‘Optimism’, Place and the Possibility of Transformative Politics

Abstract

Some ten years on from the publication of the essay ‘Building Community Economies: Women and the Politics of Place’, I am struck by both the continued relevance of what Gibson-Graham laid out in this chapter and by the many changes that have occurred both on the world stage and in my place ‘closest in’ over the last decade. Globally we have seen a widespread and growing interest in experimenting with ‘more than capitalist’ economies, publically signalled, as Michal Osterweil and Yvonne Underhill-Sem point out, by Occupy, 15-M and the buen vivir, food sovereignty and solidarity economy movements, to name just the most well-known meshworks that are leading the charge to make other worlds possible. Closest in there has been the sad loss in 2010 of one half of the J. K. Gibson-Graham writing duo, when Julie Graham’s wonderful, but too short, life was extinguished by cancer and its aftermath.