ORIENTATION

The crafting of a research question is the crafting of a story that is also the crafting of an ethics.
Natalie Loveless, How to make art at the end of the world

The kind of story, or quality of text, I desire to craft in my PhD has been on my mind lately as I begin assembling my comprehensive reading lists. Orienting toward a topic of study is an ethical matter as it involves foregrounding some concerns to the exclusion of others. While my master's research-creation attended to the everyday experience of urban inhabitation and thinking with/in posthuman entanglements, my praxis lacked recognition of the socio-ecological production of cities. Therefore, in my composition of a list entitled Urban Everyday, I want to foreground the tension between the directness of experience and engagement with broader underlying politics that structure landscapes of encounter. Taking an urban political ecology (UPE) course this term has given me some critical tools with which to think this through: tracking winners and losers as well as the persistent structures that maintain their disparity; narrating humans and nonhumans as dialectical; exploring contradictions; and making ontological claims while also attending to the epistemes from whence they are made (Robbins 2012, 87). What follows renders the effects of my term project, viz., an exploration and response to the question: How might the analytic or "theoretical platform" (Heynen et al. 2006, 8) practiced by urban political ecologists re/orient my approach to urban investigations and the questions that drive my research-creation forwards?

My inquiry takes the form of a diffractive reading in which I read concepts of metabolic circulation and infrastructures as political through my practice of alleyway gleaning. Drawing from Donna Haraway's (1991) initial suggestion of diffraction as a mapping of the effects of difference and Karen Barad's (2007) subsequent ontological elaboration and extension, Karin Murris and Vivienne Bozalek (2019) develop propositions to guide diffractive readings: "The idea is to read theory with practice diffractively guided by, for example, key questions that move the experiment forward" (1505, emphasis in original). Diffractive readings agitate presuppositions, allowing new learnings to interfere with prior convictions. Reading diffractively challenges the fixity of any one configuration of intelligibility while accounting for the differential stakes and constitutive exclusions entailed in each refiguring. Finally, diffractive readings are a way to bring different (even incommensurable) perspectives into relation without antagonism. Focusing on resonances and dissonances will help me clarify the differences that do matter. I believe this sort of exercise serves me well in ascertaining where and how urban political ecology might supplement my study of the urban everyday.

Gleaning is the practice of gathering materials or information from one's surroundings. Gleaning is a way of making do—a means of poaching from and appropriating the dominant (economic) system from within and as part of it (see negative-spaces.github.io/tactics.html for MA thinking on this). A "surreptitious creativit[y]", gleaning is a kind of tactic which "elude[s] discipline without being out­ side the field in which it is exercised" (de Certeau 1984, 96). Gleaning is taken up in a variety of manners in different contexts (see Agnès Varda's documentary, The Gleaners and I (2000)). I often encounter Vancouver's urban gleaners pushing trolly bags or bikes along the alleyways or up and down Main Street, collecting recyclables from residential and commercial bins, or from municipal garbage bins along the sidewalk that have a specific rim for cans and bottles. These gleaners deposit redeemables for monetary compensation—in other words, it is the exchange value of gleaned items that is operative in this practice. Along Fraser Street, I watch as informal exchange takes place behind a produce grocer. In one of the little plazas—a section of street cordoned off for gatherings and leisure—along Granville, I pass someone filling their plant pot from a municipal planter that's been torn up in preparation for a spring makeover. My own practice takes me to alleyways, curbsides, corridors, and underpasses where I glean not only physical objects but also graffiti. By turning graffiti into stickers and re-siting it around the city, I contribute to a "proliferating illegitimacy" (de Certeau 1984, 96). From my job teaching and consulting on mapping at the university library, I gleaned the skills and knowledge to make websites such as this one and my MA thesis. I appropriate research grants for printing materials as a necessary self-accommodation as much as an interference into dominant economies of knowledge production (see negative-spaces.github.io/rendering.html#sitation for more on this). Finally, the fabric recycling dumpster in my apartment basement as proved a generative site from whence I've obtained a digital camera from 2005 which I take most of my pictures on, photo frames to gift my artwork in, a host of clothing I wear, and plain cotton t-shirts I print my artwork on (see negative-spaces.github.io/the-middle-of-things/what-the-work-can-do.html#unruly-material for theorizing on this).

I chose to reconceptualize alleyways along the lines of urban political ecology through my practice of gleaning because I sense a relational articulation between this particular infrastructure and urban metabolisms. Enrolled in economies of resource extraction and development, Vancouver's alleyways literally pave the way for municipal waste disposal and in so doing, facilitate the ongoing process of urbanization. At the same time and alongside the flows of waste, alleyways facilitate the informal circulation of items set out by those for whom they were no longer useful. Walking alleyways while attending to their material histories, uneven maintenances, and the differential nature of their ecologies, I believe I can glean more than a dish here or a lemon balm clipping and handful of blackberries there. I believe the takeaway will be a more complex view on the politics and ethics of thinking with alleyways, through gleaning practices, and in entangled collaboration with things gleaned.

Although my sites of urban gleaning extend beyond alleyways, I impose this 'enabling constraint' (a term from process philosopher Erin Manning) so as to practice denaturalizing, historicizing, and politicizing an infrastructure my preoccupation with immediacy has heretofore led me to take for granted. Rather than conduct an urban political ecology of Vancouver alleyways (which I feel as yet unprepared to do), I aim to map out the concerns such an account might foreground and outline the kinds of questions I might ask. In short, what's rendered here is my efforts to exercise concepts of urban political ecology learned this term, taking them into my everyday practices in dialogue with infrastructures near and dear to me. I begin what follows by inviting you into my practice. How does gleaning primarily residential alleyways for physical objects differ from other practices of urban scavenging such as food reclamation and redeemable recyclable collection? From the immediacy of walking Vancouver's alleyways, I step/scale back in order to critically consider alleys as infrastructure. What role do alleys play in urban metabolism? What can be gleaned by approaching alleys as sites of continuing circulation that a focus waste/value dialectic of discard under capitalism overlooks by focusing on the contained, exceptional spaces of dumpsters and landfills? Positioning alleyways as urban/izing infrastructure, I continue to denaturalize, historicize, and politicize them by situating them "within and as part of"—to borrow a feminist new materialism's phrase, or more specifically a Baradian figure that conveys the ontological inseparability of subject and object, cause and effect, measurement and instruments/agencies of measurement, concept and experimental setup—the settler-colonial city. I conclude by reflecting on how urban political ecology as a practice might orient continued research-creation and everyday practices.

WALKING THE ALLEYS
Walking the alleys is a practice I began after moving to Vancouver in July of 2021. The first neighborhood I lived in was Dunbar, an area predominated by single-family homes on the city's western limit. Both the larger neighborhood of Dunbar-Southlands and the University Endowment Lands it borders to the west occupy unceded Musqueam territory. To the south lies the Musqueam Indian Reserve. Urban Indigeneity—as a historical phenomenon, statistical enumeration, and cultural identity—is something I've just begun learning about. Since the 1950s, the Aboriginal population in Canada's ten largest cities has dramatically increased, from a total of 2,506 in 1951 to 301,095 in 2006 (Peters and Andersen 2013, 37). In Vancouver, Statistics Canada's count for Indigenous identity has grown from 239 in 1951 to 40,310 in 2006 (Peters and Andersen 2013, 37) to 63,340 according to the 2021 census (Government of Canada 2023). From what I've read, this significant leap is due not only to natural increase and net migration but also shifting self-identification as well as changes in who Canada recognizes as Indigenous by allowing to claim status (Peters and Andersen 2013, 36). Moreover, Aboriginal urbanization was historically stymied by the settler-colonial intent to keep reserves distant from urban areas, "ostensibly to reduce contact between settlers and First Nations peoples but also to ensure that prime land was not under the control of First Nations governments" (Peters and Andersen 2013, 22). First Nations are actors and agents in the urbanization of Vancouver's landscape. For example, near where I live now, construction is underway on a massive eleven-tower apartment development on Squamish owned land spearheaded by the Squamish First Nation in partnership with Westbank (Cyca 2024; “Sen̓áḵw” 2025).

