J K Gibson-Graham
Biographic Data
| ID | 239762 |
|---|---|
| NAME | J K Gibson-Graham |
| GIVEN NAMES | J K |
| FAMILY NAME | Gibson-Graham |
| SIGNATURE | GIBSON-GRAHAM J K |
| AFFILIATIONS | Apple (Israel) |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 46 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1503 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 43 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1993 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 13 |
Responding with and for Joy
Reading for economic difference
This chapter discusses reading as a practice of knowledge production, contrasting that produced by reading for economic difference with that of the critical project of reading for capitalist dominance. It demonstrates how reading for economic difference makes subordinated economic identities and activities more visible, allowing for the possibility that they have independent agency. Deconstruction, queering and thick description are deployed to h…
The Handbook of Diverse Economies
Introduction to The Handbook of Diverse Economies: Inventory as ethical intervention
This introductory essay looks back on the origins of diverse economies as an approach to research, and looks forward to how it is developing in exciting new directions that have implications for action. It begins by elaborating why this kind of scholarship is timely, then discusses the contextual theoretical groundings of this field of study in the anti-essentialist scholarship of a number of disciplines. It introduces some critical thinking tech…
Economic Geography and Ethical Action in the Anthropocene: A Rejoinder
We are thrilled by Vicky Lawson’s deeply appreciative response to the Roepke Lecture and the written article. In her response, Vicky does more than we could ask for by inviting economic geographers to think with us about ways of reworking manufacturing (and other economic activities) that center on care for the well-being of people and of the planet. Vicky goes to the heart of our project by highlighting the importance we place on looking for the…
Roepke Lecture in Economic Geography-Economic Geography, Manufacturing, and Ethical Action in the Anthropocene
In a world beset by the problems of climate change and growing socioeconomic inequality, industrial manufacturing has been implicated as a key driver. In this article we take seriously Roepke’s call for geographic research to intervene in obvious problems and ask can manufacturing contribute to different pathways forward? We reflect on how studies have shifted from positioning manufacturing as a matter of fact (with an emphasis on exposing the ex…
La construction du commun comme politique post-capitaliste
Aujourd'hui la planète est confrontée à l'absence de gestion de communs vitaux tels que l'air, le climat, l'eau. Il importe de construire des modalités collectives de gestion de ces communs, impliquant le maximum de parties prenantes. Pour cela, il faut sortir du capitalocentrisme, parallèle au phallocentrisme dénoncé par les féministes, pour lequel le commun serait engendré inévitablement par les contradictions du capitalisme. Il vaut mieux anal…
Retomemos la economía: Una guía ética para transformar nuestras comunidades
Commoning as a postcapitalist politics 1
This chapter explores how the process of commoning offers a politics for the Anthropocene. It needs to step outside of the ways that the commons have generally been understood to reveal the political potential of communing. The chapter discusses the capitalocentric framing of the commons and raise concerns about how this framing limits the potential of commoning as a politics for the Anthropocene. Capitalocentrism names the way that a diversity o…
Social Sciences for an Other Politics
This book opens up a unique intellectual space where eleven female scholar-activists explore alternative forms of theorising social reality. These Women on the Verge ́demonstrate that a new radical subject ́one that is plural, prefigurative, decolonial, ethical, ecological, communal and democratic- is in the making, but is unrecognisable with old analytical tools. Of central concern to the book is the resistance of some social scientists, many of…
Manifesto for Living in the Anthropocene
The recent 10,000 year history of climatic stability on Earth that enabled the rise of agriculture and domestication, the growth of cities, numerous technological revolutions, and the emergence of modernity is now over. We accept that in the latest phase of this era, modernity is unmaking the stability that enabled its emergence. Over the 21st century severe and numerous weather disasters, scarcity of key resources, major changes in environments,…
Making Other Worlds Possible: Performing Diverse Economies
Authors' response
Rethinking the Economy with Thick Description and Weak Theory
In this paper I rehearse the thinking steps J. K Gibson-Graham developed in order to theorize diverse economies and reveal a landscape of economic difference. Reading with and against Clifford Geertz's 1973 essay "Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture," I discuss how "thick description" of diverse economic practices can be combined with weak theory to produce a performative rethinking of economy centered on the well-being of…
