Popular economies: theoretical and practical mapping

Popular economies emerge throughout the Latin American region as experiences of reproduction of the lives of the urban and rural majorities, characterized by the coexistence of multiple and varied strategies of stabilization and dispute of new labor dynamics in a context of precarity, dispossession and confrontation with dynamics of accumulation, extraction and exploitation.  

The organizational structures of popular economies constitute new horizons of social, political and economic construction of popular and feminist organizations, and their organizational structures have experienced possibilities of reconfiguring the institutionality, in certain political contexts, or rather they have been the target of policies of stigmatization and criminalization, configuring themselves as central spaces in the dispute for popular subjectivities.

We propose to explore new lines of research based on the hypothesis of a “war on popular economies” (Gago, 2025) in dialogue with the analytical proposal of the emergence of a global war regime (Hardt, Mezzadra, 2024), analyzing the transformation of territories, forms of mobility, and the transnational dimension of popular economies, investigating their relationships with extractivism and the ecological crisis. Furthermore, we aim to deepen reflections on the political dimension of popular, feminist, and migrant economies, analyzing the forms of political engagement deployed as they are attacked, as well as their acts of resistance against the reactionary advance. Finally, we propose to enrich the analysis of the processes of financialization, the expansion of the debt economy, and its articulation with various forms of illegality in the face of widespread impoverishment, and the experiences of management and public policy, in terms of the reconfiguration of the public sphere and different forms of popular institutionalism.

coordinate

[+] Work plan 2026-2028