My house in Dunbar was fanatic about reusing and recycling. To parry passive aggressive comments about my discard, I began tossing my garbage into neighbors' bins under cover of night. On a walk with two housemates my first week in Vancouver, we "dumpster dove" for what I want to say were tortillas or flatbreads of some kind still in their packaging. Later on, I drove with another housemate to East Point Grey where we snuck into the backyard of a house slated for demolition and stripped a plum tree of maybe 30 pounds of fruit. The next week, that house and all its trees were torn down. In the alleyway between 30th and 31st Ave I found the Epson WorkForce Pro 4740 printer I use every day for both academic and creative projects. The following winter I moved east to Mount Pleasant into a house whose ample backyard opened onto the alley between 12th and 13th. This alley became my main road and lucrative source of dishware, clothing, shoes, sunglasses, and other items set out in cardboard boxes free for the taking. Every other week (and every week for compost aka "organics"), my roommate or I would sort our plastic recycling, glass, paper, garbage, and organics into bins and place them (sanctioned distances apart) for pickup (by whom? which companies?). Two years later I moved west again to Fairview. While south of Broadway (9th Ave), Fairview consists of two, three, and four story apartment buildings, a couple towers, and single-family homes, Fairview north of Broadway yet east of Burrard is nearly all condominiums and townhouses. The alleys here are paved, sterile spaces where gleaners only come on garbage pick-up days. Waste is sorted indoors and taken out to the alley (by whom?) only on pick-up days (by what companies?). When there's system failure, pileup occurs as seen in banner image triggering elevator notices to "hold organics" or "hold recyclables".

To begin material labor on this term project, I spent an entire day walking Vancouver's alleyways. Sidewalks hail pedestrians in ways alleys do not. In the alley, you're free to move at whatever pace you like and take up as much space as you want (until cars come by). I began my dérive in Fairview near Granville Park, and zig-zagged my way east to Cambie then back, then south into Shaughnessy. Past the massive Oakridge development going up at Oak and 41st, I wandered over to Sunset and then into Victoria-Fraserview. Finally tired, I rode the 22 bus down Victoria and Commercial Drive. Stepping of at 4th, I walked west towards Clark Drive, under the skytrain and past Clark Station until I could catch the 84 bus back to Granville. At Brewing August, I re-read some class readings from early in the term. I intentionally began my alley walk in a direction I don't often wonder so as to disorient myself. I didn't use Google Maps the entire day. Having forgotten to bring water and it being one of the first truly warm days this year, I became quite dehydrated. Thankfully, I wandered through public parks with water fountains. An additional problem was the lack of public toilets, especially in residential neighborhoods. My "guileful ruse" (de Certeau 1984, 37)? The many unlocked portapotties dotting the alleyways for real estate construction.

Vancouver's alleys generally run east-west, though they also run north-south along major north-south streets like Granville, Main, Fraser, Clark, Commercial, and Victoria to accommodate commercial businesses. Of course there are exceptions—tangled places where alleys turn onto more alleys. For instance, the area south of Clark Park or around where Victoria and Argyle Drive meet. Across the city, different assemblages cohere in the alleys making some areas more lucrative for gleaning. For instance, there is generally more graffiti in the alleyways of East Vancouver, the West End, and Downtown Eastside. Clothing, dishware, electronics, and other once-belongings are more often set out in the alleyways of low-rise apartment buildings in residential neighborhoods, while cardboard boxes of free items are set in front of single-family homes. (The cartography of gleaning is something I could write so much more on given the time.) The alleys themselves have different vibes, constituted in part by the kind of buildings, houses and backyards that foreground them. In Victoria-Fraserview, backyard food provisioning predominates, with the whole backyard converted into a garden. I saw something similar though less extensive in the area just east of Renfrew and 1st.

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What else grows in alleyways untended? Mosses, dandelions, "invasives" like blackberries and scotch broom, sometimes rosemary, lots of lemon balm and one very impressive lavender bush. (I want to read Kevin Anderson's dissertation on what he calls "marginal nature" as it relates to the ecologies of alleyways as well as vacant lots and road verges which I've been thinking about lately.)

There are animals too: crows, racoons, possums, rats, as well as insects.

There is so much more alleys I could address. Given the time, I could render a more nuanced cartography of Vancouver's alleys. I would be interested in looking at archival urban planning documents to get a sense of when residential roads and alley were constructed, as well as the history of waste management in Vancouver. The closest I've come to this latter concern is Hailey Venn's MA thesis on an environmental history of Vancouver's landfill in Delta in which alley sare not mentioned. I'd also like to respond to a question my interlocutor recently posed: how do you know something is out to be gleaned? Finally, I recognize my practice of walking the alleyways, and primarily residential ones, is distinct from gleaners looking for specific items such as cans or food reclamation. Moreover, "alley walks" mean something specific in the context of the Downtown Eastside where they refer specifically to a harm reduction practice of walking an alley to ensure no one has overdosed alone.

ALLEY MATTERS
The alleyways of Vancouver are paved with asphalt or, less frequently, compacted gravel. Pavement upkeep varies across the city. To my surprise, the alleys in Shaughnessy (a very wealthy neighborhood) are more often gravel and full of potholes.

Asphalt is a combination of petroleum and aggregate (graded small rocks/gravel) (“Asphalt” 2025; “How Is Asphalt Made? A Look Inside the Manufacturing Process” 2024). Aggregate is quarried outside the city's limits in places like Abbotsford by companies like Fraser Valley Aggregate. Interestingly, in 2012, Vancouver began incorporating recyclable plastics into its asphalt in an effort to brand itself "the greenest city" (Ridden 2012). Like waste-to-energy incinerators, incorporating plastics into asphalt is a means of extracting further symbolic and use value from discarded matters. Plastics are recuperated from being waste; embedded in infrastructure, their life as a commodity is extended. Yet what doesn't make headlines is this small detail: the plastic used was not local recycling but rather brought in from Ontario (CBC News 2012). Whose interests are at the heart of this endeavor? Who stands to gain? Is there a way this kind of carbon sequestration can be read as a spatial fix—a materially new avenue for the commodification of plastic discard?

Alleyways literally pave the way for municipal waste disposal. They facilitate the movement of discarded matters from the container that delimits them as waste—specifically colored and signed dumpsters, bags, and bins—to sorting facilities, the landfill, and waste-to-energy incinerator in Metro Vancouver (see map here). An urban political ecology focused specifically on municipal waste in Vancouver might follow the flows of waste, as well as the different companies that collect it across the city. There are multiple. For example: "Recycle BC is responsible for residential curbside and multi-family recycling service in the City of Vancouver" ("Vancouver - Recycle BC" 2024), WM provides "residential waste pickup, commercial garbage collection and dumpster rental services" (“Services in the Vancouver, British Columbia Area” 2025), and Maple Leaf Disposal picks up residential, commercial, and industrial waste as well as recycling and organics ("Maple Leaf Disposal | Waste Disposal | British Columbia, Canada," 2024). GFL Environmental is yet another company with the signature chlorophyll-green trucks and the slogan "green for life". Lastly, I just saw a red Waste Control Services truck drive by, a North Vancouver company that deals with recycling, organics, and waste (“About WCS” 2025).

In class, I learned that while discard in relation to consumption has always existed, waste as a concept and set of matters is historically produced. In a seminal paper on the afterlives of waste in India, geographers Gidwani and Reddy (2011) argue "'Waste' is the political other of capitalist 'value'" (1625). Archival documents from British colonial rule define waste as unproductive nature—for example fallow land—"an untapped potential awaiting transformation into value by dint of human labor and colonial stewardship" (2011, 1630). Gidwani and Reddy trace imperial conceptualizations of waste back to John Locke's 1681 treatise, in which Locke grants property rights to those whose labors ensured that land did not go to 'waste'. (Implicit in his argument is, of course, an understanding that such labor did not need to be direct; a servant would not inherit the property of his master simply by working the land.) For Locke, laboring against waste is the route to political citizenship. (Remember above how colonial Canada's distancing of Reserves from urban areas was, in part, to "ensure that prime land was not under the control of First Nations governments" (Peters and Andersen 2013, 22).) Shifting their focus to postcolonial Delhi, Gidwani and Reddy (2011) examine the commodification of municipal solid waste and the privatization of waste disposal infrastructure since 2005. The privatization of "bin space" (Gidwani and Reddy 2011, 1637) meant that specific dumpsters as well as broader "catchment areas" around the city, once gleaning grounds negotiated amongst informal waste collectors, became limited resources.