Take Back the Economy: An Ethical Guide for Transforming Our Communities
Postcapitalist Encounters with Class and Community
Being the Revolution, or, How to Live in a “More-Than-Capitalist” World Threatened with Extinction
Much of J. K. Gibson-Graham's work has been aimed at opening up ideas about what action is, both by broadening what is considered action (under the influence of feminist political imaginaries and strategies), and by refusing the old separation between theory and action. But the coming of the Anthropocene forced Julie and me to think more openly about what is the collective that acts. In this lecture I ask: what might it mean for a politics aimed …
A feminist project of belonging for the Anthropocene
At the core of J.K. Gibson-Graham's feminist political imaginary is the vision of a decentralized movement that connects globally dispersed subjects and places through webs of signification. We view these subjects and places both as sites of becoming and as opportunities for belonging. But no longer can we see subjects as simply human and places as human-centered. The ‘arrival’ of the Anthropocene has thrown us onto new terrain. Feminist critique…
Gibson-Graham, J.K. 1996: The end of capitalism (as we knew it): a feminist critique of political economy. Oxford: Blackwell
Book review: Gibson-Graham, J.K. 2006: A postcapitalist politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 360 pp. $70 cloth, $25 paper. ISBN: 978 0 8166 4803 0 cloth, 978 0 8166 4804 7 paper
Class And Its Others
Take Back the Economy: An Ethical Guide for Transforming Our Communities
If the Global Finance Crisis has taught us anything, it's that economics as we know it is not working. If global warming means anything, it's that we have to rethink how we live on this shared planet. Take Back the Economy is about making the economy work for people and the planet. It is intended for academic researchers, activists, students, community members and citizens interested in how they can contribute to a more just, sustainable and equi…
A Postcapitalist Politics of Dwelling: Ecological Humanities and Community Economies in Conversation
If our species does not survive the ecological crisis, it will probably be due to our failure to imagine and work out new ways to live with the earth, to rework ourselves and our high energy, high consumption, and hyper-instrumental societies adaptively. We struggle to adjust, because we're still largely trapped inside the enlightenment tale of progress as human control over a passive and 'dead' nature that justifies both colonial conquests and c…
Remarx: “Place-Based Globalism”: A New Imaginary of Revolution
Over the past several decades a revolutionary “politics of place” has emerged around the world, linked through globally accessible media, loosely coordinated federations, and international gatherings, most notably the World Social Forum. While traditional revolutionary politics confronts a single space of dominion, the politics of place imagines and creates multiple spaces of freedom and self-determination. It is a politics of the here and now, e…
Diverse economies: Performative Practices for `Other Worlds
How might academic practices contribute to the exciting proliferation of economic experiments occurring worldwide in the current moment? In this paper we describe the work of a nascent research community of economic geographers and other scholars who are making the choice to bring marginalized, hidden and alternative economic activities to light in order to make them more real and more credible as objects of policy and activism. The diverse econo…
Surplus Possibilities: Postdevelopment and Community Economies
Diverse economies: Performative Practices for `Other Worlds
How might academic practices contribute to the exciting proliferation of economic experiments occurring worldwide in the current moment? In this paper we describe the work of a nascent research community of economic geographers and other scholars who are making the choice to bring marginalized, hidden and alternative economic activities to light in order to make them more real and more credible as objects of policy and activism. The diverse econo…
Rethinking the Economy with Thick Description and Weak Theory
In this paper I rehearse the thinking steps J. K Gibson-Graham developed in order to theorize diverse economies and reveal a landscape of economic difference. Reading with and against Clifford Geertz's 1973 essay "Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture," I discuss how "thick description" of diverse economic practices can be combined with weak theory to produce a performative rethinking of economy centered on the well-being of…
A feminist project of belonging for the Anthropocene
At the core of J.K. Gibson-Graham's feminist political imaginary is the vision of a decentralized movement that connects globally dispersed subjects and places through webs of signification. We view these subjects and places both as sites of becoming and as opportunities for belonging. But no longer can we see subjects as simply human and places as human-centered. The ‘arrival’ of the Anthropocene has thrown us onto new terrain. Feminist critique…
The End of Capitalism (as we knew it): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy
