Symposium on Rethinking Postcapitalist Politics: Building Solidarity Against Racialized Extraction (2023)
Co-edited with Maliha Safri, the symposium extends from the the existential limits of capitalist modernity are coming more fully into view. If we follow the insights of social-movement activists and communities around the world, the current crises are not just symptomatic of capitalism but manifestations of a deeper crisis in civilization—a crisis that is exposing and bringing to incoherence what John Law (Citation2015) refers to as a “one-world metaphysics” that posits a single container universe, or one-world world. Instead, we should learn to ask how communities and movements are further advancing other ways of being, other realities. That is what symposium contributors do: dive deeply into world making as practiced by indigenous Lakota land and water protectors, quilombo maroon communities in Brazil, artisans from the potter caste in Kolkata, members of informal rotating and savings clubs in Ghana, and solidarity economies in Massachusetts.
You can access the Introduction here and much of the symposium open access.
Conjunctural Politics, Cultural Struggle, and Solidarity Economy: An Interview with Kali Akuno (2023)
In this expansive conversation, we explore the current political-cultural conjuncture in the United States. Thinking through the responses to the pandemic and the Floyd Rebellion, Akuno analyzes the violence of and tensions between an escalating white supremacy, on one hand, and an intractable (neo)liberalism that is attempting to capture and channel the energies and ideas of the Left, on the other. Akuno locates direction for the Left amid the flourishing of mutual-aid projects and the possibility of a politicized solidarity-economy movement that can fight for and build practices, relationships, and institutions beyond the limitations of the market, the state, and what is deemed to be practical.
Shear, Boone W. 2023. Conjunctural Politics, Cultural Struggle, and Solidarity Economy: An Interview with Kali Akuno. In Jackson Rising Redux: Lessons on Building the Future in the Present. Edited by Kali Akuno & Matt Meyer. PM Press.
Earlier versions of this conversation appeared Pandemic and the Crisis of Capitalism: A Rethinking Marxism Dossier. Brighton,MA: ReMarxBooks. 7-17. and Rethinking Marxism 33:1
Fight and Build: Solidarity Economy as Ontological Politics (2022)
This article, co-authored with Penn Loh, explores the potential of solidarity economy movements to create and sustain other worlds (a pluriverse) beyond capitalism and other dictates of dominant modernity (such as white supremacy, patriarchy). It draws from our many years of involvement in solidarity economy movements in Massachusetts. It is part of a special issue in the journal Sustainability Science on Alternatives to Sustainable Development: What can we Learn from the Pluriverse in Practice?
Direct link to the essay is here
Loh, Penn and Boone W. Shear. 2022. Fight and Build: Solidarity Economy as an Alternative to Development. In Pluriverse in Practice. Edited by Shivani Kaul, Bengi Akbulut, and Julie-Francois Gerber, and Federico Demaria. Sustainability Science. 17: 1207-1221
Towards an Ontological Politics of Collaborative Entanglement: Teaching and Learning as Methods Assemblage (2020)
In this essay I reflect on and theorize efforts to teach, learn, and advance solidarity economy, a movement and design project to create the conditions for community determination and collective well-being. I draw from five years of ethnographic work and two years of teaching efforts to reassemble the resources at hand into a pedagogical intervention along the lines of what Jon Law (2004) describes as a “methods assemblage,” a set of practices, techniques, and relations that work to organize and condense particular realities. I explore how a methods assemblage of solidarity economy can open epistemological, ideological, and material trajectories toward other ways of being in the world.
Shear, Boone W. 2020. Towards an Ontological Politics of Collaborative Entanglement: Teaching and Learning as a Methods Assemblage: Cultivating Solidarity Economies in Massachusetts. Collaborative Anthropologies. 12: 1-2 (1-23).
From Worker -Self Directed Enterprise to Solidarity Economy Movement (2019)
In Transcending Capitalism Through Cooperative Practices, Mulder shows how exploitation, and non-exploitation, can be analytically discerned, and she describes some various contexts in which non-exploitation exists. Mulder’s analysis, analytical approach, and contextual descriptions, surface and prompt important questions around the conditions of possibility for imagining and actualizing economic difference and transformation. To help elaborate and begin to address these questions, I turn to a growing movement in Massachusetts in which communities are crafting and organizing around their own conditions of possibility in innovative and powerful ways.
Learning Away from Neoliberalism (2017)
In this essay, I envision the university, not simply as a discreet institution with formal boundaries to attend to and defend from neoliberal and conservative assaults, but as a location of possibility from which to locate and advance projects that connect students and others to the possibility of other economic worlds.
Go here for access to the essay
Shear, Boone W. 2017. Learning Away of Neoliberalism: Lines of Connection to Other Worlds. In Anthropologists Witnessing and Reshaping the Neoliberal Academy. Edited by Tracye Heatherington and Filippo M. Zerilli. ANUAC 6:1: 77-82.
Learning Under Neoliberalism: Ethnographies of Governance in Higher Education (2017)
As part of the neoliberal trends toward public-private partnerships, universities all over the world have forged more intimate relationships with corporate interests and more closely resemble for-profit corporations in both structure and practice. These transformations, accompanied by new forms of governance, produce new subject-positions among faculty and students and enable new approaches to teaching, curricula, research, and everyday practices. The contributors to this volume use ethnographic methods to investigate the multi-faceted impacts of neoliberal restructuring, while reporting on their own pedagogical responses, at universities in the United States, Europe, and New Zealand. Co-edited with Sue Hyatt and Susan Wright.
Hyatt, Susan Brinn, Boone W. Shear and Susan Wright. 2017. Learning Under Neoliberalism: Ethnographies of Governance in Higher Education. Berghan Books.
Solidarity Economy and Community Engagement: Emerging Cases in Three Massachusetts Cities. (2015)
Solidarity Economy is a movement that can build power within and across scales and win supportive policy and public resources. Using the development of SE in Boston, Worcester, and Springfield, Massachusetts as examples, the article discusses the possibilities and challenges for SE projects to negotiate across differing values and politics, racial and class divides, and the challenge of accessing startup capital and building finance.
Direct link to unpublished version
Loh, P. and Shear, B. 2015. “Solidarity economy and community development: emerging cases in three Massachusetts cities.” Community Development 46 (3): 244-260.
buildingsolidarityeconomies.com 