UC San Diego

My dissertation explores emergent practices of a solidarity economy in the U.S. context, through the lens of Ethnic Studies, a field that was established through struggles led by students of color for a university education that was relevant to their lives. Cheryl Harris theorizes “whiteness as property” to understand how whiteness has been legally constructed as a racial identity determining access to freedom and ownership, under settler colonialism, slavery, and institutionalized racial discrimination, and has evolved into a form of valuable property in itself, which continues to be protected under the guise of race neutrality and refusal of reparations. I understand whiteness as property as an organizing logic that people and institutions perpetuate when they impose scarcity and hierarchy upon access to resources and refuse to repair relationships of extraction and exploitation. I understand “solidarity economy” to be a practice to build relationships of understanding and care in order to collectivize our resources to meet collective needs, against the deliberate ways in which we are atomized and controlled through scarcity and hierarchy, rooted in colonial and capitalist exploitation.The discourse of a U.S. solidarity economy often centers examples such as worker-owned cooperatives, community land trusts, and other structures that largely rely on access to capital and institutional status as the “alternatives” to be networked toward a post-capitalist economy. This can obscure and extract from emergent practices of a solidarity economy, forged by those systematically excluded from access to capital and institutional status. Considering how solidarity economy has become a movement space to imagine a future beyond capitalism, there is a need for more transparency around the particular sets of privileges and professionalized resources that shape the articulation of a solidarity economy movement—a task that many people are confronting in practice. In this vein, I reflect on my own ways of engaging with solidarity economy, in relation to the academic industry in which I am positioned as a graduate student worker. This leads back to the question: “What am I practicing?”