Also interested in "bin space" (Gidwani and Reddy 2011, 1637) is anthropologist David Boarder Giles, who explores dumpsters as sites of abjection. Following the waste/value dialectic introduced by Gidwani and Reddy (2011), Giles (2021) argues that waste is the constitutive outside of market value—what's thrown away maintains the value of what's in circulation (33). The making of waste—through disposal and disposability—is thus a necessary part of capitalist production and reproduction. Giles builds his argument from the context of dumpster diving carried out by Food Not Bombs, a worldwide movement to cook and (often surreptitiously) distribute free meals made from salvaged food waste. Given more time, I'd like to read A Mass Conspiracy to Feed People (Giles 2021) all the way through and carefully examine his invocation of "postcapitalist surplus" (3) and "nonmarket commodities" (9) in relation to the work of J.K. Gibson-Graham. When I read J.K. Gibson-Graham closely for my geographical political economy course project last term, I felt the constitutive relation between capitalism and noncapitalism was not adequately addressed. Neither was materiality (See Reading Gibson-Graham tab on this page). Where Gibson-Graham's diverse economies remained (ironically) a predominantly discursive endeavor, I argued that discursive reconfiguration is at once a material reconfiguration with consequences that quite literally matter. Given this, I am having a hard time reconciling food waste as both necessary to capitalism but also a postcapitalist surplus. These kinds of superpositions are something I'm generally interested in because of my gleaning tactics, and I want to see how Giles negotiates these delineations.

I was also surprised Giles never mentioned metabolism even though his book was all about re/circulation and feeding people. The concepts of circulation and metabolism date back to the 1600s and 1800s respectively (Swyngedouw 2006, 23). Metabolisms as a framework for understanding processes of consumption and excretion have since proliferated from the scale of individual human biology to ecology as well as the natural and social sciences (Zhang 2020). Urban political ecologists employ the concept of an urban metabolism to get at the "circulation, exchange, and transformation of material elements" (Swyngedouw 2006, 27) that constitutes urbanization. To my understanding, this reframing marks the city as the effect of ongoing processes rather than a static object with fixed boundaries and properties. (This way of understanding "the city" makes a lot of sense to me in my Baradian agential realist approach.) "Nature" is not something out there, beyond city limits, but produced dialectically with "the urban". In his deliberation on "(hybrid) natures and (cyborg) cities, geographer Erik Swyngedouw writes:
A dialectical approach recognises both the radical non-identity of actants (human and non-human) enrolled in socio-metabolic processes within an assemblage, while recognising the social, cultural, and political power relations embodied relationally in these socio-natural imbroglios. The production of (entangled) things through metabolic circulation is necessarily a process of fusion, of the making of 'heterogenous assemblages', of constructing longer or shorter networks. In fact, both 'hybridity' and 'cyborg' are misleading tropes, and may even be implicated in radically reproducing the underlying binary representation of the world. Hence, the bracketing of 'hybrid' and 'cyborg' in the title of this section refers exactly to the 'excess of meaning' inscribed in coding the city as either 'hybrid' or 'cyborg'. (Swyngedouw 2006, 33)
I understand metabolic transformations to generate entangled relations. Nature and city are constituted in their metabolising of one another, and therefore cannot be taken on their own. They are internally related. The city as cyborg indexes this irreducible fusion. In her Cyborg Manifesto, which Swyngedouw is referencing, Donna Haraway writes: "cyborg politics is the struggle for language and the struggle against perfect communication, against the one code that translates all meaning perfectly…cyborg politics insist on noise and advocate pollution" (1991, 176). The alleyway resists easy interpellation as the colon of an urban metabolic. While alleyways mediate the movement of municipal waste out and away from people's homes, they also facilitate noncapitalist circulation of discarded items which, while not entirely waste (yet), no longer hold use value for a particular household. They are relinquished to the alley in hopes someone else might extend their lifespan. Alleyways at once support the production of waste as a kind of matter under capitalism, thus constituting market value of what remains in capitalist circulation, and also infrastructure the proliferation of absolutely free things. Gifts. There is intermixing, too, as some items don't end up ever moving and the waste-space of dumpsters is breached by scavengers. Finally, humans are not the only gleaners. Crows feast on the excess of consumption, metabolizing capitalism's waste right there in the alleyway. This is all to say the alleys site multiple metabolic process simultaneously. Something to explore further would be how different kinds of gleaning operate within and as part of Vancouver's urban metabolism.

Reading more about discard studies and the waste/value dialectic, I began to see where my gleaning practice diverges from the interests of urban political ecology. Municipal waste and recycling are not the only discarded matter circulating in the alleyway. Elsewhere, I've written of alleys being porous spaces where belonging is in flux. Operating on urban denizens’ tacit knowledge of the city, matters deemed useful are offered up as open-ended invitations for recirculation by passersby. Crucially, items are set beside dumpsters specifically to be gleaned. They are not deemed garbage and so not consigned to waste bins. Of course, as a classmate reminded me, these items are still being put out to the alley and moved around. There is no guarantee, however, items set beside the dumpsters will be taken as many a soggy chair can attest to. Waterlogged and disintegrating, what's not taken sort of becomes part of the alley. My argument is that there is a vial difference between trawling through the en/closed sites of dumpsters/landfill/recycling bins and walking the alleys as an open-ended practice. I believe the very nature of items as intentionally and anonymously offered up freely to be recirculated by passersby is what opens their use value to being refigured. While recyclable scavenging turns on exchange value, my gleaning practice turns on use value. While food waste reclamation is about use value, in focusing on what's in side dumpsters it's about recuperating food's use value as food. My reinterpretation is more capacious. Whats interesting about considering the alleyway as opposed to the en/closed sites of abjection is how, as an infrastructure, they mediate/facilitate different circulations simultaneously that rely on one another but also differently articulate with capital and capitalism.

POLITICIZING ALLEYS AS INFRASTRUCTURE
Alleys are infrastructure in that they materially facilitate the movement of discarded matters around and (often, though not always) out of the city. They also facilitate the movement of people to and from their residences, especially in cars. Through reading urban political ecology texts this term, I learned to regard infrastructures as political. Infrastructures entangle humans and nonhumans. In Hydraulic City (2017), anthropologist Nikhil Anand Writes: "Infrastructures are neither ontologically prior to politics nor are they merely effects of social organization. Infrastructures are flaky accretions of sociomaterial processes that are brought into being through relations with human bodies, discourses, and other things…always in formation and…always coming apart" (13, emphasis in original). Vancouver's alleys are flaky in the sense that they are unevenly maintained, used differently across the city, and, as mentioned above, spaces of differential assembly—assemblies whose differential makeup reflects broader underlying politics that structure urbanization in Vancouver. To what extent are alleyways sites of negotiated belonging where people, plants, animals, graffiti, activities, and discarded matters are rendered in/out of place by complex and situational boundary making practices? How does one alley (or tangle of alleys) become preferred for gleaning over others (and by whom)? Again, what is not for gleaning? What is in excess of meaning making? These questions could drive a continued urban political ecology of alleyways.

