4 - J.K. Gibson-Graham: Feminist Geographies and Diverse Economies

Summary

Introduction

A ‘Rainbow Nation’ party of five, two adults and three children, sit around a kitchen table. Before them sits the board game, Mzansipoli (see Figure 4.1). Taking turns to roll the dice, the players move their tokens around the Monopoly-inspired board. Unlike Monopoly, however, Mzansipoli contains an entirely different set of rules. Wielding a ‘White privilege’ card, one player narrowly avoids jail. Another player receives 100 Rand in celebration of their ‘racist neighbour’ moving to Orania. The youngest player lands on the ‘Black Tax’ tile and sighs. As the players continue, a voiceover is heard. ‘Mzansipoli!’ it enthuses. ‘Beat the game that's been playing you!’

Introducing the feminist economic geographer, J.K. Gibson-Graham, via Mzansipoli – the fictitious game of ‘survival, corruption and confusion’ (Nando's South Africa, 2019) – might be considered atypical. This speaks to the relative unusualness of Gibson-Graham amid the neoliberal structures of the Northern university that so often encourage an individualized and hypercompetitive approach to academic writing and publishing (Riding et al, 2019). J.K. Gibson-Graham, ‘conceived in 1992 and born in published form in 1993’ (Gibson-Graham and Dombroski, 2020: 20), is the shared authorial persona of Katherine Gibson and the late Julie Graham (Gibson, 2014). First meeting as graduate students at Clark University in the 1970s, Gibson and Graham worked together for 30 years until Julie's passing in 2010. Today, the continued use of this shared pen name speaks to Gibson-Graham's feminist vision of knowledge production as a space in which an ethics of relationships, connections and collaborations are centred. For more than three decades, Gibson-Graham has imagined and enacted a feminist and ethical vision of economic geography with epistemologies and methodologies that are collective, reflexive and community-led. This is seen in her contributions towards the establishment of international research communities (for example, the Community Economies Collective), her advocation of participatory action-based methodological approaches, and the publication of tools and materials that share knowledges, languages and ideas (Gibson-Graham et al, 2013; Community Economies, 2023). Within this shared feminist project is a determination to work ethically, with humility (Fisker, 2021), candour, transparency and hope (Gibson-Graham, 2006b).