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No Commons Without Micropolitics. Learning with Feminist and Municipalist Movements in Spain Cover

No Commons Without Micropolitics. Learning with Feminist and Municipalist Movements in Spain

By: Manuela Zechner  
Open Access
|Dec 2023

Abstract

This article emphasizes the importance of micropolitical and feminist research into the commons, particularly for understanding and developing forms of articulation between the public and the commons. It draws on experiences of autonomist-feminist and municipalist commons in Barcelona, presenting a case study on childcare commoning, based on engaged and situated research conducted between 2015–20. Those years were a lively period of city based commons experimentation that coincides with the first mandate of the municipalist Barcelona en Comú government. Emphasizing feminist and micropolitical understandings for commons research as a matter of going beyond technical visions of commons, based in Spanish and Latin American commons thinking, this text emphasizes the contribution of micropolitics as activist analytical lens that places a focus on knowledge production across social movements and institutions, and on the role of the invisible others of organization. To do so, it analyzes childcare commons through three micropolitical-feminist terms: care, community and resurgence. It points to possible ways of thinking alliances across grassroots and public institutions, as a matter of micropolitical articulation between claims to self-governance and claims to universality, and between autonomy and interdependence. Feminism and micropolitics feature as indispensable lenses for developing lively and lasting commons practices here.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/ijc.1232 | Journal eISSN: 1875-0281
Language: English
Submitted on: Nov 3, 2022
Accepted on: Nov 15, 2023
Published on: Dec 20, 2023
Published by: Ubiquity Press
In partnership with: Paradigm Publishing Services
Publication frequency: 1 issue per year

© 2023 Manuela Zechner, published by Ubiquity Press
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.