Being careful with tools, including concepts

I am interested in the choices we make about the tools we use to collaborate, and how these choices structure the space of possibilities for participating in transformative solidarity economies.

This interest builds on my existing contributions to a field of research integrating historical, philosophical, and sociological examinations of how contested concepts are used as tools within and across specific contexts. Examples of projects where I have been able to contribute to this field of research include:

• A four-year textual-analysis project studying how our uses of concepts as goal-directed tools can be structured by context-dependent associations. This project integrated historical and philosophical examinations of how the interdependent concepts of mental imagery and hallucinations came to be used as independent tools in neuroimaging experiments (E.T. Smith, 2018a; 2018b; 2019; 2020)

• A four-year collaborative participant-observation research project analysing the characteristics of participatory culture within the Open Source Software development of Scuttlebutt as an alternative social media platform (K. Mannell & E.T. Smith, 2022)

• An multi-disciplinary project where I contributed to a comparative analysis of uses of the concept of replication for context-specific goals (E.T.Smith et al, 2021) and an examination of possibility that including qualitative-reasoning within structured deliberation processes can improve expert predictions (B. Wintle, et al., 2023).

In preparation for researching the tools used in solidarity economies, I have been preparing summaries and in-progress reflections on related concepts, each of which build-on and feed-into various resource collections, including:

• Practising commoning
• Prefigurative politics in practices
• Transformative solidarity;
• Collective governance
• Solidarity economies.

It is important to me that any research I contribute to remains open-access. If you want to support this practice, please consider working with me and, if you have the financial means, support the following projects:

• IndigenousX, an Indigenous owned and operated media, consultancy, and training organisation.
• First Nations Hub, an organisation providing a culturally safe, co-working space to advance grassroots campaigns for Country and Victorian Aboriginal community.

“It wasn’t always this, and it won’t always be thus… How can I find the most liberated position in the current reality?” adrianne marie brown, 2019