Keynotes

Stacey Sutton (University of Illinois Chicago) "Real Black Utopias: Fight and Build Praxis for Liberatory Movements"

Amid the current conjunctural crisis, the solidarity economy movement is ascendant. In communities across the United States, people are prefiguring alternatives to capitalist economies and social relations by establishing worker cooperatives, de-commodifying land, and advocating for local, democratic and shared ownership of community assets. They also develop movement infrastructures to deepen, expand, and sustain the work. This study maps what I call Real Black Utopias in the United States, place-based, Black-centered, ecosystem formations fighting intersecting systems of oppression while building liberatory models in the interstices of capitalism.

Stacey Sutton is an Associate Professor in the Department of Urban Planning and Policy, and the Director of Applied Research and Strategic Partnerships at UIC’s Social Justice Initiative. She recently launched the Solidarity Economy Research, Policy & Law Projectwhich aims to advance interdisciplinary research, critical analysis, enabling policy, popular education, and community alliances that fortify solidarity economy ecosystems, and highlights the transformative potential of projects operating at the intersection of social movement and prefigurative politics. Sutton's scholarship and teaching are in community economic development, with a central focus on racial and economic justice; economic democracy and worker-owned cooperatives; movement building and the solidarity economy; gentrification and dispossession; neighborhood small business dynamics; and disparate effects of punitive policy. Her frameworks for research and community engagement entail advancing “cooperative cities” and the solidarity economy and critiquing “punitive cities.” Stacey Sutton's most recent publications include: "Seeding Solidarity Economies: What’s Behind the Emerging Ecosystems", (Dec. 6, 2023). Nonprofit Quarterly; 2022. Red-Light and Speed Cameras: Analyzing the Equity and Efficacy of Chicago’s Automated Camera Enforcement Program  Full Report & Executive Summary;  “The Promise of African American Worker Cooperatives”; 2020. "Black Chicagoans are Still Leaving the City", essay in Between the Great Migration and Growing Exodus: The Future of Black Chicago, Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy; 2019. Cooperative Cities: Municipal Support for Worker Cooperatives in the United States. Journal of Urban Affairs; 2019. "Spatialization of Race from Redlining to Gentrification" in N. Kwate (editor) American Inequality: A Photographic Field Guide in the Streets of Camden. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press; 2018. “Gentrification and the Increasing Significance of Racial Transition in New York City 1970-2010” Urban Affairs Review

March 22, 11-12.30 am, Keynote n°2