Dear curious reader!
My name is Jo (they/them), and I am currently following the master’s programme in Environmental Policy at Wageningen University (NL). For the upcoming months, I am excited to work as an intern at the Commons Network, support current projects and help develop transformative ideas for common and just futures.
Over the past years, I have actively engaged with intersectional feminist thinking and practices and connected the insights I gained to questions about how we govern pressing issues in the current climate crisis we find ourselves in. During my thesis research, I became involved with the activist campaign RWE & Co enteignen (RWE & Co expropriate) in Germany, which aims to transform energy into a good collectively owned by the public. I got to understand that energy and other basic human needs, such as housing, food, mobility and care, need to be governed/managed collectively to ensure just futures for both humans and non-humans. I believe that centring care and the voices of marginalised communities is crucial when moving towards these futures. In my research, I have been engaged with diverse people affected by energy poverty. Listening to their lived experiences and stories really showed me that we urgently need to halt the profit-driven activities of large multinational corporations as they directly harm people and the planet. Instead, we need to foreground (non-)human needs, mutual aid and building caring relationships through which we can reconnect within our neighbourhoods but also across local communities and beyond national borders. Living in a community myself, I experience how creating and maintaining caring relationships can have a huge positive impact on our collective well-being. Hence, my research, political work and everyday experiences inspire and drive my work at the Commons Network.
At the Commons Network, I am curious to learn more about how we can transform ideas around transformations, community economies and care into concrete collaborations with different actors, projects on the ground, and advice for decision-makers at different at the local but also regional level. Coming from a feminist perspective, my interest lies in how we can centre marginalised communities and foster needs-based approaches in governance and the reorganisation of life. During the upcoming months, I will work specifically on the Erasmus+ programme Cities Beyond Growth, which provides tools and builds capacities for post-growth urban environments. Working together with the different partners of the Commons Network will be an exciting opportunity for me to connect with like-minded initiatives and people who are working to transform our cities into spaces where we can experiment and actualise the just futures we imagine. If you, dear reader, are similarly excited to push such diverse imaginaries and prefigure communities and cities beyond growth, I am happy to exchange and connect with you. Please feel free to reach out to jo@commonsnetwork.org.