'Deconstructing communities' : An in-person workshop.

Venue:
RIFS, Ballroom.

When community is used environmentally, that idea is that community can do something or produce something that other approaches cannot. Community has a greater place-attachment say, even if just as a label. A wind farm is seen as more acceptable because it has the community branding. Those involved in a variety of grassroots initiatives feel a togetherness and connection that allows them to engage and push further than otherwise, even if this leads to detrimental effects. Community can ensure lock-in of novel practices in a way that individualized techniques don’t or can’t.

We want to turn this on its head. What if what is useful about community—belonging to and with others, acting as more-than-self—is partly an orientation ‘against’. By trying to reform overarching policies that capture community initiatives, by trying to take aim at the regulatory frameworks that sideline or stifle them, or by seeking to unsettle and disrupt establishment actors, in order to leave room for grassroots experiments. In these ways community initiatives are not only building positive alternatives but also attempt to undermine or dismantle their inhibiting framework conditions.

We are thinking of deconstruction in two related ways. First, deconstruction as a form of what Chakori calls ‘ex-ovation’, or Feola ‘unmaking’. That is the opposite side of innovation, or a philosophically positive building of new and deliberate alternatives and arrangements. The second sense of deconstruction comes from the Derridean framework, where using the internal logic to undermine and unsettle a false binary. Centrally, the community economies framework allows us to see things as not either in a ‘capitalist’ or ‘non-capitalist’ camp, but can see certain practices as helping to unsettle a capitalist mode of production, without themselves being strictly speaking antagonistic to them or needing to form a binary opposite pole to oppose them. So the deconstructive effects of community is both in practical terms but also undermining an unhelpful binary logic.

Open to the public, but please note the participative nature of the planned discussion, including sending some text in ahead of the event.