25 April 2022 16.00-17.30 UK GMT – Transforming Local Infrastructures: Care, Commons and Remunicipalisation
A collective infrastructure for care requires institutions that can organise and allocate the necessary resources. As the care crisis has intensified, including during the pandemic, people have pooled their capacities and resources in local networks of mutual aid and practices of commoning. At the same time, remunicipalisation movements in Europe and elsewhere have sought to reverse privatisation and bring services back into the public hands of municipalities and local authorities. Key to these initiatives has been the elimination of the profit motive and the rollback of corporate control over key utilities, especially where this has had detrimental effects on universal access, quality of service provision and costs. Remunicipalisation seeks to devise alternative ownership, access and decision-making models that are not orientated towards financial profit. In this seminar we will discuss how practices of commoning and (re)municipalisation can help to create bottom-up and inclusive infrastructures of care, and what the potentials and challenges might be.
Speakers: Emma Dowling (Tenure-Track Professor for the Sociology of Social Change, University of Vienna), Jo Littler (Professor of Social Analysis and Cultural Politics at City, University of London) and Manuela Zechner (facilitator, artist and postdoctoral researcher at the Friedrich-Schiller University of Jena)
Discussant: Bertie Russell (Research Fellow at the Autonomous University of Barcelona).
Chair: Amy Horton (Lecturer in Economic Geography, University College London).