Posted in News on May 23, 2025.
This webinar took place on 28 April 2025, exploring the dynamic interplay between commoning, sharing, and personal autonomy, drawing from ethnographic research on sharing economies and alternative exchange systems, while also engaging with recent developments in multispecies anthropology.
Organised by the Global South Studies Center, University of Cologne, a lead partner in the UNESCO-MOST BRIDGES Hub for Planetary Wellbeing.
Discussions centred around the proposition that autonomy is not necessarily opposed to sharing, but that both deserve to be discussed in the context of relational practices of commoning. A second proposition for discussion was that while commoning norms and sharing practices have been widespread historically and persist in particular contemporary contexts, they are increasingly under pressure and may be expected to decline due to the global expansion of capitalist forms of value and exchange.
Foregrounding ethnographic insights from more-than-human communities, the dialogue aimed to illuminate how practices of mutual care, reciprocity, and conviviality persist, adapt, or erode under shifting socio-economic conditions.
The discussants were given space to reflect on ethnographies from diverse contexts to examine the ethical and political implications of this dynamic and to explore whether commoning and sharing might serve not only as forms of resistance, but also help to reimagine autonomy in multispecies worlds.
In doing so, the dialogue encompassed broader debates on value, relationality, and the futures of collective life.