In a plenary lecture on urban geography, Deb Cowen asked: "What can be gleaned by approaching the city through the infrastructural systems that constitute its materiality" (Cowen 2019, 479)? Applying geography's 'follow the thing' method to infrastructure, Cowen explores the distributed, ongoing role of railways in the colonial making of Canada and Canadian cities. While not specifically an urban political ecology, I found her account helpful in thinking through the role of alleyways in sustaining a settler-colonial city. Her attention to infrastructure as both method and object of inquiry (471) is an orientation I want to bring to my work with alleyways. "Through infrastructure," writes Cowen, "cities were constituted as spaces of intimate imperialism" (2019, 480). Pairing the concept of urban metabolism with ideas of infrastructure as political, I wonder whether alleyways are also infrastructures of ongoing, everyday colonialism, contested citizenship, and differential belonging. Last term, I took a geographical political economy course for whose final project I read J.K. Gibson-Graham (see another tab on this page). In that paper (referenced above) but also in that term's directed reading output (see what-the-work-can-do), my understanding of diverse economies and postcapitalist politics deeply influenced by thinking I'd been doing through my crafting practices at the time. Basically, I concluded by framing my urban gleaning practices as participating me in noncapitailst economies and the production of noncapitalist commodities. However, reading alleyway gleaning through urban political ecology this term, the question arises, What does it mean to situate alleyway gleaning as an alternate or marginal form of circulation, one happening alongside the disposal of waste which constitutes capitalist market value, when alleys are denaturalized and politicized? What does it mean to participate in noncapitalist forms of circulation such as scavenging and gleaning when the giving and taking of these excesses or surpluses is facilitated by an infrastructure that maintains ongoing urbanization of a settler-colonial city?

Geographer David Hugill (2017) draws a distinction between literature on the colonial city, which treats colonization as a historic phenomenon, and those on the settler-colonial city, which recognize colonialism as ongoing. Hugill calls on geographers to "renovate and extend their interpretations of the 'urban' implications of colonial practice" (2017, 2). Yet, in thinking with what I've learned this term, I'm inclined to refigure his question in order to ask: What are the colonial implications of my urban practices, specifically alleyway gleaning? My contention is that the colonial implications of settler urban practices may be a significant object/site of inquiry, especially when those practices are assumed to be counter-hegemonic.

In his book Carbon Sovereignty (2023), Andrew Curley (Diné) highlights how settler-colonial theory can be ahistorical in failing to account for how "the dispossession of Indigenous peoples from their lands (one of the key elements of settler-colonial theory) changes shape and practice over time" (14). While infrastructures mediate the disposal of municipal waste, thus sustaining the urban metabolic of a settler-colonial city, to frame alleyways as only or entirely operands of settler-colonial urbanization doesn't account for Indigenous agency and participation in the city and Vancouver's ongoing urbanization. Counter to the "long historical tradition in Western thought that holds urban and Aboriginal cultures to be incompatible" (Peters and Andersen 2013, 29), Indigenous people live in cities, Indigenous people experience urbanization, and First Nations are actively developing real estate that's visibly refiguring the skyline. Failing to denaturalize, historicize, and politicize alleyways as infrastructure of the settler-colonial city leads to a romanticization of alleys as alter-economic spaces, and their generalization across the city. As a non-Indigenous settler theorizing and practicing deep mapping, gleaning, and (here) urban political ecology on the unceded Coast Salish lands, it is important I reflect on the specific ways my urban (research; navigational) practices might participate in what Natalie Baloy (2016) describes as settler coloniality's holographic in/visibility of urban Indigeneity, wherein Indigenous peoples' presence in the city is simultaneously hypervisible and invisible to the settler gaze. Reading urban political ecology through my urban everyday has been a generative beginning.

CONCLUSION
While Michel de Certeau's Practice of Everyday Life (1984), tremendously influential to my prior work, attends to poaching in symbolic terms, his theory ironically lacks practical engagement with those practices on which he writes. In reading alleyway gleaning through urban political ecology, I've tried to consider the ethics and politics associated with this suppositively counter-hegemonic tactic. My overarching question came down to: how does denaturalizing, historicizing, and politicizing alleyways reorient my practice of urban gleaning? How does it change the way I inhabit/engage the urban everyday? Although I began oh so early, my project ballooned in many directions and so in the end, I wasn't able to incorporate everything I wanted in this write-up. Some of the texts which most inspired me didn't make it in because I didn't have time to do them justice. While sad about this, I do feel like the above, winding as it may be, was helpful as a first step in finally writing about alleys. That this entry be through the lens of urban political ecology has been incredibly fruitful.

Some differences that matter arose. For instance, reading Maan Barua's critiques of new materialisms in Lively Cities (2023), I realized how important it is that I distinguish Baradian posthumanism and distributed agency from not only the problematic transhumanism registers, but also other, less rigorously ethico-onto-epistemologized, posthumanisms. In the work I do, I see a need for matter to matter, just just materials, and think the commonplace (non)definition of sentience echos vitalist geographies which I differentiated myself from in my MA (see the end of the section Thinking through deep mapping). Moreover, I'm left wondering where my practice of gleaning would fit into discard studies, if at all.

Through the course of this class and final project, my hope was to gain an understanding of how the tools of urban political ecology might help me see the politics that structure landscapes of encounter in the immediacy of the urban everyday. What I've learned is that even if I'm not doing an urban political for my PhD, I can still practice urban political ecology! What I'm suggesting for myself is a reorientation of urban political ecology from an analytic to an ethic. In their introduction to A Postcapitalist Politics (2006), J.K. Gibson-Graham write:

If politics is a process of transformation instituted by taking[sic] decisions in an undecideable terrain, ethics is the continual exercising, in the face of the need to decide, of a choice to be/act/think a certain way. Ethics involves the embodied practices that bring principles into action. (xxviii)
Making the choice, over and over, to continue reading tools and concepts I learned this term through my everyday research-creation, I take on urban political ecology as an ethic of orienting toward the world.

A movement of thought is elastic. It always begins in the milieu, in the midst of experience.
Erin Manning, The Minor Gesture

I've entered geographical political economy from the middle, along with my associated milieu of theories, commitments, and ethics-in-the-making. I approach this course and term paper with hesitation, unsure how to participate and where what I have to offer might fit in. My first academic encounter with "the economy" occured during my master's degree when an interlocutor who studies the political economy of land asked me if and how I saw myself participating in the economy whilst deep mapping.¹ Having never thought about this before, my initial response was: "Not really… well, maybe when I buy something?" This revealed my understanding of "capitalism as interchangeable with the notion of economy" (Gibson-Graham et al. 2013, 10). My subjectivity wrought wholly in relation to capital, I could only identify myself as a consumer. Upon further reflection, however, I realized I was deeply embedded in economies of knowledge production and academic reproduction.² Part of my thesis³ therefore sought to untangle how my participation (as both academic and urban inhabitant) in unruly material and semiotic flows such as gleaning interfered with regulated forms of exchange from within the dominant system. By "dominant system", I meant capitalism and the apparatuses through which value is ascribed and intelligibility figured by the neoliberal university. I was significantly out of my disciplinary depth in this endeavor, and struggled to situate my tactics within and as part of capitalism without rendering capitalism omnipotent. In emphasizing the ways in which my everyday practices poached capitalism from within, constituting a "proliferating illegitimacy" that "elude[d] discipline without being outside the field in which it is exercised…" (de Certeau 1984, 96), I ended up framing "the economy" as a hegemony of its own.⁴ The question of how to query the perhaps generative interrelation of capitalist and noncapitalist practices lingers. How does research-creation⁵ interfere with capitalism, reconfiguring the economies in which it operates? What might my own research-creation, both that of my master's thesis but also my continued work, offer in terms of geographical political economy?

Motivated by these questions, the following paper will critically assess the contributions of J.K. Gibson-Graham across three books: The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It)(1996), A Postcapitalist Politics (2006), and Take Back the Economy (2013). I believe these publications respectively contribute a framework for thinking the economy otherwise than capitalism, a discursive language for reciting the economy into otherwise existences, and strategies and tactics for enacting otherwise economies at the scale of everyday labors. J.K. Gibson-Graham's counterhegemonic project of subverting capitalism's performed dominance is multifaceted, spanning an oeuvre I have only just been introduced to. This paper enters in the middle of things and works through nascent ideas and connections. I will begin by briefly contextualizing J.K. Gibson-Graham's contribution to economic geography, as well as situating the author's joint subjectivity. Next, I will summarize key arguments from each book interleaved with my own critical commentary. Amid my explication of the books themselves, I will reflect on their different styles and approaches. With what space remains, I will feel towards articulations emerging in the touching of J.K. Gibson-Graham with those I'm moved by and, to echo Murris and Bozalek (2019, 1505), those key questions that drive my experimentation forwards. I end by imagining ways in which I might enact J.K. Gibson-Graham's provocations as praxis.