This short piece introduces *The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It)*. It argues that the book is not about the end of capitalism as such, but about the end of a particular way of thinking about capitalism, a way that has characterized both Left and Right understandings of political economy. The book is a feminist critique of political economy that challenges the centrality of capitalist production and the adequacy of class as the primary axis of s…
An ethics of the local
Feminising the Economy: Metaphors, strategies, politics
Within contemporary feminism, common approaches to feminising the economy involve adding a sphere or sector or attributing a monetary value to women's unpaid labour. Each of these approaches is interested in creating an accurate representation of the real or 'whole' economy. But these representations are in the same lineage as mainstream economic conceptions; the economy remains a bounded entity that can be known by enumerating its parts. The 'ad…
Waiting for the Revolution, or How to Smash Capitalism while Working at Home in Your Spare Time
1993). Waiting for the Revolution, or How to Smash Capitalism while Working at Home in Your Spare Time. Rethinking Marxism: Vol. 6, No. 2, pp. 10-24
Identity and Economic Plurality: Rethinking Capitalism and 'Capitalist Hegemony
In the work of Chantal Mouffe, society is seen as structured by a hegemonic articulation, but one that is only temporarily fixed and always under subversion. Following Mouffe, in this paper I pursue the implications of theorizing 'the economy' as a hegemonic formation rather than as a fixed capitalist totality. What might it mean to understand 'the economic' as a provisional articulation of capitalist and noncapitalist activities and relations? H…
Area Studies after Poststructuralism
In this paper we address the question of 'what next after poststructuralism' through a reassessment of area studies. In a narrative of our own involvement with place-oriented research and institutions, we examine the traditional position of area studies in geography and anthropology and its reevaluation by poststructuralist scholars in a number of disciplines. We argue that both prestructuralist and poststructuralist treatments of areas are orien…
Queer(y)ing Capitalism in and out of the Classroom [1]
Much of our teaching and research in economic geography ends up affirming (or failing to question) the existence of a global, national or local capitalist economy. Using queer theory to open up a space of difference, this paper suggests ways of introducing students to a differentiated economic landscape, offering possibilities outside and beyond the capitalist 'norm'. Keywords: Queer TheoryEconomic GeographyPerformativityDifference
Being the Revolution, or, How to Live in a “More-Than-Capitalist” World Threatened with Extinction
Much of J. K. Gibson-Graham's work has been aimed at opening up ideas about what action is, both by broadening what is considered action (under the influence of feminist political imaginaries and strategies), and by refusing the old separation between theory and action. But the coming of the Anthropocene forced Julie and me to think more openly about what is the collective that acts. In this lecture I ask: what might it mean for a politics aimed …
Enabling Ethical Economies: Cooperativism and Class
This paper situates contemporary evaluations of the 'success' of Spain's Mondragon cooperative complex within a tradition of debate about the politics of economic transformation. It traces the long-standing suspicion of worker cooperatives among political and social analysts on the left, revisiting both the revolutionary and gradualist socialist critiques of cooperativism. Taking the set of problems identified by Beatrice and Sidney Webb as leadi…
Roepke Lecture in Economic Geography-Economic Geography, Manufacturing, and Ethical Action in the Anthropocene
In a world beset by the problems of climate change and growing socioeconomic inequality, industrial manufacturing has been implicated as a key driver. In this article we take seriously Roepke’s call for geographic research to intervene in obvious problems and ask can manufacturing contribute to different pathways forward? We reflect on how studies have shifted from positioning manufacturing as a matter of fact (with an emphasis on exposing the ex…
Querying Globalization
Remarx: “Place-Based Globalism”: A New Imaginary of Revolution
Over the past several decades a revolutionary “politics of place” has emerged around the world, linked through globally accessible media, loosely coordinated federations, and international gatherings, most notably the World Social Forum. While traditional revolutionary politics confronts a single space of dominion, the politics of place imagines and creates multiple spaces of freedom and self-determination. It is a politics of the here and now, e…
La construction du commun comme politique post-capitaliste
Aujourd'hui la planète est confrontée à l'absence de gestion de communs vitaux tels que l'air, le climat, l'eau. Il importe de construire des modalités collectives de gestion de ces communs, impliquant le maximum de parties prenantes. Pour cela, il faut sortir du capitalocentrisme, parallèle au phallocentrisme dénoncé par les féministes, pour lequel le commun serait engendré inévitablement par les contradictions du capitalisme. Il vaut mieux anal…
