Abstract

This Participatory action research (PAR) project seeks to understand what happens when youth begin to imagine the economy differently. This project is about youth becoming economic subjects as they develop and run their own alternative economic initiative: a youth-led cooperative arcade. My youth co-researchers and I seek to reconfigure power relations as these four youth participate in a series of workshops designed to get them to think about the economy differently and to enact non-capitalist practices (other-doing). Each of the workshops is designed around one of J. K. Gibson-Graham’s five ethical coordinates to help communities “take back their economies:” labour (surviving well), business (distributing surplus), market (encountering others), finance (investing in futures) and property (commoning) (Gibson-Graham, Cameron & Healy, 2013). I borrow from critical pedagogy to co-develop and co-facilitate workshops with youth and, in doing so, reposition them as both learners and teachers. Through the PAR process and the development of Press Start, the four youth co-researchers develop a new language of diverse economies and begin to see themselves as critical economic subjects as they enact other-doing.