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- Convenors:
-
Daniela Triml-Chifflard
(University of Marburg, Germany)
Inga Scharf da Silva (Saravá Berlin)
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- Format:
- Workshop
- Regional groups:
- Afroamerica
- Transfers:
- Open for transfers
- Location:
- Seminargebäude S13
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 30 September, -
Time zone: Europe/Berlin
Short Abstract
This workshop explores the transformative potential of the Black Commons framework to challenge capitalist resource management of commodification and exploitation, and to imagine alternative forms of collective resource management to address today's multiple socio-environmental crises.
Long Abstract
We aim to collectively explore the transformative potential of the "Black Commons" as a framework for imagining alternative forms of social life that challenge capitalist systems of commodification and exploitation. Black Commons center on the creation and preservation of shared resources, spaces, and social infrastructures by Black communities, cultivated through acts of resistance and survival.
Emerging in response to the violent domination and control over Black bodies, labor, and resources during and after slavery, Black Commons represent a radical alternative. Hidden spaces and practices allowed Black communities to claim autonomy beyond the reach of dominant power structures, reclaiming agency through collective action and mutual support. Grounded in distinct cosmologies and forms of knowledge, Black Commons emphasize a reciprocal relationship with the natural environment, fostering communal resilience and self-determination.
We invite participants to discuss the creativity and ingenuity embedded in Black commoning practices, and their potential to address today's multiple socio-ecological crises. Scholars, activists, and artists are encouraged to submit proposals for a panel exploring collective stewardship, resistance, and care within Black communities in the Americas and Europe.
Topics of interest include but are not limited to:
• Theoretical frameworks for understanding Black commons
• Historical and contemporary examples of Black commoning in rural and urban contexts
• Black communal economies, cooperative models, and mutual aid networks
• Intersection of Black commons with Black feminist thought
• Role of art, storytelling, and performance in shaping and preserving Black commons
• Environmental justice movements in Black communities
Accepted contributions
Session 1 Tuesday 30 September, 2025, -Contribution short abstract
Marronage sites in the Americas have a dual historical dimension: they are the result of the wounds caused by the colonial project (dispossession, enslavement), while at the same time being the result of healing practices (creation of the collective). The scar is the result of all of the above.
Contribution long abstract
Based on the analysis of written sources, landscape characteristics, and archaeological materials, I discuss the emergence and persistence of a particular landscape of freedom associated with the phenomenon of collective marronage in northern Colombia. The irruption and recurrence of this phenomenon throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the Montes de María region, allows me to trace the way in which maroons and their descendants transformed the asymmetrical power relations of slavery and created concrete spaces of freedom: the palenques (maroon settlements). These new sites of habitation are crossed by a double historical dimension: they are connected to the occurrence of events that hurt and cause wounds (enslavement and persecution), while at the same time being the result of acts of healing (creation of social relations and generation of spaces of collective care). I represent this dialectical condition of the production of space and the material culture that integrates it through the figure and metaphor of the scar. This makes visible the temporal and spatial transversality of the tension that accompanied the creation of community by Africans and their descendants during the colonial period.
Contribution short abstract
This paper theorizes gleaning as a 'minor tactic' of un/commoning in the Racial Capitalocene, positioning it not as a Eurocentric pre-capitalist 'custom' but as a practice (re)forming with (neo)liberal markets that offers distinct, if limited agency in everyday postcolonial life.
Contribution long abstract
This paper outlines and problematizes gleaning as a form of un/commoning in the Racial Capitalocene. Gleaning is an age-old practice grounded in the right of the subaltern to the remainder, and the obligation of the dominant to produce and/or grant access to this remainder under conditions of marginality. Drawing on the history of gleaning and its Eurocentric framing vis-à-vis contemporary empirical examples from the larger Global South and especially Senegal and Ghana, this paper aims to move beyond the portrayal of gleaning as a pre-capitalist 'custom' of commoning and shows how it is a vital, if often overlooked practice of everyday postcololonial life. Contemporary gleaning arrangements call upon moral registers of benevolence, neediness and marginality that see (re)formation in the advance of (neo)liberal markets. Thereby, gleaning transgresses common notions of moral economies: it does not necessarily stand in opposition to profit, yet introduces different assumption to capitalist principles such as accumulation, property or standardisation under the prerogative of the 'limit'. As such, gleaning, I trace, can be a key, if fragile livelihood practice especially for women that also allows to eschew labour relations or can figure as an integral part of and a means of reshaping labour relations. Adding to notions such as black commons, latent commons, peri-capitalist sites, undercommons or infrapolitics, gleaning as what I have termed a 'minor tactic' thus creates distinct, if entwined minor niches within hierarchical socio-economic relations and their dynamics of marginalisation, dispossession and ruination. Gleaning is thereby permeated by indeterminacy and limits and both affirms and decenters these relations, while breathing a sense of justice and figuring as a larger promise that questions the givenness of hierarchies, the character of work/labour and the establishment of property and value.
Contribution short abstract
Lisbon’s housing crisis disproportionately affects racialized residents in informally build neighborhoods. This paper explores how Black Commoning—mutual aid, care, and solidarity—shapes resistance to displacement, challenging racialized exclusions and envisioning alternative urban futures.
Contribution long abstract
Lisbon is facing a severe housing crisis that disproportionately affects racialized residents in informally built neighborhoods. Many of these areas emerged in the 1970s through postcolonial migration from Portugal’s former African colonies. While often marginalized, these neighborhood struggles are also examples of black commoning, where residents reclaim space, build solidarities, and negotiate agency in the face of displacement.
This paper explores how commoning emerges as both last resort and a political practice. Mutual aid networks, shared infrastructures of care, and collective organizing sustain long-term mobilization and contest exclusionary urban governance. Affective dynamics play a key role in bridging social differences within the housing movement. Anger and indignation are mobilized against state actors enforcing evictions and financial capital restructuring the city. At the same time, practices of care—such as attentive listening, communal meals, and organizing transportation between peripheral neighborhoods and the city center—forge solidarities and bind people to the movement. These acts of commoning not only resist capitalist extraction and state neglect but also create alternative urban life rooted in care.
This paper asks how the material and affective dimensions of black commoning shape resistance to urban displacement. It does so by showing how residents struggling against demolitions of their neighborhood negotiate through commoning practices the tensions between individual needs and collective commitments. By situating these housing struggles within the framework of Black Commoning, I argue that they are not just local phenomena but part of a broader history of negotiations of urban belonging, challenging racialized exclusions while envisioning alternative infrastructures of care and solidarity.