Last week I was in Edinburgh for two Caring&Sharing COST Action meetings and for the Ethnographies of Collaborative Economies Conference. Both events were interesting and truly committed to bringing together European research on the Collaborative Economy and community-led initiatives. The conference proceedings can be found here. Looking forward to meeting again old and new friends/colleagues I met there.
Month: October 2019
From Commodities to Gifts: Redistributing Surplus Food Locally
New paper out, co-authored with Katie Berns
Abstract. This paper investigates the practices and dynamics of a grassroots initiative that takes a non-monetary sharing approach to the issue of food surplus. Food sharing Copenhagen (FS-CPH) is a community-led, volunteer-run organisation working towards reducing food waste by collecting surplus food from supermarkets, bakeries, and private individuals and redistributing it locally, for free. The analysis illustrates the practices of the three main working groups within the organisation, the role of technology within the organization, and how food is framed through a community economies approach.
The paper will be presented at the Ethnographies of Collaborative Economies Conference and can be found here.
Scaling Out, Scaling Down: Reconsidering growth in grassroots initiatives
New paper out , co-authored with Airi Lampinen and Christofer Gradin Franzén.
Abstract. In this paper, we reflect on how scaling out – recreating and reconfiguring horizontally the most promising practices across contexts (Manzini, 2015) – can help local, grassroots initiatives to grow in a socially sustainable fashion and to sustain their action over time. We ground our discussion on the case of Hoffice, a self-organizing network that is experimenting with an alternative social model for collectively organizing and supporting flexible forms of work. In a prior ethnographic study of the Hoffice network (Rossitto & Lampinen, 2018), we outlined the socio-technical practices and values that characterise this community. We complement this previous piece by zooming in on the community’s struggles in the face of rapid growth. We conclude by proposing a way to rethink the challenges that growth can pose.
The paper will be presented at the Ethnographies of Collaborative Economies Conference, and can be found here.