Thinking, writing, and enacting diverse economies
J.K. Gibson-Graham is the penname of feminist economic geographers Katherine Gibson and Julie Graham. Katherine and Julie met in graduate school at Clark University in the 1970s. It wasn't until 1992, however, that J.K. Gibson-Graham emerged from a feminist conference at Rutgers University (Gibson-Graham 1996, xli). In their first book together, they sometimes use "I" and sometimes "we" when referring to themselves, though never assume individual credit; their second book reads more uniformly "we".⁶ Though life after graduate school saw them geographically distanced, Katherine and Julie continued to convene regularly for intensive thinking and writing retreats. While Julie passed away in 2010, Katherine has continued to sporadically publish under their joint name.⁷ To describe the feeling of what grows between them through joint authorship, J.K. Gibson-Graham cite another writing persona comprised of two female novelists, who remark: "There's a whole [between us], but it doesn't belong to anyone. We share it" (Eldershaw qtd. in Gibson-Graham 1996, xli). As a graduate student in the early stages of my academic career, I've had my share of abysmal collaborations in which my time, labor, and contributions were disrespected by graduate students in positions of greater power and privilege. My experiences taught me 1) how to set boundaries in order to maintain my dignity and self-respect, and 2) that ethical collaboration is immensely important to me. Approached as relationships, intellectual collaborations are replete with their own commitments and responsibilities which may be joyously and explicitly co-designed as you go. J.K. Gibson-Graham model an ethos of becoming together that I admire, and which palpably deepens over the course of their three books.

J.K. Gibson-Graham stand as key figure in feminist political economy, widely known for their critique of the way so-called heterodox economic geographers talk about capitalism. They write: "Noncapitalist forms of economy are positioned within 'capitalocentric' discourses as the opposites, the subordinates and servants, the replications, or the deficient nonexistent or even unimaginable others of capitalism" (1996, 35, n22). Class did nothing (in my opinion) to dispel this capitalocentrism which forecloses any possibility for noncapitalist economic practices to coexist on an equal terrain. To unsettle the discursive hegemony which fixes capitalism's dominance, J.K. Gibson-Graham develop a language of "diverse economies" that accounts for the plurality of economic practices—capitalist and noncapitalist—which make up any one economy. Through action research projects and academic as well as lay-accessible literature, Gibson-Graham cultivate an understanding of community economies as spaces of ethical and political decision making. While "most people don't see themselves as significant actors in the economy, let alone shapers of it" (Gibson-Graham et al. 2013, xix), their work aims to generate new senses of identity which are not forged in relation to capitalism. Within the framework of a diverse economy, people are freed from existing only as wage laborers and commodity consumers, thus able to identify with multiple class positions simultaneously. The multiplicity of ways we show up in the world for ourselves and others—compensated and uncompensated, reciprocal and nonreciprocal—is not only accounted for but valorized, not in terms of what it affords capitalism but in how it prides the individual and reinforces collectivity. Together, J.K. Gibson-Graham founded the Community Economies Collective (see www.communityeconomies.org/about) to share their ambition with a worldwide audience of academics and nonacademics alike.

The contribution of J.K. Gibson-Graham to economic geography, both within and beyond the books I will introduce shortly, has been the topic of much discussion over the last three decades. Are community economies really viable as more than experimental start-ups in the face of a capitalist-leaning global economy? Good idea(l) as they may be, do they have the teeth to face the Big Bad Wolf of Capitalism? In a beautifully written reading of Gibson-Graham, Tuomo Alhojärvi (2020) question whether the uptake of 'captolocentrism' as a settled matter denies the productive aspects of critique

Noel Castree (1999) finds Gibson-Graham's rethinking of Marxian political economy in The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It) (1996) too abstract and deconstructionist, prompting ontological and epistemological concerns. Among the concerns he raises are the conflation of knowledge with the world, a "paradoxical reticence to make truth claims about the world" (145), and what he perceives to be a failure to recognize the sometimes necessity of making "strong claims to 'truth'" (145). On Castree's first point, I agree that the world is not what we know alone, and indeed, that we could never know everything that exists for mattering is a question not of un/certainty but in/determinacy (see Barad 2007, 118, 127, and 300). It seemed as though J.K. Gibson-Graham took Castree's first critique of The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It) under advisement in A Postcapitalist Politics (2006) by explicitly opting to develop "a weak theory of economy" (60) that does not presume to know in advance the structure and relationality of economic sites (71). Inspired by Eve Sedwick, their second book explicitly orients towards an "ebullient practice of theorizing, one that tolerates 'not knowing' and allows for contingent connection and the hiddenness of unfolding; one that at the same time foregrounds specificity, divergence, incoherence, surplus possibility, the requisite conditions of a less predictable more productive politics" (xxxi). Practicing weak theory, they argue, challenges the paranoid drive for certainty which leads academics to make strong claims to truth. I believe this development in the work of J.K. Gibson-Graham speaks to Castree's second and third critiques in that the pitfall of claiming to practice "weak theory" is, well, you open the door for the big boys with their strong theory to come in with paternalistic lecturing: sometimes dears we must do things we don't particularly like. Castree's third critique is probably a fair one, and likely the result of Gibson-Graham negotiating perhaps conflicting Althussierian and Derridian commitments. I'll add one final note in response to Castree's first critique. Across all three books, J.K. Gibson-Graham's emphasis on discourse to the abandonment of materiality did read as a conflation of knowledge and the world. I would have liked to see more attention paid to the material-discursive nature of performativity. A posthumanist performativity (see Barad 2003, 2007) would, in my opinion, have better served their argument. The holes they left open in their theoretical framework belie a perhaps limited reading of affect, psychoanalysis, and performativity. This is not to say Gibson-Graham didn't "get it" or apply it "correctly," but rather that what they drew from outside their subdiscipline they interpreted through feminist political economy and not on its own terms. I'm not certain what a different reading would entail; these are just my nascent thoughts on the matter. I will elaborate my thinking further as this paper unfolds, and invite you to draw your own conclusions. I turn now to the work of summary and synthesis interspersed with more of my critical commentary.

The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It) (1996)
In The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It) (1996), J.K. Gibson-Graham aim to decenter capitalism by positioning it as but one of a "plurality of [economic] practices scattered over the landscape" (99). Drawing from postmodern Marxism and poststructuralist feminism, they reframe both the economy and capitalism by opening the latter to "irreducible specificity" (16) and the diversity of its constitutive outside. Such a task requires an exploration of the mechanisms through which an equivalency between the economy and capitalism is drawn and maintained, or, how hegemony operates so as to produce and sustain capitalocentrism. How come an economy wherein capitalist and noncapitalist practices generativity coexist is virtually unimaginable?

Gibson-Graham begin The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It) by constructing an analogy between the differential constitution of man and woman and that of capitalism and noncapitalism. They highlight how the definition of woman as that which man is not within phallocentric discourses serves to reify man as singular, homogenous, definite. Self-referential, man is man whilst woman exists entirely as man's constitutive outside—a vast, vacuous, and violable space articulated only in its relation to that singular figure whose negation it comes to embody. In the same manner, noncapitalism is rendered capitalism's subordinate, undifferentiated other. However, "If there is no singular figure, there can be no singular other. The other becomes potentially specific, variously definite, an array of positivities rather than a negation or an amorphous ground" (14). The theoretical task is therefore first and foremost to undermine the professed/presumed/performed singularity of capitalism: "the specificity of capitalism — its plural identity, if you like — becomes a condition of the existence of a discourse of noncapitalism as a set of positive and differentiated economic forms" (14). For examples of noncapitalist enterprises, Gibson-Graham offer communal (such as non-market household or community relations), independent (forms of commodity production such as self-employment), feudalisms (where surplus labor is appropriated in exchange for lease of land/housing), and slaveries⁸ (though what constitutes slavery is unexplored). "When Capitalism gives way to an array of capitalist differences, its noncapitalist other is released from singularity and subjection, becoming potentially visible as a differentiated multiplicity" (16). Here, Gibson-Graham's capitalization of Capitalism serves to cite the identity capitalism assumes as self-referential subject. Only through recognition that "There is no capitalism but only capitalisms" (247) does the singular figure of Capitalism give way to irreducibly specific economic configurations. It is not so much the end of capitalism that Gibson-Graham inaugurate but the end of Capitalism. With the end of Capitalism comes the end of a constitutive outside defined as the uniform other of a singular figure. Relinquished from existing solely as "premodern and precapitalist" (245), noncapitalist economic practices become differentiated positivities in their own right. This is the goal, in any case.

