Short Abstract:

Property and access to it are central to the organization of inequality and hierarchy in societies. This panel explores the contested dynamics of property transfers from above and below through concepts such as expropriation, dispossession, collectivization, and commoning.

Long Abstract:

Property and access to it play a pivotal role in shaping inequality and hierarchy in societies. This panel focuses on transfers of or struggles over property and related attempts at commoning or uncommoning. We are interested in the entangled dynamics of expropriation and dispossession from above and moves toward collectivization and commoning from below in contemporary conflicts over property. "New enclosures" (Federici 2018) drive the dispossession of private or common property for infrastructure expansion, resource extraction and border processes. These forms of uncommoning face new kinds of collectivization movements. Examples include the ballot initiative "Deutsche Wohnen Enteignen" struggling to common housing, or movements around the East African Crude Oil Pipeline, which resist the forced expropriation of land for a pipeline project.

This panel engages with the politics of property transfers to understand the utopias and dystopias of un/commoning. By juxtaposing the different directions, we seek to understand how property transfers from above and from below are enabled, valued, and known. When and where do property relations and transfers become contested? How are they legitimized, how are they imagined differently?

We seek to foster a conversation between anthropologists, activists, or hybrid forms of epistemic practice. We invite people who are involved in and study social movements of commoning, socialization, and collectivization, as well as those who study expropriation and dispossession. And we especially welcome papers that bring these projects of bottom-up and top-down transfer into conversation.

Propose paper