Approach

The lab looks at the world through the lens of community economies and takes a participatory research-through-design approach in order to enhance civic participation in constructing desirable alpine and (trans)local futures in the face of economic globalisation and earth systems breakdown.

 

Commoning
The lab is dedicated to commons as a means for creating an egalitarian and cooperative society. We assume that commons – which are commonwealth created, maintained and defended by a community via ethical negotiations – is a core contribution to promoting eco-social justice. Commons thus encompass the material as much as the relational dimensions necessary to put in practices life-sustaining values such as solidarity, mutuality, interdependence, co-operation and care. Through practices of commoning, people take the matters of their life into their own hands.

 

Community-based research lab
The lab is based at the community academy La Foresta situated at the train station of Rovereto (Trentino) in the Italian Alps. The lab majorly supported the emergence of the community academy, which now constitutes its physical base. In terms of “local community”, the research actions take the whole Lagarina valley with its 17 municipalities as their space of reference.

 

Community economies
The term community economies has been developed within economic geography and indicates economies in which social interdependency as well as ecological interdependency are acknowledged, respected and ethically negotiated. The notion of community economies is inscribed in a feminist approach that reads the economy as always diverse (i.e. made up also of social and ecological activities usually considered unproductive in market terms). Moreover, it takes a posthumanist stance that approaches other living beings and matter as agency and respect claiming actors, not as mere resources for human use.

 

Enlivenment
Fostering enlivening experiences and processes is a key concern of the Lab: on the one hand, this is about reintroducing felt aliveness in our picture of the world – from matter over other living beings to humans and their modes of life. On the other hand, this is about generating practices that support aliveness and the thriving of multiple forms of interdependent lives.

 

Gender-sensitive research
The Lab adopts a gender-sensitive and intersectional approach, which means that gender and other factors of discrimination are taken into account as a significant variable along the whole research cycle, from formulating research questions to choosing research methods, from connecting with specific stakeholders to making sure the lab and its activities are accessible.

 

Livelihoods
The Lab mobilises the notion of “livelihood” as a powerful tool for thinking and acting: it invites us to consider the multiple means through which we secure the necessities of life — well beyond the activities which earn us money, like friendship or familial connections. Structuring thinking and acting in terms of livelihoods fosters imaginative and caring modes of life.

 

Participatory research through collective design
Participatory research through collective design is an approach to knowledge production that has experimental practice and collective modes of world-making at its core. In the Lab this means that the production of knowledge related to community economies is deeply intertwined with the actual living out of what caring livelihood practices can function, look and feel like. Participatory modes of research that unfold through the collective design of concrete practices, while also being intertwined with feminist theory and participatory modes of analysis, are hugely performative: they not only produce the transformative practices they set out to explore, but also create diverse, locally rooted knowledges that are highly connectable with experiments of postcapitalist livelihood production in physically distant localities.