Politicizing Communities and Local Everydayness Against Capitalism

The papers on this panel will interpret communities, neighborhoods, and their policies as an embattled space of reproduction. This space can be conflictual in relation to capitalist developmental initiatives and/or the requirements for social reproduction (i.e., reproduction of the relations of production), which are differently experienced by the working class according to gender, race, and migrant position. While Western critiques have studied the community by locating it in modern capitalism, those from non-Western cases or poststructuralist positions have blurred the focus on capitalism and uncovered nuanced subjectivities and supportive practices of residents. In this panel, the organizers aim to resurface, within these and other community dynamics, logics and elements that can be broadly construed as having capitalist characters, to disclose ways in which “residents” negotiate and thwart capitalist logics, redefine the very meaning of “residents” in the process, and may attract new disciplinary politics. The papers may wish to focus on key specific features such as: the politics of housing, including homelessness and informal settlements, as sites where residents negotiate social reproduction within and beyond capitalist constraints; the role of homeowners’ associations, neighborhood councils, and other local groups in mediating capitalist developmental policy; the redefinition of “residency” and land-based belonging through struggles over displacement and migration; non-Western cases in which community practices entail indigenous logics of local life to resist capitalist rationality and its policy manifestations; and gender, race, and migrant strategies of social reproduction and their limits put in a critical perspective on capitalism.