Capitalism Goes the “Full Monty”
Economic Geography and Ethical Action in the Anthropocene: A Rejoinder
We are thrilled by Vicky Lawson’s deeply appreciative response to the Roepke Lecture and the written article. In her response, Vicky does more than we could ask for by inviting economic geographers to think with us about ways of reworking manufacturing (and other economic activities) that center on care for the well-being of people and of the planet. Vicky goes to the heart of our project by highlighting the importance we place on looking for the…
Dilemmas of theorizing class
Pushed by our reviewers to revisit perennial (meta)theoretical questions and choices, we confront once again the dilemmas of theorizing. Should we emphasize the emptiness or fullness of categories? What historical baggage comes with our theoretical categories and what violence does theory do to history and geography? Must we sacrifice the heterogeneity within categories to constitute differences between them? Can a category function simultaneousl…
Intervenciones posestructurales
El posestructuralismo es una aproximación teórica al conocimiento y la sociedad que acoge la incertidumbre de los significados, el poder constitutivo del discurso y la efectividad política de la teoría y la investigación. Las autoras exploran tres conceptos/estrategias posestructuralistas -la deconstrucción, la genealogía y la performatividad- resaltando su uso en la geografía económica. El artículo concluye con una exploración acerca de la maner…
Waiting for the Revolution, or How to Smash Capitalism while Working at Home in Your Spare Time
1993). Waiting for the Revolution, or How to Smash Capitalism while Working at Home in Your Spare Time. Rethinking Marxism: Vol. 6, No. 2, pp. 10-24
Haunting Capitalism…in the Spirit of Marx and Derrida
(1995). Haunting Capitalism...in the Spirit of Marx and Derrida. Rethinking Marxism: Vol. 8, No. 4, pp. 25-39
Identity and Economic Plurality: Rethinking Capitalism and 'Capitalist Hegemony
In the work of Chantal Mouffe, society is seen as structured by a hegemonic articulation, but one that is only temporarily fixed and always under subversion. Following Mouffe, in this paper I pursue the implications of theorizing 'the economy' as a hegemonic formation rather than as a fixed capitalist totality. What might it mean to understand 'the economic' as a provisional articulation of capitalist and noncapitalist activities and relations? H…
Queer(y)ing Capitalist Organization
Querying Globalization
The End of Capitalism (as we knew it): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy
This short piece introduces *The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It)*. It argues that the book is not about the end of capitalism as such, but about the end of a particular way of thinking about capitalism, a way that has characterized both Left and Right understandings of political economy. The book is a feminist critique of political economy that challenges the centrality of capitalist production and the adequacy of class as the primary axis of s…
Capitalism Goes the “Full Monty”
Queer(y)ing Capitalism in and out of the Classroom [1]
Much of our teaching and research in economic geography ends up affirming (or failing to question) the existence of a global, national or local capitalist economy. Using queer theory to open up a space of difference, this paper suggests ways of introducing students to a differentiated economic landscape, offering possibilities outside and beyond the capitalist 'norm'. Keywords: Queer TheoryEconomic GeographyPerformativityDifference
Toward a Poststructuralist Political Economy
Re/presenting Class: Essays in Postmodern Marxism
Class Enchantment Part III
Class Enchantment Part III J.k. Gibson-Graham (bio) Class Enchantment, continued from Part II In the scene of Gaz and Dave dashing to the car we see a swerve away from wage labor; in the next scene Lomper and Guy swerve away from heterosexual masculinity and toward homosexual desire; and in the third and fourth scenes there are swerves toward what might be called “embodied communality.” Here we can begin to think about noncapitalist class relatio…
Class Enchantment Part V
Class Enchantment Part V J.K. Gibson-Graham (bio) Class Enchantment, continued from Part IV The Full Monty is, for us, about multiple productions — the making of masculinities released from the symbolic centrality of the erect phallus and manual labor;[11] the creation of new forms of community energized by pleasure, fun, eroticism and connection across all sorts of divides and differences; and experimentation with a communal class process in whi…
Class Enchantment Part IV
Class Enchantment Part IV J.K. Gibson-Graham (bio) Class Enchantment,continued from Part III The actual performance begins to take on reality from the energies of a community that forms around each of the participants to encourage him on. It’s almost as if the performance is a promise, an unreality to them all until these moments of community are enacted. The women gathered around the men actively call forth new performances of masculinity, braze…
Class Enchantment Part II
