ICS Seminar Series - Alex Baumann, Louise Crabtree, Ann Hill and Liam Magee

Date: Thursday 6 October 2016
Time: 11.30am–1pm
Venue: EE.G.36, Western Sydney University, Parramatta South campus

Alex Baumann, Louise Crabtree, Ann Hill and Liam Magee

Thinking in Common: the Commons

The second 'Thinking in Common' panel will focus on the concept of 'the commons' with four speakers presenting short interventions on the topic that emerge from their current research. Some of the questions we will be pursuing are: what are the various meanings for the commons and commoning and how does this term differently apply to biophysical, social, cultural and knowledge resources? How does the commons open up new ways to think about economy, democracy, ownership and open access? What are the limits and hazards of the commons? What are the connections between the commons, community and co-operation? In what ways are gift or sharing economies open to exploitation? What are the governance models for the commons and do they hollow out the state or demand its reconfiguration?

Could Public Housing Tenant Participation Provide a Basis for Viable Commons? - Alex Baumann

Social housing residents are broadly characterised as flawed citizens, many having 'failed' in two key hallmarks of neo-liberal citizenship; private housing and paid work. As such, state sponsored Tenant Participation programs endeavour to 'responsibilise' residents; first to get them involved, but ultimately to integrate them into paid work and private housing. As an alternative to this market agenda, my research explored residents' use of a new participation process where public land use is not positioned in flawed citizenship or dependency but rather in the age-old tradition of land commons (a foundation for productive local collaboration). My research demonstrated that this alternative framing of public tenure has potential to facilitate less dependent and more empowered public resident participation.

The Elephant in the Common Room: Property and Commons as Irreconcilable? - Louise Crabtree

Despite their growing popularity as a framing of theory and practice, commons remain peculiarly circumscribed to systems and spaces—such as community gardens, social enterprises, and virtual spaces—that in the main do not challenge or disrupt dominant property discourses and praxis. Indeed, commons frequently do a lot of fancy footwork around the private property elephant in the room. I am therefore interested in if and how real property law can be made to articulate core attributes of commons, or whether the birth of Western property law through enclosure has left a legacy of incommensurability and irreconcilability.

Temporalities and Commoning - Ann Hill

Garden-based commoning has long been regarded as a way to help communities survive and rebuild after crisis events in 'clock time' such as war, extreme weather or financial crisis. Commoning initiatives are often funded for a fixed term with the expectation that everything will happen in the project lifetime. But what happens when a project ends, does it lose its potency? In this panel segment I raise various questions for discussion based on my research of urban food gardening commoning projects in the Philippines 2008 to present day. Retracing my steps in quick time, I explain why I have taken a community economic theoretical approach to commoning and why more recently I have intersected community economic theory with the non-linear concepts of time. I consider - How might we think about commoning projects as events in time that are at the same time events of 'being in-common' (Nancy 2000) connected to timeless processes of creating, rebuilding, transforming lives, land, soil, food growing practices or other things? What might we gain from attending to the temporal multiplicity of commoning practice? What are the research and project funding implications of adopting such an approach?

Discerning the Digital Commons - Liam Magee

The commons is a powerful conceptual anchor for contemporary discussions of the digital. And certain types of digital production and reproduction - open source software, creative commons-licensed media, open standards - have reinvigorated broader debates of the commons and commoning. As a lens for considering the dispersed effects of the digital commons, I revisit briefly a case study of Microsoft's standardisation of office formats between 2005-2008, where the operationalisation of "openness" and the "commons" formed a discursive tactic between corporate and state actors. It illustrates that at least in the digital sphere, the commons can never be assumed as a benign background against which uncommon, privatised derivatives are established. Instead the very definitions of the commons are rhetorical instruments that delineate territories of collaboration, compromise, competition and conflict.

Biographies

Alex Baumann has lived and worked in a public housing community in the Blue Mountains for the past ten years. Alex has recently submitted his PhD looking at a re-framing of tenant participation in public housing. Where public tenure is characteristically conflated with welfare dependency, Alex is looking at the way that local unpaid collaboration on public land has direct parallels with the widespread economic tradition of commons.

Louise Crabtree is a Senior Research Fellow in the Institute for Culture and Society and the Office of the Pro Vice Chancellor, Engagement & Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Leadership. Her research focuses on participatory research practice and on the interfaces between sustainability, property, democracy and coloniality.

Ann Hill is an early career academic working part-time on the ICS-based ARC Discovery Project Strengthening Economic Resilience in Monsoon Asia. Currently she is also convening a Masters course on 'Engaging Communities in Change' at the University of Canberra. She is an economic geographer by training. For more than a decade she has worked as a community and diverse economies scholar. In her PhD, completed 2013, she examined urban food commoning in community economies in Mindanao and Manila in the Philippines.

Liam Magee is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Culture and Society. He researches the relationships between software and geography, with a particular focus on urban sustainability.