The Commonist Podcasts

In an age defined by capitalist systems that dominate our socioeconomic structures, the need for innovative perspectives and transformative theories has never been more pressing. “ Capital Redefined ,” crafted by S. A. Hamed Hosseini and Barry K. Gills, launches a pioneering scholarly endeavor to reconceptualize ‘capital’ and its intertwined value theory at a time when the resurgence of the ‘C wor...

Professor Marcus Foth - from Queensland University of Technology - Hosted by UON-FEDUA  Alternative Futures Research Hub Tuesday 10 Sep 2019, 10am – 2pm incl. lunch-breakThe turn to participation in smart cities was intended to increase the involvement of diverse, often marginalized, citizens in the design and use of networked sensing technologies. However, ideals of activism, citizen engagem...

Professor Bronwen Morgan (UNSW Law) and Dr. Joanne McNeill (UWS) discuss the insights gained by thinking about the ownership and governance of platform cooperatives across a range of sectors through the tri-fold perspective of legal, design and urban policy perspectives. They highlight how this provides an important complement to the more traditional focus on greater regulatory protection of preca...

Robyn Kaczmarek (Founder and Managing Director, The Co-operative Life), tells her story about how Australia’s first worker-owned cooperative delivers quality social care services and offers care workers a better deal.  Robyn Kaczmarek is the founder and managing director of The Co-operative Life, Australia’s first worker-owned cooperative in social care services. The cooperative began operati...

Dr Louise Crabtree (and James Brown) discuss how co-operative housing is demonstrating how to break away from developer-led models of housing to focus on people and community. Several case studies highlight key aspects of the model, what it means to do housing cooperatively and why we should embrace co-operative housing in pursuit of a better and alternative future.  James Brown is the CEO of...

Dr. Jarra Hicks (Co-Founder and Director of Community Power Agency) will discuss the work of the Community Power Agency is helping to support and build the capacity of community energy co-operatives.  Jarra is a passionate advocate, researcher and participant in the creation of community-owned renewable energy projects. She holds a PhD from University of New South Wales, and an Honors degree...

This panel brought together a group of people who have experience in designing, analyzing and implementing co-operative solutions to our most pressing everyday needs – work, energy, housing and care. The panel members introduced four case studies that demonstrate how the co-operative model has been used in the most innovative and practical ways to solve these problems at a grass roots level. &nbsp...

The Community Economies Research Network (CERN) is an international network of 200 scholars, activists, and artists working in locations throughout the world to enact a post-capitalist politics in economies understood to be already more than capitalist.  Seeing the economic landscape as intrinsically heterogeneous changes the optics of post-capitalism directing our gaze away from a Utopian ho...

As Marxist feminist political economists demonstrate reproductive labour is a key, oft, invisibilised feminised place, of value production (Federici 2004). As decolonial feminists demonstrate the raced and gendered body is faced with complex forms of onto-epistemological violences (Motta, 2018). The contemporary period has witnessed both the feminisation of precarious labour and the continuation o...

In a time of ecological breakdown on a planetary scale, governments, business and United Nations agencies advance the Green Economy idea and Sustainable Development Goals as panacea. These programs look to entrepreneurial partnerships and research on innovative product design to 'join the dots' of society, economy, and ecology. But a sex-gendered reading of the Green Economy exposes the full depth...

By Dr S A Hamed Hosseini at the International Sociological Association World Congress, in Toronto 2018. Monday, 16 July 2018: 11:30 Location: 713B (MTCC SOUTH BUILDING) Oral Presentation Seyed A. HOSSEINI FARADONBEH , The University of Newcastle, Australia Barry GILLS , University of Helsinki, Finland In 21st century, “Capital” requires a more comprehensive and applicable definition than merely a...

The systematic degradation of the commons must be contained and reversed if future generations are to survive and prosper. The air we breathe, the temperature in which we live and extreme weather events are now risking our very existence. How did we get into this mess? What contribution have corporations made towards creating the dire circumstances we face? What can we do to harness the power of m...

Whilst the energy transition from fossil fuels to renewables offers significant environmental benefits, the other transition—from a centralized to a distributed energy system—underpins a disruptive model for planning cities, towns and villages. A local energy micro-grid can power a local water micro-grid, which in turn can irrigate a local food system, offering a community the opportunity to harve...

Reconciling Social and Regional Policy with the Macroeconomic Constraints  Professor Martin Watts and Dr. James Juniper (University of Newcastle, Australia)  This Conference is focused on Alternative Futures and Regional Outcomes, as a means of creating a vision of an inclusive and sustainable future for us all. There is a tendency within Economics and other disciplines to extrapolate fr...

I offer a vision of a socially just and environmentally sustainable Australia that draws on the concept of democratic eco-socialism, a term which I along with Merrill Singer and Ida Susser coined over 20 years ago and conflates the notions of democratic socialism and eco-socialism. Following from my recent book Democratic Eco-Socialism as a Real Utopia (Berghahn, 2018), I delineate the following ‘...

The potential role of organized workers in combatting environmental problems and global warming is rarely discussed in academic considerations of these problems. For example, Ulrich Beck on The Risk Society ignores the role of working-class organisations when dealing with the question of how to confront ecological irresponsibility. The ecotopian imagination is similarly unreceptive to the potentia...

 Knowledges of the inner nature, deep structures and conflictual dynamism of capitalism potentially constitute a transformative cognitive Commons. Likewise, to achieve an inclusive understanding of the existing post-capitalist praxes and the imaginary visions of utopian futures require cumulative, collective and cooperative learning. Thus, theories of capital and the post-/counter-capital alt...

 Building an Earth Centred Future: Culture, Ethics, Law, Economy  Dr. Michelle Maloney   Australia faces a deeply challenging governance and leadership crisis, as many national and state political leaders continue to support unjust and ecologically damaging corporate agendas and continue to deny the current reality and future threats of climate change. However civil society is stepp...

 In Our Time: From Southern Neoliberalism to Cooperative Futures  Professor Emerita Raewyn Connell   The Hunter region has been through a sequence of changes that are distinctive, but in many ways reflect the wider story of Australian settler colonialism and postcolonial development. Reflecting on my own attempt to define a socialist agenda about forty years ago, I argue that s...

 Subverting the Corporate Form  by Jim Stanford for 2018 Alternative Futures Symposium UON   Alternative Futures and Regional Prospects Symposium Working across Differences, beyond Carbon, Capital and Commodity  Thursday 22nd & Friday 23rd of November 2018 Organisers: The University of Newcastle Alternative Futures Network, Common Alternatives Network ( http://thecommo...