Swinburne Seminar Series

Professor Bronwen Morgan (University of New South Wales) seeks to bring into dialogue two previously unrelated areas of scholarship: legal consciousness and diverse economies, as a way of illuminating the analysis of community-level action for sustainability, including its troubled relationship to the emerging 'sharing economy'. She draws indirectly on a comparative UK-Australia study of 'grassroots innovations' ("networks of activists and organisations generating novel bottom-up solutions for sustainable development") in food, energy and transport. These initiatives stress, to varying degrees, civil society, activism, localism and community even while tensions emerge with particular forms of the sharing economy that enact and rely on much more extractive modes of 'business-as-usual'.