Call for Papers: 2014 RGS Annual Conference, London 26-29 August 2014

From co-production to alternative futures: social movements, common(s) and ‘other values’

Sponsored by the Geographies of Justice Research Group

“On one side, a social force called capital pursues endless growth and monetary value. On the other side, other social forces strive to rearrange the web of life on their own terms” (De Angelis, 2007).

This session aims to bring together critical geographers and researchers from affiliated disciplines to explore the contradictions, tensions and potentialities of co-production, in exploring  ‘other values’, the common(s) and social change. De Angelis (2007) identifies the way ‘other values’ are created through social movements engaging in resistive practices, the co-production of alternatives, and the way in which they resist, subvert and/or subsist with the capitalist extraction of value from our activity.

Related to the co-production of these ‘other values’ is the defence of existing and collective construction of new heterogeneous forms of common(s). Geographers have been increasingly examining commons and commoning through work ranging from research into ‘actually existing commons’ (Eizenberg, 2011), such as the ‘urban commons’ (Jeffrey et al. 2012; Chatterton, 2010; Hodkinson, 2012; Chatterton et al, 2013) to more abstract theoretical and conceptual  engagements (Hardt & Negri, 2009; Jeffrey et al, 2011). However, whilst many of these debates highlight the potentiality of the common(s) as part of wide-ranging social change, as George Caffentzis has examined, commons are not inherently anti-capitalist, and are being increasingly utilized as part of a strategy of austerity led ‘neoliberalism plan b’ (2010).

In this session we are interested in papers which explore the way ‘other values’, capitalist value and the commons intersect around social movements and struggle.

•         Experiments in co-producing other values – including contradictions and tensions

•         Examples of everyday life in capitalist and anticapitalist commons

•         Experiments of radical praxis in, against and beyond value

•         Collective co-production of alternative futures

•         Responses to isolated individualism- collective responses to precarity and resistive politics

•         What does it mean for academics to co-produce knowledge with(in) movements?

•         What could a co-produced alternative academia look like?

·         Horizontality and the production of ‘other values’


Please send a proposed abstract of 200-300 words, together with a title to André Pusey (University of Leeds, [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>) or Victoria Habermehl (University of Leeds, [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>) by 20th February, 2014.


Expected format: 20-minute papers (inc. 5-minutes each for Q&A), and panel discussant