Monday Nov. 19 * 730-930 pm

FORTNIGHTS - Rhizome's communal learning series is untaught and unled. Our discussion/action groups are an opportunity for people to learn about a topic by reading, discussing, and then experimenting with the ideas that grow out of our discussions.

During the 2016-17 season Rhizome DC’s Fortnights held a reading and discussion group on Gilles Deleuze/Felix Guatari and Guy Debord’s Situationist International. The 2018/19 sessions will employ an even more participatory format, which will encourage everyone to present an author or reading of her/his choice in the area of social justice. Readings are available here: https://rhizomefortnightsdc.wordpress.com/

At this meeting we will discuss the essay, “Cultivating Community Economies: Tools for Building a Liveable World” by J.K. Gibson-Graham & the Community Economies Collective. The essay comes out of the author’s Diverse Economies project in which they* contemplate the possibility of alternative forms of economy and politics outside of capitalism or socialism. To do this they “imagine ‘the economy’ differently—as something that is created in specific geographical contexts and in historically path-dependent ways.” The project “outlines a strategy for taking back the economy, for representing it in a way that dislodges the discursive dominance of capitalist economic activity and reclaims it as a contested space of representation.” To accomplish this requires a deep accounting of history and ethnography to devise a kind of taxonomy of alterative economic forms based upon a variety of alternative values and relationships such as reciprocity, gift giving, cooperative labor, and self-provisioning. [*J.K. Gibson-Graham are actually two authors publishing under a single pen name: feminist economic geographers Julie Graham and Katherine Gibson]