Preface

It took us many years to get to this point. Based in universities, each of us spent years working with collective initiatives, cooperatives, groups, communities, political campaigns, and social movement activists from different places all over the world. That experience encouraged us to write and receive a National Science Foundation grant (2014–2016) titled “Mapping the Solidarity Economy in the United States.” This project helped us to do even more research with those and more constituencies in all three cities (New York City, Philadelphia, and Worcester, Massachusetts) in which we were working. That empirical research became the basis for a series of articles, which subsequently inspired further research and visions for a book, this book. From the beginning, we had intended to include examination of how racial demographics intersect with solidarity economies in our research. The urgency of engaging racial justice issues in a full and direct way became ever more apparent to us and became central to our research over time, as our cities and the country boiled over in struggles for Black lives against anti-Black racism. Studying solidarity economy in the context of race led us to engage with scholarship on racial capitalism and Black geographies that we draw upon to explain racial divisions within cities and within the solidarity economy movement itself. It has also led us to grapple in personal ways with our own racial and class positionalities.

Our research and writing process also evolved in our years working together. When we first started collaborating, we would come together in person for in-depth research and writing retreats. As the pandemic unfolded, we found it necessary to switch to virtual meetings, typically at least once a week, held via Zoom from our offices and homes in different parts of the world. One of us (Stephen) moved from Massachusetts to Australia and welcomed a child who now lightens up our meetings. We regularly apologized to one another’s family members who had to put up with yet another one of our book meetings. We came from different disciplines (economics, political science, and human geography), brought different expertise, and sometimes struggled with differences that may have seemed minor to people on the outside, but negotiating differences among four people with strongly held political and theoretical positions takes time. Early on, we decided to work as a collective and to write the book together instead of splitting the writing of individual chapters between four people. In hindsight, this mode of collaboration, while at times painfully slow, proved to be exceptionally engaging on intellectual and social levels as we deliberately prioritized shared understanding to structure how we write as a collective. We learned tremendous amounts from each other, listened to one another, morphed and multiplied our understandings, and felt genuinely illuminated by one another’s insights. Over the years, we became a “we.” We each passed over these chapters more times than can be counted, trading responsibilities, asking for help when we got stuck. Reading the final text, we find it is practically impossible to disentangle any one author’s specific contributions from the others. At the same time, we understand the individual contributions as so significant that we cannot imagine this book could have been written without any one of us. The words and ideas in these pages owe to a quartet, each of whom offered everything they had to this labor of solidarity, in the name of solidarity and the future of Solidarity Cities.

Given all of this, the order of the authors presented something of a dilemma for us. We needed an organizing principle. Alphabetical order? We considered randomizing the order but then feared that doing so would be less intuitive for readers and would risk being interpreted as implying significance and contribution. In the end, the choice came to alphabetical or reverse alphabetical, and we unanimously decided on the latter as a way to move furthest away from conventions of our disciplines that uphold hierarchical notions of authorship.

As a final note, the book’s strength lies in our interdisciplinary approach that combines political science, heterodox economics, human geography, and critical cartography/GIS. And yet, our combined expertise remains necessarily partial, as is the case with all knowledge. We are now eager to talk about our ideas and findings with readers, colleagues, students, and solidarity economy movement activists who have much to add.