Short Abstract:

Our panel invites participants to reflect on the relationship between commoning value (sharing resources for living well) and common values (sharing a notion of the good), and what it means to hold these “in common” - beyond projections of sameness and difference.

Long Abstract:

Our panel invites participants to reflect on the relationship between commoning value (sharing resources for living well) and common values (sharing a notion of the good), and what it means to hold these “in common.” Sylvia Federici’s assertion that “there are no commons without a community” emphasizes that commons are not just shared resources but deeply relational: dependent on collective action and rooted in care, mutual aid, and regeneration. David Graeber’s theory of value highlights that a diversity of values arise in human (inter)action and manifest their importance in relation to desired futures. While the concept of community can elide the hierarchies, inequalities, exclusions, and the suppression of difference, an emphasis on differentiation may also replicate, and re-scale, a problematic sense of sameness – whether of values, ontology, identity or positionality. In both approaches, commoning values involves social processes by which value and values, sameness and difference, what is common and what is “uncommon,” are generated at the same time.

We suggest that envisioning “new commons” as an emancipatory, resistive social practice also demands interrogating forms of value generation rooted in projections of sameness and difference. Instead of taking “the new commons” as project for re-scaling the circulation of values, we ask:

How may values be generated or held “in common” without resorting to equivocations and divisions? How may common values and what is commonly valued emerge as the basis of new solidarities, and defy appropriations by state or market?

Our panel welcomes papers addressing these issues empirically and/or theoretically.

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