This paper draws from and contributes to fine-grained empirical feminist research on the pitfalls and potential of community economies approaches for generating and maintaining ethical, anti-racist, and feminist commoning strategies. By focussing on the projects taking place at the Kinning Park Complex (KPC), an innovative social enterprise organization in Glasgow’s South Side, I discuss the potential of diverse business models for generating ethical economic relationships and meaningful anti-racist and feminist activism.
According to some critical academics, social enterprise organisations inadvertently naturalize a depoliticised neoliberal status quo: in their promotion of entrepreneurialism, social enterprise organizations may promote volunteerism and internships at the expense of addressing structural inequalities (McRobbie 2011). Critics also contend that, the reliance of social enterprise organisations on philanthropic, public, and private funding means they avoid ‘resistive’ politics in order to fit in with depoliticized planning models (Swyngedouw, 2009).
However, feminist scholars show how such readings of capitalist relations are limiting and partial (Gibson-Graham, J.K, 2006). Wendy Larner, for example, claims that post- political critiques of social enterprise groups invalidate the ongoing struggles of these organisations in crafting alternative economy models to support marginalised communities (Larner, 2014). By furnishing her argument with a more generous and fine- grained empirical analysis of social enterprise groups she sheds light on ‘the actual initiatives, ideas, and techniques’ (Larner, 2014: 199) involved in sustaining their progressive agendas, Larner reveals the resistive potentialities of these organisations. Her research also echoes community economies analyses of the everyday practices social enterprise engage in to enact ethical negotiation and commoning (Gibson-Graham, Cameron, Healy:2013).
My paper draws from and contributes to these debates by exploring social enterprise activities currently taking place at Kinning Park Complex (KPC). KPC is a community-run social centre in Glasgow’s disinvested South Side that has existed since activists occupied the spaces to prevent closure by Glasgow City Council in 1996. Currently, KPC maintains and rents out halls, meeting rooms, artist studios, and office spaces, as well as programs various gardening, cookery, up-cycling, sewing projects, and projects to redistribute food waste. Over the past few years, KPC has also become a key site for activists supporting migrant workers and asylum seekers rights.
Here I show how, in some ways, the organization is entangled in neoliberal, arts-led regeneration strategies meant to ‘re-invent’ the neighbourhood as it receives funding from increasingly market-oriented third sector funding bodies and rents artist studios to create a revenue stream. However, I also explore how KPC re-works such planning models to support asylum seekers and refugees, as well as make space for under- represented African arts organizations, artists of colour, and feminist arts groups. I maintain that bringing arts-based social enterprise models into feminist debates about the contradictory terrain of neoliberal planning regimes uncovers sites of anti-racist solidarity and feminist practices of care in an era of intensifying xenophobia, racism, and borders in the UK and globally.
References:
Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2006). The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy (2nd ed.). Minneapolis, USA: University of Minnesota Press
Gibson-Graham, J.K., Cameron. J. & Healey, S. (2013). Take Back the Economy: An Ethical Guide for Transforming Our Communities. Minneapolis, USA: University of Minnesota Press
Larner, W. (2014). The limits of post politics: re-thinking radical social enterprise. In: Wilson, J. & Swyngedouw, E. (eds.) The Post-Political and Its Discontents: Spaces of Depoliticisation, Spectres of Radical Politics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press
McRobbie, A. (2011). Re-Thinking creative economy as radical social enterprise. Variant, 41: available at www.variant.org.uk
8. Social enterprises, sustainable transition and common goods
