The event takes place every first Thursday of the month during the semester from September through December and from February through June and is open to PhD students at the Lucerne School of Design, Film and Art (HSLU), the National Institute of Design (NID), and other interested guests and PhD students from other universities.
Katherine Gibson
Imagining and Enacting Community Economies in a Time of Collapse
Thursday, July 2, 2026
12:00 - 13:15 (CET / Central Europe)
3:30 pm - 4:45 pm (IST / India)
For those of us who sense that environmental and social collapse is a distinct possibility in coming decades, there is an urgency to the project of disassociating ourselves from capitalist modernity and working to incubate new forms of living. In this fractured time community economies researchers and practitioners are finding that their approach to imagining and enacting a politics of possibility resonates with that of eco-social designers interested in dismantling infrastructures of unsustainablity and ushering in what Fry calls The Sustainment. In this lecture Katherine Gibson will discuss how community economy researchers and practitioners adopt a stance that is open to possibility.
Katherine Gibson is Professor Emerita of the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University, AUSTRALIA and Co-Director of the Community Economies Institute, an international Non-University Education and Research Organization (NUERO). She is a feminist economic geographer with an international reputation for innovative research on economic transformation and over 30 years’ experience of working with communities to build resilient economies. With the late Professor Julie Graham, University of Massachusetts Amherst, and as the joint author J.K. Gibson-Graham, she initiated the Diverse Economies Research Program and founded the Community Economies Collective.
If you have any questions regarding the lecture series or the PhD programme please share them by mail to
esi@hslu.ch.
