Episode description

The Commons as Sites and Struggles of Global Dis/Ordering

Rather than focusing strictly on how the commons are formally (mis)recognised or regulated in (international) law, this episode foregrounds the diverging modes of dis/ordering that practices of commoning can produce. This entails an attentiveness to the new legal spaces that commoning engenders, as well as the forms of political subjectivity and resistance that animate it. Moving across different sites and scales, the episode explores commoning practices on both a transnational and local level – from a reimagining of international law’s constitution of value and the reclaiming of common wealth to the urban practices of adverse commoning employed under conditions of rapid gentrification.

The speakers:

Isabel Feichtner is Professor of Public Law & International Economic Law at the University of Würzburg in Germany, and a Fellow at The New Institute in Hamburg, where she chairs the programme ‘Reclaiming Common Wealth’. Isabel’s work brings us to one of law’s most aspirational yet abstract ideas on ‘global commons’ as the ‘common heritage of so-called Mankind’ or ‘Humanity’, as well as concrete practices of resistance to the appropriation, commodification, and valuation of such ‘commons’, with a particular interest in the Deep Seabed and its mining. Listeners might find resonance here with the first session of our series, where Professor Surabhi Ranganathan – a close collaborator of Isabel – spoke about the enclosure of the Ocean Floor through mining exploration and exploitation practices. Today, we are excited to hear more from Isabel about her work ‘Commons Public Partnerships’, and whether and to what extent they can support socio-ecological transformations through democratization and commoning.

Elsa Noterman is Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL), and Fellow of the Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences. Her work on urban practices of ‘adverse commoning’, which are deployed today under conditions of rapid gentrification, takes a feminist, decolonial and critical legal geography approach to property, and questions of land and housing justice. Her work focuses on everyday collective struggles over land and housing in the US and in the UK, with case-studies on reclaiming public land in the city of Cambridge – where Elsa was a Junior Research Fellow before joining QMUL – addressing the inequalities in access to land and food, and reimagining land stewardship towards climate and racial justice. Elsa’s work delves into practices of resistance and contestation of property regimes in pursuit of equity and reparation through commoning.

Event Resources:

· Isabel Feichtner’s project on ‘Reclaiming Common Wealth’ at The New Institute.

· Isabel Feichtner, ‘Re-Valuing the Global Commons’: https://thenew.institute/en/programs/reclaiming-common-wealth

· Listen to Isabel Feichtner’s talk on ‘Reconstituting the Seabed as a Global Common: What Would It Take?’ on the Appropriate Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/episode/4jj1AtdTZvsg1gpiX2Skzc

· Isabel Feichtner and Surabhi Ranganathan, ‘International Law and Economic Exploitation in the Global Commons: Introduction’ (2019) EJIL: https://academic.oup.com/ejil/article/30/2/541/5536740

· Elsa Noterman, ‘Adverse Commoning: Tracing Contested Legal Geographies of the Urban Commons’ (2021) Environment and Planning D: Society and Space: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/02637758211053339

· Elsa Noterman, 'Beyond Tragedy: Differential Commoning in a Manufactured Housing Cooperative' (2016) Antipode: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/anti.12182.

· See Elsa Noterman’s project on ‘Access and Land Justice’ in Cambridge: https://antipodeonline.org/2023/11/29/accessing-land-justice/.

· Listen to Elsa Noterman discussing her project on Access and Land Justice at the festival ‘From the Ground Up’: https://wysingbroadcasts.art/discover/from-the-ground-up-james-boyce-and-elsa-noterman