My PhD journey — aim and objectives

I am currently working towards my first deadline due at the three month point. Along with a 2000 word critique of at least four papers, I have to propose a deliverable. The deliverable will be due at the nine month point. This is 5000–10000 word piece. Could be a lit review, a methodology, whatever I decide with my supervisors. Right now it feels like I have a big box of puzzle pieces from more than one puzzle with an aim to complete just one. I must remember to not be over ambitious with my aim. Not to try and wedge puzzle pieces from other puzzles in.

Returning to my original proposal helps to centre me. Its title A comparative ethnography of Diverse and Solidarity economies in the UK and the EU.

AIM

To discover cultural practices that contribute to Diverse and Solidarity economies and their effectiveness in place-based development.

OBJECTIVES

• To investigate how place-based development emerges from Diverse and Solidarity economies in the UK and the EU.
• To investigate and understand how cultural practices inform and contribute to Diverse and Solidarity economies.
• To understand some of the barriers these alternatives economies face as they operate within the dominant economic model.

Anthropology has countless examples of cultural practices that sit outside of capitalist modes of production and consumption that are an integral part of the a local economy and its continued development (or perhaps maintenance is a better way to think). But I am a 21st century UK based anthropologist. Decolonisation of academia is an important process. Whilst it would be impossible to not make significant references to the global south and its more recognisable solidarity economies my focus has to be the global north, and specifically UK, where capitalism has been more efficient at suffocating any alternatives.

Thinking again about the care economy, the invisible bedrock of capitalism. Capitalism and the industrial revolution would not or could not have thrived without the unpaid labour of women and children in the global north…

…and still I keep coming back to our relationship with plants and their agency. How their invisible labour is also essential part of our existence, of an economy … of any ecological system.

I am attending the social and solidarity economy and the commons international conference in Lisbon in November. The conference is leading with “the relational ethics and practices underlying the sympoietic processes (Haraway, 2016) by which humans and non-humans collectively produce autopoietic social-ecological systems”.

Sympoietic — collective creation, organisation

Autopoietic — the capacity of living cells to reproduce and organise themselves (Varela and Maturana 1972). Haraway prefers the term Sympoietic

I have a good friend, an anarchist, who lives a couple of hours north of Lisbon on his own piece of land. It’s been a good few years since we last spent time together. I hope to visit him after the conference.

Maybe Portugal will gift me some insights …

I have a hypothesis. Spaces that create fertile conditions for activities of solidarity are less available in the UK. If this is true I have my own ideas as to why. But perhaps I need to test that hypothesis. A return to the commons. Maybe it is the commons that provide spaces of experimentation. I’ll see what Elinor Ostrom is saying on this.

I need to investigate and find some examples of spaces of solidarity in the UK and the EU.

After visiting the BASE centre in Bristol for the Solidarity Economy Association event I am now considering the potential of focus groups as part of my methodology. A group can bounce ideas off of each other…

With plants in mind I have begun reading Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. A gift from a friend which arrived in the post at exactly the right time for my existential mindset. I am already in love with her writing …

“Plants know how to make food and medicine from light and water, and then give it away”. (p.10)

It is moving me further toward thinking about spaces of solidarity co-created by plants and humans and how culture develops from those mutual relationships. This area of enquiry is not new to me and has a lot in common with my masters research on the human-cannabis relationship.