Transformative economic relations: an affective study on redistribution practices in solidarity communities

Format: I will discuss the theoretical and methodological complexities grounding my PhD research. I aim at engaging with the audience to further fine-tuning my research design prior to my ethnographic work. “Gemainsame ökonomie” (solidarity economy) is the German language term which refers to informal groups constituted by a limited number of people who collectively design private practices of economic solidarity through internal redistribution solutions. These practices concern agreed-upon sharing of income, property and/or debt and a need-oriented use of the generated common resource. These groups´ engagement is fuelled by a common political commitment to socio-economic transformation aimed at limiting the impacts of intersectionally unequal access to economic resources in the framework of western neoliberal capitalist economies. I understand these groups´ engagement as fuelled by a political commitment to socio-economic transformation in the framework of western neoliberal capitalist economies. Transgressing normative private practices of economic sharing – traditionally associated with nuclear families – allows to understand these groups as blurring the boundaries of normative relational practices too. It is my thesis that the sharing of economic resources materialises a series of tensions that threaten an otherwise well-intended political commitment and which emerge in negotiations of “different” needs and desires, in the re-articulation of collective and individual interests, and in the constitution of alternative relational frameworks for self and collective identification. This research problematises how these groups simultaneously engage in practices of social transformation whilst caught in, and reproducing, normative socio-economic morals, values, ideas, behaviours, institutions. I anchor my analysis in affect theory due to its capacity to articulate power dynamics as a social and embodied manifestation of socially constructed, vehiculated and accumulated meanings: making affects key to understand the governing of collective bodies and the struggles of social change. Affect theory is therefore key to make visible the complexities, incoherencies and ambivalences that emerge within transformative practices of social change; in the case of my projects, specifically concerning relational (re)negotiations and economic-sharing and the tensions emerging between collective solidarity and individualist pulls.