Calling capitalist hegemony a "discursive artifact" (3), J.K. Gibson-Graham deploy their feminist framing of capitalism/noncapitalism to locate hegemony not in capitalism itself but in specific articulations of discourse. It is not capitalism which is hegemonic, totalizing, final, or dominant; rather, it is through discursive self-referentiality—"capitalism is Capitalism"—that homogeneity, totality, finality, and dominance is fixed. By recognizing these qualities are not intrinsic to capitalism, Capitalism becomes capitalism and therefore susceptible to reconfiguring: Theorizing capitalism itself as different from itself — as having, in other words, no essential or coherent identity — multiplies (infinitely) the possibilities of alterity. At the same time, recontextualizing capitalism in a discourse of economic plurality destabilizes its presumptive hegemony. Hegemony becomes a feature not of capitalism itself but of a social articulation that is only temporarily fixed and always under subversion; and alternative economic discourses become the sites and instruments of struggles that may subvert capitalism's provisional and unstable dominance…. (Gibson-Graham 1996, 15) If the above claims that capitalism as we know (knew) it is but the effect of discursive iteration, how can capitalism be fully delineated from the social articulations that provisionally define it? The reader is left not knowing what, in fact, constitutes hegemony—is it simply folds of discourse without matter? The way knots of meaning form and take hold? What they must mean is that they are trying to subvert an understanding of capitalism as this fixed thing by refiguring it as a social articulation susceptible to being undone. Gibson-Graham mobilize Althussier's concept of overdetermination to "destabilize theoretical discourse and reposition the concepts within it" (44). Overdetermination brings to the fore the constitutive relation between the othered outside and all that is intelligible and determinate. It is the constitutive outsides that will be the undoing of the illusory stability of capitalism bestowed by hegemony: Through the lens of overdetermination, identities (like capitalism) can become visible as entirely constituted by their 'external' conditions…. Overdetermination enables us to read the causality that is capitalism as coexisting with an infinity of other determinants, none of which can definitively be said to be less or more significant, while repositioning capitalism itself as an effect. (Gibson-Graham 1996, 45) As much as contingency, indeterminacy, and the entangled nature of casual structures appeals to the Baradian in me, I find it interesting verging on ironic that Gibson-Graham would formulate capitalism's identity "as entirely constituted by 'external' conditions" after having just problematized the definition of noncapitalism/woman as the negation of capitalism/man (44). Granted, "thinking the radical emptiness of every capitalist instance" and understanding capitalism to have "no invariant 'inside'" (15) is less about emptying capitalism of material contents (though Gibson-Graham's contribution is largely devoid of materiality) and more about challenging the imagined uniformity of capitalism and the belief in its ever having had an inherent essence to begin with. Yet, I think my getting caught up on semantics here reveals the limitation of theorizing through an inside/outside oppositional framing. I also think building a framework from the sex binary of man/women is inherently faulty in that it sets the terms capitalism/noncapitalism (and indeed sex and gender) in a dipole. As man and woman are taken to be opposites, so capitalism and noncapitalism are forever entangled in a mutually constitutive embrace. Though Gibson-Graham aver capitalism must be theorized as different from itself and that there is no singular Capitalism only irreducibly specific capitalisms, they never actually attend to the diversity of capitalist economies. Therefore, although Gibson-Graham view overdetermination as an anti-essentialist strategy to bring to the fore what is backgrounded within a discursive hegemony of capitalism, their asymmetrical attention to specificity serves to invert the dualism they began with. The constitutive relation between capitalism and noncapitalism persists. Indeed, while they claim their intent is to break down binaries and not to assert a hegemony of the subaltern (87, n25), Gibson-Graham begin The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It) by positing "the inception of a new 'hegemonic discourse' of economic difference and plurality" (13). I find such slippage into dualisms indicative of the impossibility of at once wanting to dissolve the differentiation between inside and outside whilst also foregrounding what was once outside. To me, there are two mutually exclusive scenarios. Either: foreground and background are on the same plane, there is no distinct inside or outside, every economic configuration is specific and the economy is thus a heterogenous multiplicity of interplaying forms, or: foreground and background are simply swapped. Which is the project of diverse economies? Is the objective of counter-capitalocentrism a hegemony of noncapitalocentrism? So far, it seems to me that in recuperating the constitutive outside of capitalism from Capitalism, J.K. Gibson-Graham render unspecified capitalisms a uniform other to Noncapitalism.

Central to Gibson-Graham's counterhegemonic project (intentions of asserting a new hegemony aside) in The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It) is their refiguring of class as a social process rather than determinate social categories. Understood as the processes of producing, appropriating, and distributing surplus labor (52), class becomes "overdetermined, or constituted, by every other aspect of social life" (55). This reconceptualization frees class transformation from only occurring in moments of crisis as decisive conflict between stratified groups, recognizing sites of struggle to occur "whenever there is an attempt to change the way in which surplus labor is produced, appropriated, or distributed" (59). It also enables individuals to occupy multiple positionalities in diverse economic relations. Taking the household as a "major site of class processes" (58), Gibson-Graham describe how wives and husbands in rural Australian mining communities produce and appropriate surplus labor in what amounts to feudal relations. Complicating the notion of households as merely a sites of social reproduction, they explicate how reproduction of the paid, capitalist workforce through unpaid and feminized labor subsumes what could otherwise be rendered as a lively site of noncapitalist production under a discursive hegemony which fixes capitalism's dominance. While I found Gibson-Graham's arguments about reproduction particularly compelling, I wondered whether disrupting the homogeneity of economic representation (by "queering the body of capitalism" (145)) but not that of the household (236) risks reifying a key site of noncapitalist economic activity through cisheteronormative social articulations.

In summary, The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It) (1996) introduces a theoretical critique of capitalocentrism, reframing the economy in order to open capitalism to heterogeneity, contingency, and specificity. It remains to be seen, however, how to enact the economy otherwise. How might the current hegemony of articulation be unraveled and new knots of meaning formed? While Gibson-Graham reference action research they undertook in Australian mining towns, only in retrospect do they identify how their work brought forth new subject positions for mine shiftworker's wives (232). Perhaps in response to the prevalent critique that you can't just "think capitalism away" (see North 2008, 477), in their next book, J.K. Gibson-Graham develop a new discursive language for dislocating the hegemony of capitlocentrism—that of diverse economies.

A Postcapitalist Politics (2006)
The end of capitalism isn't once and for all. Just as the discursive dominance of capitalism is temporarily fixed through iterative recitation, so forging new economic imaginaries requires more than simply identifying diverse economies: Capitalism is not just an economic signifier that can be displaced through deconstruction and the proliferation of signs. Rather, it is where the libidinal investment is. (Gibson-Graham 2006, xxxv) Bringing new economic imaginaries into existence requires cathecting otherwise. In A Postcapitalist Politics (2006), J.K. Gibson-Graham aim to dislocate people's libidinal investment in capitalism by engendering affective attachments to identities that don't center capitalism. To this end, they construct a language of diverse economies.

