Oral Presentation Institute of Australian Geographers & The New Zealand Geographical Society Conference 2014

Becoming ‘more-than-subjects’ of community economies (14130)

Ann Hill 1
  1. The Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia

Increasing environmental and climatic uncertainty calls for a re-working of ourselves as economic subjects. Geographers re-thinking economy in this new geological epoch are already examining how individuals and communities work up ethical actions in ways that build community economies. Taking things one step further, here I re-think human specialness and re-think economic subjects as the ones, who think, decide, speak and act in the deliberative ethico-political moments that construct community economies. My starting place is not whether our humanness is inextricably linked to earth others, rather how (Head and Gibson 2012). Specifically I consider ways in which we might begin to think about ourselves as ‘more-than-subjects’ and part of human-nonhuman ‘ethical assemblages’ that act collectively much like a super-organism. We now know that we must go onward in a different mode of humanity or else we will not go onward at all (Plumwood 2007; also see Gibson-Graham and Roelvink 2009). Indeed the question is not whether we must re-work ourselves but how. How might we re-work ourselves as subjects of community economies in the Anthropocene through learning new economic habits whereby a collective ‘we’ decides, speaks and acts ethically?