Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference 14-17th December 2016 Program Index

of state versus market or the neoliberal corporatisation of everything it investigates how public
infrastructures function as interfaces where distinctions between consumers and publics are continually
negotiated. Since corporatisation Sydney Water has addressed its users as customers and framed water use
in terms of individual choices. At the same time it has also developed campaigns promoting water and the
catchment as a shared public resource fundamental to the common good. The rapid rise of bottled water
markets has intensified this hybridisation of business and political lexicons highlighting the ways in which
shifting boundaries between consumers and publics, individualised and shared are materialised through
mundane devices from plastic bottles to domestic taps to public water fountains.
Louise Crabtree Housing as commons: did we miss something?
This paper will discuss the issues raised by approaching housing as commons. Historically, “commons” as a
Western context has referred to spaces and systems of subsistence activities such as collectively managed
grazing lands or fisheries. More recently, this has expanded to include water supplies, the atmosphere, and
new terrains such as online systems and/or content amongst others. Human dwellings remain conspicuously
absent from such considerations: the majority of commons literature and examples in the West elide how it
is that humans reside in space, implying that commoning can happen regardless of the destabilisation of
dwelling due to seemingly ever-intensifying housing market pressure. Given that, ironically, the enclosures
are perhaps most evident in the ongoing expansion of debt-based, speculative housing and indeed are
fundamental to such a system, and given the global financial vulnerability this creates, it seems timely to
explore the implications of housing as a commons.
Stephen Healy Care and Common Concern
One manifestation of the care crisis is elevated stress levels among nursing staff. Staffing rationalization is
one obvious explanation for stress though caregivers themselves identify increased reporting requirements
as something that competes for the time and emotional energy effective care requires. What this suggests is
that it’s not the work, it’s not being able to do the job well that is stressful. Following David Bollier, I explore
how “thinking like a commoner,” might enable a different response to the care crisis. Bollier’s emphasis on
the sociality of use and shared responsibility for commons makes it easier to see how knowledge and
cultural practises can, like physical resources, be commoned. From this perspective, current efforts at coproductive
care reform becomes a politics of commoning.
Declan Kuch
Solar Citizens: Towards Energy Commons or Regulatory Politics as Usual?
Home battery storage may see a “big disconnect” of households or even towns following sharp rises in
network charges to electricity users. “Solar Citizens” has emerged as a campaigning organisation to battle
against these network charges. This paper uses the concept of commoning to challenge neoliberal discourses
pervade debates about these charges and the political potential of the “Solar Citizens” fighting them. This
civic conception challenges divisions between public and private good that have firmed under neoliberalism
by drawing attention to the ways social justifications are culturally enmeshed with calculations of price.
Using comparative international data comprising regulations and case studies of energy social enterprises, I
argue that “Solar Citizens” have been important democratising agents in energy planning. Furthermore,
experimental social enterprises may provide a useful bridge between (a deeply impoverished, yet lively,
national) discourse of innovation on one hand, participation for sustainability in a carbon constrained world.
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