Commoning, Community Economies and the Politics of Care   

How gender relations are being shaped in emerging practices of commoning, community economies and work of care for families and communities in successful strategies of ‘living well together’.

This theme will focus on in-depth case studies in six countries of commoning experiments. Special attention will be placed on the relationships between gender relations and resource extraction and governance to understand how commoning can add to transformation of sustainability outcomes. The individual projects will have a strong focus on the Global North (Germany, Spain, Italy, Belgium, Scotland and Japan) as well as the Global South (India and Indonesia). The PhDs will benefit from the on-going relations with communities where WEGO beneficiaries and partners are actively engaged. The projects will examine how changing gender relations in rural communities have come under pressure from changing resource depletion as well as policy changes that have transformed the political economy of small-scale communities.

The shared framework will look at how communities are being transformed into more resilient and sustainable ones by exploring:

  1. ‘commoning’ efforts to promote the recovery of their food security and their communities;
  2. care practices in interconnected spaces, the enterprise, its members’ households and embedded communities and environments;
  3. subjectivities (masculinities and femininities) to create and enable a more inclusive community and commitment to place;
  4. market rationalities in the shift to alternative ideas of sustainable livelihoods;
  5. entrepreneurial practices and resource management by community groups linking rural producers and urban consumers; and
  6. political and ecological consequences of new value chains and how they intersect with notions of class, gender, religion (caste) and age.

handshake diagram family diagram meeting diagram

PhD Topics

  1. Community, commoning and care in the ruins of post-oil palm landscapes in Indonesia
  2. Eating relations: community economies, belonging and place-based food in the megacity Chennai, India
  3. The politics of care and defining the good life: elderly women’s community food economies in rural Japan
  4. Transformation of small-scale fishing communities
  5. The politics of food in urban southern Europe
  6. Women organizations in gendered economic landscapes in rural Italy