Class Enchantment Part II J.K. Gibson-Graham (bio) Class Enchantment, continued from Part I Brassed Off is a film of and about closure — not only the closure of the pit, but closure around a particular masculine identity, the closing of the era of working class politics, the closed and closed-off (hidden) nature of truth — whether it be the truth about the pit, or household finances, or health and death, or male emotions. The Full Monty, by contr…
Class Enchantment
Class Enchantment J.K. Gibson-Graham (bio) Since 1997, when I saw both films, I have been ruminating over the very different things that Brassed Off and The Full Monty have to say about class politics.[1] It’s almost as though one film was designated as the point of departure, serving up modernist class politics at the moment of its death, while the other shows us the way forward into a postmodern politics of class. But before I get into explorin…
Intervenciones posestructurales
El posestructuralismo es una aproximación teórica al conocimiento y la sociedad que acoge la incertidumbre de los significados, el poder constitutivo del discurso y la efectividad política de la teoría y la investigación. Las autoras exploran tres conceptos/estrategias posestructuralistas -la deconstrucción, la genealogía y la performatividad- resaltando su uso en la geografía económica. El artículo concluye con una exploración acerca de la maner…
Feminising the Economy: Metaphors, strategies, politics
Within contemporary feminism, common approaches to feminising the economy involve adding a sphere or sector or attributing a monetary value to women's unpaid labour. Each of these approaches is interested in creating an accurate representation of the real or 'whole' economy. But these representations are in the same lineage as mainstream economic conceptions; the economy remains a bounded entity that can be known by enumerating its parts. The 'ad…
An ethics of the local
Enabling Ethical Economies: Cooperativism and Class
This paper situates contemporary evaluations of the 'success' of Spain's Mondragon cooperative complex within a tradition of debate about the politics of economic transformation. It traces the long-standing suspicion of worker cooperatives among political and social analysts on the left, revisiting both the revolutionary and gradualist socialist critiques of cooperativism. Taking the set of problems identified by Beatrice and Sidney Webb as leadi…
Area Studies after Poststructuralism
In this paper we address the question of 'what next after poststructuralism' through a reassessment of area studies. In a narrative of our own involvement with place-oriented research and institutions, we examine the traditional position of area studies in geography and anthropology and its reevaluation by poststructuralist scholars in a number of disciplines. We argue that both prestructuralist and poststructuralist treatments of areas are orien…
Surplus Possibilities: Postdevelopment and Community Economies
Dilemmas of theorizing class
Pushed by our reviewers to revisit perennial (meta)theoretical questions and choices, we confront once again the dilemmas of theorizing. Should we emphasize the emptiness or fullness of categories? What historical baggage comes with our theoretical categories and what violence does theory do to history and geography? Must we sacrifice the heterogeneity within categories to constitute differences between them? Can a category function simultaneousl…
Remarx: “Place-Based Globalism”: A New Imaginary of Revolution
Over the past several decades a revolutionary “politics of place” has emerged around the world, linked through globally accessible media, loosely coordinated federations, and international gatherings, most notably the World Social Forum. While traditional revolutionary politics confronts a single space of dominion, the politics of place imagines and creates multiple spaces of freedom and self-determination. It is a politics of the here and now, e…
Diverse economies: Performative Practices for `Other Worlds
How might academic practices contribute to the exciting proliferation of economic experiments occurring worldwide in the current moment? In this paper we describe the work of a nascent research community of economic geographers and other scholars who are making the choice to bring marginalized, hidden and alternative economic activities to light in order to make them more real and more credible as objects of policy and activism. The diverse econo…
A Postcapitalist Politics of Dwelling: Ecological Humanities and Community Economies in Conversation
If our species does not survive the ecological crisis, it will probably be due to our failure to imagine and work out new ways to live with the earth, to rework ourselves and our high energy, high consumption, and hyper-instrumental societies adaptively. We struggle to adjust, because we're still largely trapped inside the enlightenment tale of progress as human control over a passive and 'dead' nature that justifies both colonial conquests and c…
Sociology (34 works) · Political science (27 works) · Law (23 works) · Economics (17 works) · Politics (17 works) · Philosophy (15 works) · Political Economy and Marxism (15 works) · Epistemology (14 works) · Capitalism (11 works) · Law (11 works)