Solidarity Economy, Transition, Worldmaking–this is the broad, ongoing engaged ethnographic research that provides a foundation for and fuels BSE teaching and learning efforts. We are interested in exploring and advancing the conditions that enable individuals and communities to truly imagine, desire, and organize around other economies and other ways of being in the world. BSE Coordinator Boone Shear is currently working with Penn Loh on a book that extends from this 2022 article and the 2023 NPQ adaptation.
Pay-What-You-Can, Beyond Market Exchange: Participatory Research with Stone Soup Cafe (2024-2025)— Social Thought and Political Economy Alum, Abby Brooks and Boone Shear are working with Stone Soup Cafe to help envision and support their efforts around better aligning their Pay-What-You-Can model with their own vision and mission.
We are conducting a series of interviews and conversations with Stone Soup leadership and will be producing a report and a zine intended to help Stone Soup create community awareness and deepen understandings of the pay-what-you can model and help identify tensions and openings for a deepening of mutual aid.
Update: As part of this ongoing research, we have produced pop-ed zine for Stone Soup community and beyond about Pay-What-You-Can that you can access here (fall 2024) as well as a report to assist Stone Soup’s efforts to more deeply embody a politics of mutual aid. You can access the PDF version of the report here and download the print version here.
Mapping Land Decommodification This research began in spring 2024 as a partnership between Anthropology 341 and the Community Scholars Program. Initial student research began to catalog land decommodication efforts including Land Back projects, Community Land Trusts, and Ecovillages. This work is being carried forward by the team of Deborah Keisch, Abby Brooks, Avery Conrad, and Boone Shear through qualitative research and mapping. Ultimately, we intend to create a storymap of land decommodification efforts in what is colonially known as the United States to help reframe land and livelihoods, showcase economic and worlding possibilities, and envision a politics of becoming
Student Well-Being, Desire, and Post-capitalist Belonging this ongoing research collaboration runs through the Mutual Aid Project at UMass and involves many undergraduate student co-researchers and collaborators. We are researching changing conditions at the university and conducting interviews to better understand how students are experiencing and desiring being in the world.This work has helped to further inform MAP’s efforts and has thus far resulted in the publication of this short essay, and a subsequent zine.
Mapping UMass’s Diverse Economies This project, launching in Spring 2025, will create a storymap of UMass’s Diverse Economies and Happenings.
WSIP Fellows BSE has partnered with the World Studies Interdisciplinary Project to help shepherd three Mellon Foundation Internships. BSE has connected these fellows to two of our collaborators: Cooperation Vermont and Land in Common. We meet regularly as a group with other BSE graduate students to help support each others learning and efforts. BSE also organizes a reading group involving the fellows and other students and faculty.
Summer of 2025 Research Fellows: Will Cheney, Raihan Rahman, and Upasana Goswami (with Boone Shear on the far left) are completing three projects:
- Working with Cooperation Vermont to help create a knowledge commons for land-based community organizations in Vermont
- Working with Land in Common to help develop a cohort-based learning model for moving land from individual owners and into commons
- Working with Building Solidarity Economies to help develop a pop-ed game around economic subjectivity and desire
Jeff Coyne is a graduate student in the Community Engaged Research Program (CERP). Jeff is working closely with local community members who are increasingly desiring to live cooperatively on and through land. Jeff is exploring the converging reasons and desires for ways of living beyond individual property ownership as housing becomes less accessible, social relationships become more alienated, and land continues to be commodified. As part of his research, Jeff is producing a resource that pulls together stories, strategies, and tools the can help groups and communities to re-imagine and organize livelihoods.
CERP Student Avery Conrad‘s research involves weaving together university-community collaborations. In addition to working on the mapping land decommodification project, Avery is working with Land in Common to research land allocation principles and practices as they have existed “outside” of or have attempted to reject market relations. Avery’s thesis reflects on the collaborative research and teaching and learning projects carried out in Anthropology 341 during the spring 2024 semester, exploring how they are constitutive of a growing worlding politics at the level of subjectivity and relations.
Rethinking the Commons and Commoning through Place-Based Assemblages Meredith Degyansky and Boone Shear are drawing from and reflecting on years of ethnographic work in and as part of activist communities who are attempting to re-design conditions of life. Our aim is to explore and theorize how “the commons” is or might yet be manifesting as already interdependent relations of beings, with a deep attention to place. We hope to better locate an embodied and constructivist politics for reweaving relations amidst an increasingly incoherent and unraveling capitalist modernity.
Other research is being conducted through Anthropology 341 and other BSE courses and containers.
BSE also is creating a series of zines exploring and explaining the theories and practices animating economic possibility and worlding politics.
buildingsolidarityeconomies.com 