The State of the Commonsverse
event
event
The State of the Commonsverse
A lunch talk with David Bollier discussing opportunities and challenges of the Commonsverse.
David Bollier will discuss diverse commons projects and movements that constitute an overlooked parallel polis in today’s political economy. Working outside of the usual circuits of capitalist markets and state power, the Commonsverse consists of subsistence farming and fishing, a huge variety of self-governing digital communities, mutual aid networks, urban commons, alternative currencies, and much more. This loose social order has great transformative potential as neoliberal capitalism and liberal democracy falter, but expanding the Commonsverse will require federations of mutual support, new types of infrastructure, law and finance, and reconfigurations of state power.
SPEAKER
David Bollier has been an American activist, scholar, and blogger focused on the commons as a new paradigm for re- imagining economics, politics, and culture for the past twenty-five years. The Director of the Reinventing the Commons Program at the Schumacher Center for a New Economics since 2016, Bollier speaks and frequently collaborates internationally with many commons scholars, activists, policy experts, and brilliant irregulars.
Bollier's blog Bollier.org and his monthly podcast Frontiers of Commoning, are popular sources of news and commentary about the commons. He has written or edited more than ten books on various aspects of the commons, including The Commoner's Catalog for Changemaking (2021) and Think Like a Commoner (2014 and revised, updated edition in 2025). With his long-time collaborator Silke Helfrich, Bollier co-authored Free, Fair and Alive (2019) and co-edited Patterns of Commoning (2015) and The Wealth of the Commons (2012). He lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, USA.
ATTENDANCE
This conference is a closed event. If you have any questions about this event, please contact Katja Schubel. Press inquiries can be made here.