From challenges to the tragedy of the commons to theories of primitive accumulation, enclosure, and privatization, the commons have long “served as a foil for political ecological analysis” (Turner 2016: 1). Political ecologists have extended institutionalist approaches to study and conceptualize the commons, but have also noted that political ecology and institutionalism’s underlying assumptions and theoretical premises differ in meaningful ways (Turner 2016), raising the need for diverse theorizations of the commons and property more generally. To those ends, political ecology has drawn extensively on approaches grounded in Marxian political economy to reveal the complexities of property under neoliberal governance (e.g. Bakker 2013) and the persistence of primitive accumulation in creating new arenas for generating rent and profit (e.g. Glassman 2006, Harvey 2011). Scholars have also engaged closely with the role of the state in environmental management and emerging legal mechanisms to support common property rights (e.g. Mansfield 2004, Baragwanath and Bayi 2020). Such efforts at building common property, however, may also reflect interventions to create infrastructures that support private accumulation of capital and processes of social reproduction undergirding capitalism (Caffentzis 2010, De Angelis 2013). While some commons may serve to advance private capital accuulation (Theesefeld 2019), private property regimes may also function as commons, providing access for resources users in both rural (Kay 2017) and urban contexts (McLain et al. 2014). In this session, we seek to engage diverse and novel means of thinking the commons. We see potential for research on the commons to interface with a range of areas, including engagements with the commons in Black, Latinx, and Indigenous geographies, migration and mobilities studies, legal geographies, fiscal geographies, feminist and queer geographies, and more-than-human geographies. Through a renewed conversation on the commons, we seek to explore commoning as a technology of power, a relational process, and counterhegemonic project (McCarthy 2005).
Organizers: John Casellas Connors & Kelly Kay
Please submit abstracts to John Casellas Connors at jpcc@tamu.edu by 15 December 2023.
Modality: In-person