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J. K. Gibson-Graham is a pen name shared by feminist economic geographers Julie Graham and Katherine Gibson. The two professors' landmark first book The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It) was first published in 1996, followed by A Postcapitalist Politics in 2006. The two scholars also founded The Community Economies Research Network (CERN) and the Community Economies Collective (CEC), "international collaborative networks of researchers who share an interest in theorizing, discussing, representing and ultimately enacting new visions of economy."[1]
Julie Graham died on April 4, 2010 of complications from cancer.[2][3] Since then, Gibson has published some texts under their joint pen name—for instance, as co-editor of The Handbook of Diverse Economies (Gibson-Graham and Dombroski 2020). She has, since Graham’s passing, mostly published under her own name, Katherine Gibson. Gibson is currently professor at the Institute of Culture and Society, University of Western Sydney.[4]
Their current work involves rethinking economy and re-visioning economic development. They and the community economies collective draw on human geography (especially economic geography), political economy, poststructuralism, feminism, and ongoing community-based research to pursue three major research directions:
J. K. Gibson-Graham have provided significant contributions to understandings of community economies and economic geography. In both A Postcapitalist Politics and The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It), Gibson-Graham "propose to construct a new 'language of economic diversity'"[5] that will contribute to our understandings of possible economic structures.[5] They use a Marxist analysis of capitalism but they argue that capitalism is overdetermined and that there are many non-capitalist economic practices that exist alongside it. Based on this insight, they elaborate a "politics of possibility" that explores alternatives to exploitative economic practices. [6] As one reviewer notes, Gibson-Graham "rejects the idea that capitalist economies are tightly organized systems" and instead presents the economy as consisting of "many different undertakings, only some of which cluster around market transactions."[7]
In 1996, Gibson-Graham popularized and furthered discussion on a concept coined "capitalocentrism":
This term refers to the dominant representation of all economic activities in terms of their relationship to capitalism—as the same as, the opposite to, a complement of, or contained within capitalism. Our attempts to destabilize the hegemony of capitalocentrism have included a number of theoretical strategies:
1) production of different representations of economic identity, and
2) development of different narratives of economic development.[8]
Their work focuses on moving beyond a "capitalocentric" viewpoint and recognizing the wide range of economic institutions that co-exist within a given social formation.
