Researching Postcapitalist Possibilities: pedagogy as resubjectivation

Drawing on decades of place-based action research to make other economies possible, members of the Community Economies Institute (CEI) have developed a range of anticapitalist pedagogies. Most recently these pedagogies have informed the CEI Summer/Winter School on the theme of Researching Postcapitalist Possibilities. Having run the ten-day program for three years with 120 participants, we are now in a position to reflect on what we have learned about anticapitalist pedagogies and teaching radical economics. We argue that even though the school’s curriculum covers the distinctive Community Economies approach what is perhaps more important are the pedagogical exercises and principles that we use to help transform how participants think of themselves as activists, artists, practitioners, and researchers, and how they understand their role in making other economies possible. We discuss how the school uses appreciative, experimental, and collaborative modes of working to provide participants with a taste of what it might mean to step aside from the critical mode that characterizes much academic training, and to adopt the stance of a researcher oriented toward engendering possibility in the world.