeing

    Evaluating holistic wellbeing

    Measuring and communicating the holistic wellbeing outcomes of community intiatives is often difficult, time-consuming and can miss important intentions and outcomes. Our recent report documents our 3 year project with Christchurch organisation Life in Vacant Spaces (LiVS), trialling a method of evaluating wellbeing outcomes of 27 of the more than 700 projects supported by LiVS over ten years.

    Enabling Life in Vacant Spaces: A partnership approach to evaluating holistic wellbeing in disaster recovery projects reports on our experiment with a “Community Economy Return on Investment Approach” combined with a holistic urban wellbeing tool based on evidence-based urban wellbeing actions for change. We found that this way of assessing holistic wellbeing ‘returns’ on investment could help communicate outcomes in a more holistic way.

    However, we found that the method still relies on some expert input and some more time-consuming qualitative and relational methods.

    Next steps are to develop then test a community-based ‘how to’ guide that helps community groups develop their own methods for assessing their holistic wellbeing returns. The report will be a useful start point for community groups, local government and funding agencies to think about how they approach evaluation for both human and environmental outcomes with reference to the ‘inputs’ of investment — both financial investment and investments of time and energy!

    This report was part of a the Building Better Homes, Towns and Cities Urban Wellbeing National Science Challenge. The first two years of my Transitioning to Caring Economies through Transformative Community Investment research programme specifies collaboration with the Urban Wellbeing stream. The report was authored by Kelly Dombroski, Gradon Diprose, Matt Scobie and Amanda Yates.

  • Annual reporting

    Detail from painting by Inge Flinte — hopefully it will feature on the cover of one of the books coming out!

    It’s hard to believe that it’s been a year already since I started at Massey and began working on this project fulltime. Recently I had to complete an annual report, which provides a nice opportunity to reflect on what I have been doing. Here are the highlights:

    Transforming the way we think about economies

    • Finished off and submitted Caring for Life: A postdevelopment politics of infant hygiene. It’s now in production with University of Minnesota Press and will be available by the end of the 2023. While infant hygiene might not seem related to economies, the book develops an approach to studying places built on pluriversal thinking. Nappy-free hygiene practices in the Global South are understood as important innovations for Global North communities who need to rethink their resource use.
    • Finished off an submitted Introducing Human Geographies, 4th edition, co-edited with Paul Cloke, Mark Goodwin, Junxi Qian and Andy Williams. This global textbook is in production with Routledge, and was a complete revision and redesign of the text that included a diverse range of authors from all over the world. I worked particularly on the ‘Collaborations’ section, which envisions the next generation of geographic education and research.
    • Taught the Aotearoa node of the intensive winter school Researching Postcapitalist Possibilities. PhD and early career scholars from NZ and Australia converged on Palmerston North for 10 days of immersive learning in poststructural action research, community economies, and researching with postcapitalist possibilities in mind.

    Inventorying diverse economies with postcapitalist potential

    Case studies of transition

    • The in-depth case studies have emerged from partnered work from my Building Better Homes, Towns and Cities work.
    • We have completed in-depth case studies of composting and organic waste initiatives, which we published this year.
    • We have completed an in-depth report on the wellbeing outcomes of the work of Life in Vacant Spaces in a post-disaster context in Ōtautahi Christchurch.
    • Did some experimental work with a quantitative version of a Community Economy Return on Investment tool, with the help of a wonderful intern from Norway. We will continue to work on developing this in both quantiative and qualitative versions as part of this research programme.
    • I have begun a new case study of Christian and post-Christian postcapitalist subjectivities and activism, with ethics approval, a book contract and co-author all lined up!

    Key findings in 2023

    • Communities are already investing in transition to postcapitalist and caring economies and there is extensive innovation that is not yet present in the literature. Part of the issue is that social innovation is not always recognised, particularly if it is done in marginalised and low-income groups, regions or nations.
    • Global interconnections are being made, particularly between networks in the Global South, that have well-developed bottom-up theories of economic change.
    • Subjectivities (or sense of self as an actor) play a role in community investment – we have found this in particular with alternative waste infrastructure that contributes to more circular community economies.
    • New metrics are needed and desired by community organisations who want to represent the transformative work they do outside of monetary frameworks.