Enacting Community Economies Within a Welfare State Enacting Community Economies Within a Welfare State
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
3 – Diverse work practices Enacting Community Economies Within a Welfare State Welfare a Within Community Economies Enacting Enacting Community Economies Within a Welfare State Teppo Eskelinen, Tuuli Hirvilammi & Juhana Venäläinen (eds.) i Enacting Community Economies Within a Welfare State ii Published by Mayfly Books. Available in paperback and free online at www.mayflybooks.org in 2020. © Teppo Eskelinen, Tuuli Hirvilammi & Juhana Venäläinen (eds.) 2020 Layout by Mihkali Pennanen (based on earlier MayFly book layouts by Kaajal Modi). Cover photo by Maia C from Rebecca Louise Law's Community exhibition (Toledo Museum of Art). Photo's license: Attribution-NonCommercial- NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) isbn 978-1-906948-51-1 (Print) isbn 978-1-906948-52-8 (pdf) isbn 978-1-906948-53-5 (ebook) This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0 Enacting Community Economies Within a Welfare State Teppo Eskelinen, Tuuli Hirvilammi & Juhana Venäläinen (eds.) Contents Authors �������������������������������������������������������������������������������������vi Acknowledgements ....................................................................xi 1. Introduction: Community economies and social transformation with, within and beyond the welfare state........... 1 Teppo Eskelinen, Tuuli Hirvilammi & Juhana Venäläinen 2. The conception of value in community economies ................ 23 Teppo Eskelinen 3. Diverse work practices and the role of welfare institutions .....47 Tuuli Hirvilammi & Maria Joutsenvirta 4. Building upon, extending beyond: Small-scale food production within a Nordic welfare state .................................................... 71 Pieta Hyvärinen 5. Commoning surplus food in Finland – actors and tensions ... 95 Anna-Maria Isola and Janne Laiho 6. Self-organised online ridesharing as a ‘transport commons’ �� 117 Juhana Venäläinen 7. Epilogue: On the possibilities to learn from the Global South .................143 Laura Kumpuniemi & Sanna Ryynänen Bibliography ............................................................................152 vi Authors Teppo Eskelinen is a senior lecturer at the Department of social sciences and philosophy, University of Jyväskylä. Having obtained his PhD in philosophy (2009), he moved to teach social and public policy and subsequently development studies. His multidisciplinary research covers a variety of themes, chiefly related to the normative and political aspects of the economy: global justice and extreme poverty, economy/ics as power, alternatives to growth/capitalism, and heterodox economics. He has also published on themes such as development policy, radical democracy and the possibility of utopias. In general, Eskelinen hopes his academic work to retain the transformative spirit of the global justice/solidarity movements which originally drew him into having an interest in societal matters. Tuuli Hirvilammi is a postdoctoral researcher who currently works at the Faculty of Social Sciences at Tampere University, Finland. Her academic background is in social policy but her long term aim has been to integrate sustainability concerns into social policy as well as into wellbeing research. She believes that multidisciplinary research and learning from alternatives is a key answer to radically transform our current societies. Her research interests include sustainable wellbeing, eco-welfare state, ecosocial policies, degrowth and ecological economics which is seen in her publications she has co-authored both for the Finnish and international readers. Besides the academic research she is a degrowth and timebank activist, even though lately she has been more occupied as a local politician in her hometown. Juhana Venäläinen is an assistant professor in cultural studies at the University of Eastern Finland, Joensuu. His research revolves around fractures and new formations of work and the economy. In and after his doctoral thesis (2015), he has strived to explore how vii the notion of “the commons” could recalibrate understanding of the value-creating processes in contemporary capitalism, with case studies ranging from silence tourism to the affective economies of googling. Venäläinen has edited volumes and special issues e.g. about employment precarity, the experience economy and financial cultures. Lately, he has focused on the paradoxes of “sharing” and “gig” economy. Pieta Hyvärinen is a doctoral researcher in gender studies at Tampere University, with an academic background also in environmental politics. Their research concentrate on small-scale food production from the perspective of feminist postcapitalist economics and interspecies relations. In their doctoral thesis in the making, they develop a concept of multispecies livelihoods to elaborate the interdependencies and contradictories in everyday food production practices. So far they have authored journal articles on communal agriculture and urban beekeeping, co- authored book chapters on translating and teaching diverse and community economies, as well as co-edited a special issue on naturecultures in feminist studies. Along with research and writing, small-scale food production also plays a minor role in their everyday life as a hands-on practice. Anna-Maria Isola is a Research Manager at The Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare. Her research has covered the politics of breastfeeding, experiences of poverty and experienced inclusion, and population-political rhetorics – on which topic she obtained her PhD in 2013. She leads a research group that has developed and validated the Experienced Social Inclusion Scale (ESIS) -indicator. Anna-Maria’s thinking is that the welfare state continuously needs to renew itself; however the renewal can only happen sustainably when economic systems change as well. Change processes are global, but solutions are first found locally. “Think globally, act locally” describes her thinking well. viii Maria Joutsenvirta is a Senior Research Fellow affiliated with the Sustainability-in-Business (SUB) program at Aalto University School of Business (https://people.aalto.fi/maria.joutsenvirta). She is interested in finding answers to how economy can be harnessed to serve ecological and social wellbeing through, for example, practice of commons, new ’monies’ and systemic co- design. She has used post-growth and heterodox economics lenses to detach wellbeing and societal structures from the extractive, growth-dependent economy. Maria believes that a sustainable future demands a shift in the way people and organizations relate to one another and with the Earth. Her academic and practical work aims to foster deeper and more meaningful relationships between people, with nature and with our own inner worlds. Laura Kumpuniemi is a doctoral researcher at the University of Eastern Finland. At the moment, she is working on her PhD thesis about political and democratising aspects of solidarity economy in Bolivia. In her research she is interested in exploring the possibilities of post-capitalist politics, post-development practices, and local and global networks of reciprocal solidarity. In Finland, she is active in an organic food cooperative and in the network and communication group called commons.fi. Laura is also passionate about fostering global networks of solidarity in practice and in her activism she has worked especially with Latin American countries and Western Sahara. Janne Laiho is a film-maker and marketeer. He is especially interested in the application of art (particularly film) for communicating societal change and issues. With degrees in economics (MBA) and art (M.A.), he has been able to examine market economy dynamics through art. The Family Federation of Finland, The Finnish Youth Research Society, and The Finnish Institute of Occupational Health have commissioned Janne to produce documentary films on societal topics. These films have ix been parts of larger, academic research initiatives; the role of these films in the research initiatives has been both to uncover new information as well as to communicate dynamics that are hard to communicate by other means. Sanna Ryynänen is a senior lecturer at the Department of Social Sciences, University of Eastern Finland. Her academic background is in sociology, and her PhD she obtained in educational sciences, specialising in social pedagogy (2011). Her research topics range from social inequalities, processes of marginalisation and excluding bordering practices to belonging and citizen participation, as well as to social and political theatre as an invitation to political discussion and dialogue. In her research, she often experiments with creative and participatory research methods, and believes in the transformative potential of academic work and research. Her interest in solidarity economy comes with her long history in Brazil, and her research in this field focuses on the pedagogical dimensions of solidarity economy and solidarity economy incubators as pedagogical and political actors. x xi Acknowledgements s becomes hopefully evident to the reader, this book is not A so much a collection of individually authored articles, but first and foremost an outcome of a collective effort. This effort was not a brief one but involved a seemingly endless sequence of meetings filled with ideas, discussion and collective inspiration. Therefore, it is necessary to mention a