Aimilia Voulvouli and Alexandros Kioupkiolis from the Heteropolitics team, along with Maribel Casas-Cortes,
will host this panel on alternative politics, ethnographies and the commons, fleshing out ideas we have
been discussing and developing both theoretically and in field research on how ethnographies of social mobilizations, grassroots initiatives and new civic practices can help us to re-imagine and remake radical democratic politics in our times

Check out here for more information

https://nomadit.co.uk/easa/easa2018/conferencesuite.php/panels/6588

Alter-politics, commons and ethnographies for another world
Location SO-D207
Date and Start Time 17 Aug, 2018 at 09:00
Sessions 2
Convenors

Aimilia Voulvouli (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki) email
Maribel Casas-Cortes (Wenner Gren Anthropological Foundation) email
Alexandros Kioupkiolis (Aristotle University) email

Mail All Convenors
Short abstract

Our panel aims at exploring ethnographic engagement with communities practicing alternative politics that revolve around shared/common resources aspiring thus to contribute to the emerging field of the anthropology of the commons and the wider ethnographic literature on alternative politics
Long abstract

Recent times have been marked by a global financial crisis and a neoliberal hegemony that have driven large parts of the population into depression, resignation and escape, spreading disaffection with the current state of global democracy. Nevertheless, alongside resignation and escape, we can also witness the rise of alternative practices of self-governance, community building and democratic politics.

Emerging community initiatives that self-organise around common endeavours such as social economy initiatives, civic engagement in municipal politics, digital networks, communities of migrants and solidarity groups that self-organise to face the defects of official migrant policy realise and propose different paradigms of political engagement. Based on principles of self-reconstruction and self-governance, such communities practice alternative politics that revolve around shared/common resources, produced and managed by the community itself. At the same time, they engage in knowledge production around alternative notions of the political.

Our panel aims at exploring ethnographic engagement with such ‘alter-political’ communities. We seek contributions examining the character and practices of collective action which revolves around shared resources and promotes alternative politics beyond the established mainstream political and market apparatus. Key questions to be tackled include, among others:

How can we articulate already existing anthropological knowledge of collective action with fieldwork on the commons?

Which modus vivendi and forms of subjectivity are unfolding in the context of such collectivities?

How is the collective subject constituted through practices and knowledge production in the framework of such groups?

How do contemporary ethnographies of political processes problematize or stimulate and enrich political theory?

This is a brief report on the fieldwork in Bologna, Italy,
as conducted by the PI.

We post it in a draft form, because it conveys a concise and illustrative
idea of our approach, containing some preliminary conclusions of Heteropolitical
research and some interesting points about commons and the political
in the contemporary Italian context.

Alter-politics and commons in Bologna 4 -10 June 2018

Illuminating, critical and constructive discussion of how law is implicated in the promotion
of alternative politics of the commons in the contemporary Italian context by leading
scholars engaged in the field

In 10-12 July 2018, the first scheduled workshop of Heteropolitics took place
at the University of Torino, consisting of the main research team of the project
(A. Vesco, M. Zechner, A.Voulvouli, A. Kioupkiolis) and six participants, who
are researchers, academics and activists.

The workshop discussed mainly contemporary social movements and civic politics in Italy,
as well as the relationship between law, politics and the promotion of the commons
in the Italian context.Heteropolitics_Seminar program_Turin_July 2018

2nd Version of Conference Proceedings Heteropolitics September 2017

Conference Proceedings Heteropolitics Sep 2017 Final Version [EPUB]

Alexandros Kioupkiolis and Antonio Vesco from Heteropolitics research group participated last week in the Commons & Cities workshop at Teatro dell’Asilo in Naples.

Υοu can find the workshop programme here.