Enterprising new worlds : social enterprise and the value of repair

In this chapter, we have shied away from essentialist notions of social enterprise and maintained a commitment to diverse motivations. We have proposed decolonial love, Metta teachings of loving kindness and routine care and maintenance as three interrelated socially enterprising activities that shift affective economic registers and enact the social in transformative ways. We have amplified small narratives of kindness and repair in the broken worlds of Cambodia where a population tries to recover from trauma while past perpetrators continue to assume power, and of Canada where neoliberal concentration of land and resources continues to deny basic social justice. We have suggested that through social enterprising involving the routine maintenance of our collective world and reciprocal acts of decolonial loving kindness, the pain of a suffering and damaged world can be softened a little. Perhaps this pain can be mingled with hopeful dispositions premised on the appreciation of daily collective work, however mundane it may seem. Through allowing ourselves to be affected by others through this work, and by refusing to know too much, we are called to be open to possible enterprising activities that undo harm and maintain, repair and revitalize loving pedagogical relations with our human and non-human kin.