A diverse economy is one wherein a multitude of economic practices and relations abound, only some of which are capitalist. While The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It) aimed to situate noncapitalist practices as always already within so-called capitalist economies, the language of diverse economies makes explicit the inherent diversity of transactions, labor relations, and enterprises that make up any one economy. J.K. Gibson-Graham offer the following figure to convey some examples:

When first asked how my research-creation involved me in the economy, I could only identify myself as a consumer. Gibson-Graham et al. (2013) note that self-identification in terms of capitalism is not at all unusual, since "most people don't see themselves as significant actors in the economy, let alone shapers of it" (xix). Reflecting on a diverse economy, however, I suddenly recognized how my research-creation participates me in not only in dominate regimes of academic knowledge production, but also alternative market transactions including local trading, informal markets, and barter, as well as nonmarket transactions involving household flows, gift giving, institutional appropriations, gleaning, gathering, and poaching. By bringing people's attention to what might otherwise go unregistered as economic activity, J.K. Gibson-Graham begin to shift the economic imaginary towards possibilities otherwise than capitalism. Notice, however, that a diverse economy as they articulate it above does not include mainstream capitalist markets, wage relations, or enterprises. Michael Samers (2005) observes that mundane and small-scale informal employment (by which he specifically means informal paid labor as opposed to informal yet unpaid work) is glossed over by Gibson-Graham who favor more utopic economic alternatives such as cooperatives. What would mainstream markets, mainstream paid labor, and mainstream capitalist enterprises look like? As someone unfamiliar with economics and economic geography, it is difficult (and perhaps hazardous) to conjure up examples. It remains unclear whether mainstream renditions are part of a diverse economy or not. If they are, their elision from the figure of diverse economies seems critical. Can "alternative capitalist" and noncapitalist activities really exist independently of mainstream/hegemonic capitalism? Does decentering capitalism risk missing the generative (and I would argue inextricable) relationality between mainstream capitalism, alternative capitalism, and noncapitalism? Smith and Stenning (2006) raise similar concerns over the limited attention paid in diverse economies literature⁹ to the interrelation of capitalist and noncapitalist economies, recognizing "different spheres of economic practices as always already articulated with each other" (193).

In developing and implementing a language of diverse economies, J.K. Gibson-Graham center discourse as both site and instrument for subverting hegemonic fixations of meaning. This means they are concerned with changing the way people imagine, think/talk/write about, and feel for capitalism. Unlike The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It) which was rather lacking in empirics, Gibson-Graham reference numerous action research projects in A Postcapitalist Politics, focusing especially on collaborations conducted in the Latrobe Valley, Australia and the Pioneer Valley in western Massachusetts, USA. Through reflexive activities with study participants and community researchers, Gibson-Graham practice using the language of diverse economies in order to "create the conditions for the emergence of noncapitalist modes of economic subjectivity" (2006, 148). Exercises carried out by participants included crafting photo essays to describe the socioeconomic story of the valley, inventorying a community's skillset, and guided shares to illuminate the diverse ways people were in economic relation to local enterprises and to one another.

Reflecting on the disciplinary milieu in which they find themselves in the early 2000s, J.K. Gibson-Graham see the Left as having distanced themselves from power in a bid for apolitical moralism.¹⁰ A postcapitalist politics is about finding new ways of inhabiting power rather than shying away from it.¹¹ Gibson-Graham position the language of diverse economies as their "principal technology for 'repoliticizing the economy'" (195) as a space of ethical and political decision making. Such a "repoliticization requires cultivating ourselves as subjects who can imagine and enact a new economic politics" (xxviii). In their efforts to understand how subjectivity is formed and cultivate differently desiring economic subjects, Gibson-Graham draw from affect studies, performativity theory, and psychoanalysis. Whereas their first book was predominantly influenced by feminist theory and (post-)marxism (particularly the work of Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff, as well as Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe), A Postcapitalist Politics feels more widely read, its ethos noticeably moved by William Connolly. For affect theory, Gibson-Graham turn to Nigel Thrift, Eve Sedgwick, and, to a minor degree, Brian Massumi. Judith Butler's Psychic Life of Power (1997), published a year after The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It), contributes significantly to Gibson-Graham's theorizing on subjectivity. Butler understands "subjection as both the subordination and becoming of the subject" (1997, 13). In other words, subjects can be read as an effect of subjection (Butler 1997, 11), formed in and through their "passionate attachment" to, or a desire for, their own subordination (9). The passionate attachment of interest to Gibson-Graham is that which people feel towards capitalism. It is this desiring that they are attempting to dislocate through their discursive language of diverse economies. Yet I wonder whether the focus on self-cultivation risks a self centering humanism. Does the attendant drive to know and change our selves place primacy on what Erin Manning (2016) calls the "volition-intentionality-agency triad" so prized by neurotypicality? The more-than-human and the nonhuman are conspicuously absent across all three books. In a later paper, J.K. Gibson-Graham do consider the "interdependencies,[sic] between humans, environments and non-human entities… displac[ing] humans as the sole agents of ethical decision-making" (Roelvink and J.K. Gibson-Graham 2009, 151). However, their discussion remains focused on the ecological in terms of non-human nature; in thinking "the overdetermined process of production in a commodity economy" (Roelvink and J.K. Gibson-Graham 2009, 152), the physical geography and nonhuman species are what comes to matter not the nonhuman others of equipment and infrastructure. What might a postcapitalist politics look like that doesn't presuppose the boundary between human and nonhuman? How might materiality be repoliticized with a diverse economy?

Reflecting on the disciplinary milieu in which they find themselves in the early 2000s, J.K. Gibson-Graham see the Left as having distanced themselves from power in a bid for apolitical moralism.¹⁰ A postcapitalist politics is about finding new ways of inhabiting power rather than shying away from it.¹¹ Gibson-Graham position the language of diverse economies as their "principal technology for 'repoliticizing the economy'" (195) as a space of ethical and political decision making. Such a "repoliticization requires cultivating ourselves as subjects who can imagine and enact a new economic politics" (xxviii). In their efforts to understand how subjectivity is formed and cultivate differently desiring economic subjects, Gibson-Graham draw from affect studies, performativity theory, and psychoanalysis. Whereas their first book was predominantly influenced by feminist theory and (post-)marxism (particularly the work of Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff, as well as Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe), A Postcapitalist Politics feels more widely read, its ethos noticeably moved by William Connolly. For affect theory, Gibson-Graham turn to Nigel Thrift, Eve Sedgwick, and, to a minor degree, Brian Massumi. Judith Butler's Psychic Life of Power (1997), published a year after The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It), contributes significantly to Gibson-Graham's theorizing on subjectivity. Butler understands "subjection as both the subordination and becoming of the subject" (1997, 13). In other words, subjects can be read as an effect of subjection (Butler 1997, 11), formed in and through their "passionate attachment" to, or a desire for, their own subordination (9). The passionate attachment of interest to Gibson-Graham is that which people feel towards capitalism. It is this desiring that they are attempting to dislocate through their discursive language of diverse economies. Yet I wonder whether the focus on self-cultivation risks a self centering humanism. Does the attendant drive to know and change our selves place primacy on what Erin Manning (2016) calls the "volition-intentionality-agency triad" so prized by neurotypicality? The more-than-human and the nonhuman are conspicuously absent across all three books. In a later paper, J.K. Gibson-Graham do consider the "interdependencies,[sic] between humans, environments and non-human entities… displac[ing] humans as the sole agents of ethical decision-making" (Roelvink and J.K. Gibson-Graham 2009, 151). However, their discussion remains focused on the ecological in terms of non-human nature; in thinking "the overdetermined process of production in a commodity economy" (Roelvink and J.K. Gibson-Graham 2009, 152), the physical geography and nonhuman species are what comes to matter not the nonhuman others of equipment and infrastructure. What might a postcapitalist politics look like that doesn't presuppose the boundary between human and nonhuman? How might materiality be repoliticized with a diverse economy?

