Spaces for Feminist Commoning? Creative Social Enterprise’s Enclosures and Possibilities

Abstract

This paper contributes an intersectional feminist analysis and methodological approach to debates about commoning and social enterprise. Through a narrative description of feminist social enterprise projects based on action research with the Kinning Park Complex, a social centre with a radical history in Glasgow's South Side, I demonstrate how contemporary community economic development models can entrench intersectional exclusion. Specifically, I show how market-oriented social enterprise models reproduce precarious work, hinder cooperative ethics, and promote depoliticised notions of difference. However, I also investigate the ways that community organisers and activists at KPC are reworking these neoliberal models to carve out spaces for feminist commoning. Through these acts, women-identifying and non-binary activists, artists, and community organisers grapple with the classed, raced, and gendered politics of community organising and foster solidarities across difference.

Antecedents of women’s social entrepreneurship: values development and the perceived desirability and feasibility of social venture creation

“…Initially, potential participants were contacted via unsolicited email using publicly available information. All recruited participants were requested to provide snowball referrals (Bourne, 2010; McLean, 2021), which elicited facilitated introductions to further potential participants. Facilitated referrals were also provided by social enterprise experts within the researcher’s own network, e.g.…”

Mobilizing space to realize the transformative potential of work integration social enterprises through a politics of scale and scope

“…While clearly operating within neoliberal capitalism, recent work foregrounds the potential embedded within the social economy's contradictory positioning (Hudson, 2021;Larner, 2014;McKinnon et al, 2020;McLean, 2021;Peredo & McLean, 2006;Zitcer, 2021). As Amin et al (2002) points out, social enterprises support the sustenance of marginalized communities and promote the formation of valuable skill sets (see also Farmer et al, 2016;Munoz et al, 2015).…”

“…A growing body of work highlights the significance of space for the development of the social economy (Farmer et al, 2020;McKinnon et al, 2020McKinnon et al, , 2022McLean, 2021;Munoz, 2010;Munoz et al, 2015;Zitcer, 2021). This literature reflects the renewed interest within geography over the past two decades in the importance of the 'material' (e.g.…”

The Economic Politics of Anti‐Displacement Struggle: Connecting Diverse and Community Economies Research with Critical Urban Studies on the Carpenters Estate, London

“…While several DCE researchers have acknowledged the roots of community economy initiatives in antagonistic struggle (Kruzynski 2020; McLean 2021; Thompson 2020), the relationship between the two has been most thoroughly explored by Huron (2015, 2018; see also Vieta and Heras 2022). Huron foregrounds the struggle to seize, maintain, and expand the urban commons in her research on housing cooperatives in Washington, DC, showing how tenants and residents built the relationships and confidence they needed to make housing commons through contesting evictions.…”