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On Babushkas and Postcapitalism:Theorising Diverse Economies from the Global East
No full textAs transformative visions for more just and sustainable societies multiply around the globe, the Diverse and Community Economies approach presents one of the most influential strategies to advance postcapitalist visions. In this paper, we contribute to this project based on our research and activism in the Global East, intended here as Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. We argue that engaging with the Global East is not only a matter of epistemic inclusivity but also a (too-often-neglected) opportunity to learn from a region with a history of dramatic economic transformation and diversity. We highlight examples of community economies already contributing to more-than-human wellbeing, and we present emerging theoretical insights concerning temporality, the multi-sitedness of the enterprise, and diverse economic subjectivities. With that, we articulate our ongoing research agenda and advance conversations with postcapitalist scholarship and politics
Building bridges between urban food activism and quiet Food Self-Provisioning practices:lessons from transdisciplinary participatory action research interventions in Eastern Estonia
No full textThis empirical contribution examines the potential of building bridges between urban community gardening and food activists (UFA) and the rather overlooked Food Self-Provisioning (FSP) practitioners at Eastern Estonian dachas – a Russian term for a plot of land with a seasonal allotment house used primarily for food production. The invisibility of FSP practices, and the lack of communication between UFA and FSP practitioners, has been identified as an important gap by recent literature on urban gardens’ sustainability potential. Using a Participatory Action Research (PAR) approach, we organised a series of transdisciplinary events (Gardeners’ Day 2022, 2023) at the Sputnik dacha garden association in Eastern Estonia. We conceptualized these events as PAR interventions with a four-fold objective: countering polarization, cultivating ‘unlikely alliances’, re-powering local knowledge and enhancing mutual exchange. This contribution summarizes lessons drawn from the events and PAR process, completed with follow-up interviews, feedback surveys, and critical collaborative analysis. Our results demonstrate the challenges and limitations but also the formative potential of such interventions to counter societal polarization and build collaborative capacity for sustainability. We conclude that ‘neutral’ common denominators such as FSP have a specific potential for building ‘shared politics of space’ in a politically sensitive context like that of Eastern Estonia
Milgram’s experiment in the knowledge space:individual navigation strategies
No full textData deluge characteristic for our times has led to information overload, posing a significant challenge to effectively finding our way through the digital landscape. Addressing this issue requires an in-depth understanding of how we navigate through the abundance of information. Previous research has discovered multiple patterns in how individuals navigate in the geographic, social, and information spaces, yet individual differences in strategies for navigation in the knowledge space has remained largely unexplored. To bridge the gap, we conducted an online experiment where participants played a navigation game on Wikipedia and completed questionnaires about their personal information. Utilizing the hierarchical structure of the English Wikipedia and a graph embedding trained on it, we identified two navigation strategies and found that there are significant individual differences in the choices of them. Older, white and female participants tend to adopt a proximity-driven strategy, while younger participants prefer a hub-driven strategy. Our study connects social navigation to knowledge navigation: individuals’ differing tendencies to use geographical and occupational information about the target person to navigate in the social space can be understood as different choices between the hub-driven and proximity-driven strategies in the knowledge space
Covid-19: Crisis, Accountability and Support for Populist-Authoritarian Governments in Poland and Hungary
No full textWe examine how pandemic crisis management has affected public support in the democratic backsliding members of the EU - Poland and Hungary. We claim the first, immediate effect of the pandemic is to "rally around flag" but since populist illiberal governments adopt authoritarian measures, the ongoing pandemic brings to the fore populists' failure/ineffective crisis management, and thus public dissatisfaction should erode support for the incumbents. Relying on original survey data collected during the Covid-19 pandemic, we test several possible sources of dissatisfaction: the state of the healthcare; the economy; corruption and abuse of power; and distorted communication/false information on the crisis. Citizens dissatisfied with governing populist parties' performance should be willing to punish the "guilty" party withdrawing their support, yet we find partisan preferences affect government accountability evaluations and leave supporters immune to policy negative effects. Comparing Hungary to Poland, we see the more polarized society is, the more likely extraordinary circumstances will only reinforce divisions in society and strengthen incumbents