Let me introduce you to a significant intra-locutor¹² of mine: an Epson WorkForce Pro 4740 printer I gleaned in a Dunbar alleyway soon after I moved to Vancouver. My printer serves two major functions. First, it enables me to print hard-copies of class readings. I require hard-copies to read for many reasons which can most legibly be summarized as "due to disability." Well, most legibly to the reader, not to the institution. Although I am registered with UBC's Center for Accessibility, when I asked to be accommodated with hard-copy readings for class I was told this request was not an accessibility need. My Epson WorkForce Pro 4740 printer has therefore served as a tactic of self-accommodation in the face of UBC's disabling subjectivation. Second, I use my printer to craft cards, stickers, iron-on transfers, prints, bookmarks, zines, and more which I gift freely and barter, as well as exchange at local art markets. The clothing I print on is material I've salvaged for free from the fabric recycling dumpster in the basement of my building, as well as from alleyway free boxes. I also make stickers of graffiti I follow around the city, re-siting these unruly material-semiotics in perpetuation of a "proliferating illegitimacy" (de Certeau 1984, 96). In the first case, that of assistive technology, my printer is figured as a commodity in service of knowledge production under (academic) capitalism. In the second case, that of creative practice, my printer may be figured as a means of production for gift and barter economies, as well as for informal markets of alternate and reciprocal exchange.¹³ In both cases, I make use of ink and supplies obtained through appropriating institutional grants for fieldwork and research materials. In the instance of both assistive technology and creative practice (for the boundary between the two disintegrated over the course of my inquiry), knowledge is distributively produced through the very process (enterprise) of making (laboring) and distributing (transacting) my outputs.¹⁴

The interference I want to make here is this: drawing from posthumanist performativity, I suggest there is another way to configure appliances, one which gets us out of the capitalism/noncapitalism binary. What if, say, my printer was never wholly interpellated as either a commodity for reproducing capitalism or as a means of noncapititalist commodity production, but was instead s/cited as an intellecting other in its own right. Acknowledged as such, my printer could be recognized as continually gifting¹⁵ its capabilities in exchange for ink and paper.¹⁶ Material outputs are therefore imbricated with mainstream capitalist, alternative capitalist, and noncapitalist economies by virtue of input materials being bought in-store, appropriated from institutional grants, as well as salvaged, poached, and gleaned. Although J.K. Gibson-Graham acknowledge "The market is not all or only capitalist, commodities are not all or only products of capitalism" (1996, 144), discussion of the intertwining nature of capitalist and noncapitalist markets with capitalist and noncapitalist commodities—and noncapitalist noncommodities for that matter—is limited to a single paragraph in A Postcapitalist Politics (2006, 150). Gibson-Graham thus fail to consider things which are produced for market and nonmarket transactions simultaneously. The creative artifacts of research-creation complicate the easy delineation of commodities as goods and services produced for markets, since "research-creation participates in both the gift alter-economy and the dominant quantitative economy" (Manning and Massumi 2014, 130). Whether the material outputs of research-creation are figured as gifts (and therefore enrolled in nonmarket transactions) or bartered/traded/sold locally (enrolling them in alternative market transactions) is less important than what the physical-conceptual (or material-discursive, if you prefer) work is doing and how boundaries are being refigured in the process. Overall, I found the framework of diverse economies missing this generative interrelation. I have an intuition that enacting Gibson-Graham's provocation as praxis would, for me, entail reclaiming practices of academic reproduction like citation as both sites and tactics for noncapitalist knowledge production that performatively interfere with hegemonic frameworks of intelligibility.

Enacting otherwise than capitalism
Over the course of A Postcapitalist Politics, J.K Gibson-Graham conceptualized an "intentional economy". In contrast to capitalist development strategies which prioritize commodification and capital accumulation (Gibson-Graham 2006, 193), the intentional economy is a space of ethical and political decision making around meeting needs, appropriating surplus, responsible consumption, and nurturing the commons. Gibson-Graham suggest community economies as intentional economies which at/tend to community. Here, community is not predicated on common Being wherein some essential sameness is presupposed, but rather an orientation to being-in-common that cultivates collective subjectivity whilst respecting and accepting peoples differences. Whereas community under (academic) capitalism is a hollow word rife with hyperindividualism (careerism), community economies are committed to a "praxis of co-existence and interdependence" (Roelvink and Gibson-Graham 2009, 149). Take Back the Economy (Gibson-Graham et al. 2013) elaborates community economy threads from A Postcapitalist Politics in lay language for a general audience. It is not prescriptive nor one-size-fits-all. Filled with graphics and anecdotal vignettes from action research participants, this practical handbook is an invitation to cultivate community economies through everyday labors.

The counterhegemonic project of taking back the economy is oriented around taking back work, taking back business, taking back the market, taking back property, and taking back finance. I want to conclude this paper by considering what it means for me to take back work à la J.K. Gibson-Graham. Through exercises like a 24-hour clock and wellbeing scorecard, Gibson-Graham explore different people's material, occupational, social, community, and physical wellbeing in relation to the work they carry out over the course of a day. As an academic-in-training juggling numerous jobs and side hustles, the way I spend my time from day to day is idiosyncratic, even in relation to my colleagues. For me, everything is quite blurred and I like it that way. Indeed, I see research-creation as a generative blurring that challenges the asymmetrical porosity of work and home described by Doreen Massey (1995). In Massey's account, paid work disproportionately "invades" the household, while reproductive labor, brought into a place of capitalist employment, is see as "hardly an invasion" (494). C/siting situated practices as multimodal knowledges, research-creation acts as intercessor for the invasion of so-called reproductive labors into the sphere of academic work. For me, cooking, cleaning, commuting, and making clothes are sites of knowledge production. I am always, as praxis, finding ways to appropriate institutional time and resources for creative projects through which I continue to theorize unruly practice.

I also question whether J.K. Gibson-Graham's narrow focus on the interplay of capitalist and noncapitalist labor relations elides activities that are neither, or, rather, those undertaken by individuals to reproduce the capacity for both capitalist and noncapitalist production. What I have in mind is autistic regulation. Autistic regulation is the engagement in self soothing activities, often oriented around special interests or hobbies. My own regulation activities include an assortment of making and doing practices that involve my hands: hand-sewing speculative garments, painting, playing music, cooking, cleaning, folding laundry, and doing the dishes. Yes, we all need alone time and enjoy cultivating our hobbies and investing in our practices. But regulation for autistics is vital to functioning in any capacity, productive or reproductive or even nonproductive. Not being able to regulate as needed can lead to meltdown. Meltdowns exhaust the body, leaving the individual incapacitated. I want to posit autistic regulation as asocial reproduction that replenishes/regenerates capacities for sociality, life, and labor. Though the outcome of an emotionally regulated state is no doubt valuable to capitalist attention economies, I think autistic regulation is generative of its own forms of valuation.¹⁷ I also felt the need to contribute something positive and actually insightful about autistics and geographical political economy after early-term references to Post-autistic Economics!

This paper articulates around research-creation and diverse economies. In order to pursue the ideas emerging through the process of writing this paper, I will need to read more widely with specific attention to people who, like Smith and Stenning (2006), "consider non-capitalist, non-market economic practices as always in an intimate and plural existence with, not 'outside', the realm of capital and market processes" (191). A rereading of Anna Tsing's The Mushroom at the End of the World (2015) is in order, as is a prolonged engagement with Erin Manning's contribution to research-creation. I should also revisit David Roussell's dissertation-derived book on postqualitative inquiry and research-creation. Reading feminist and geographical political economy, however, has given me the confidence to tackle concepts I previously thought I didn't have the capacity to engage with. I am better equipped now to go forth gleaning what I need from a variety of approaches so as not to become "allergic" to ways of thinking and being that challenge me. I have been tremendously inspired by J.K. Gibson-Graham's dedication to working out their ideas over many years in care-fully collaborative research engagements. They never intended their theory to be flawless, and demonstrate a real dedication to praxis and commitment to making their work matter to people outside the academy. I'll end by sharing a particularly moving passage: ...we see the need not only for a differently theorized economy, but for new ethical practices of thinking economy and becoming different kinds of economic beings. The co-implicated processes of changing the self/thinking/world is what we identify as an ethical practice. If politics is a process of transformation instituted by taking decisions in an undecidable terrain, ethics is the continual exercising in the face of the need to decide, of a choice to be/act/think a certain way. Ethics involves the embodied practices that bring principles into action. (Gibson-Graham 2006, xxxviii, emphasis in original) What possibilities are opened up to refigure my own subjectivity in regards to how I participate making economies? How might the ethos of my PhD, already a matter of concern as part of my directed reading, be moved by a postcapitalist politics? Does what I have to offer extend J.K. Gibson-Graham in any new directions? If so, where do I go from here? These questions and those scattered throughout this paper are ones I will continue to ponder in the coming years.