Good Afternoon!

I'm writing to announce the Community Commons Colloquia for Friday October 11th, Noon-1:30pm.  

Please distribute this announcement and Flyer to your colleagues, coworkers, departmental listservs, friends, family, and anyone else you think might be interested in learning about the concept of the commons and how academic scholarship, community practice, and social engagement can combine to create both social arrangements and resource-pools with the power to sustain real communities, when faced with failures of the market and the state. 

Please feel free to attend or to tune-in to the LiveStream to explore, with us, what Lin Ostrom saw as a world "Beyond Market and States"

Food Commons: A Rhetorical Flourish or a Flourishing Practice?: 
The popularization and colloquial use of the term “commons” has been both encouraging and frustrating.  From a pedagogical standpoint, the spread of the concept in popular discourse – largely instigated by Elinor Ostrom’s 2009 Nobel Prize award – is encouraging, as the concept can be a stepping-stone into new ways of practicing and thinking about community, economy, and self-governance.  However, from an analytical standpoint, this popular diffusion has promoted conceptual confusion:  research on “the commons” has a substantial history of academic inquiry, in which many useful clarifications have evolved to inform technical practices of common-pool-resource and common-property governance, legal applications of property rights and dispute resolution, as well as further theoretical development that helps to enhance our understanding of complex problems of resource use and the development of expectation-stabilizing social arrangements.

The purpose of this panel is to invite critical reflection on the value of both colloquial and technical concepts of “commons,” specifically as they relate to different aspects of food systems.  Our three panelists were invited for the diversity of their expertise: as practitioners, scholars, & IU community members with differing levels of involvement with the Ostrom Workshop.

Amy Roche is Early Childhood educator at Indiana University and is both the Outreach Team Leader and the Chair of the Board of Directors at the Bloomington Community Orchard.   She’s a life-long fruit lover and can’t think of much more inspiring than growing and sharing fruit. Amy says she’s here to learn how to do just that, and share what she learns.

James Farmer is an Assistant Professor in the IU School of Public Health.  His research focuses on the motivations and barriers to sustainable behavior. I most commonly utilize mixed-methods research designs to examine behavior variables in private land conservation, land trust activities, participation in local food systems, and the human dimensions of sustainable agriculture and rural living.