Commoning as a Healing Practice? Potentials, Challenges, and Promises
A Dialogue between Eveline Dürr, Karla Garcia, Meret Haack, Wolfgang Kapfhammer and Markos Panayiotou (Planetary Healing Group, LMU Munich)
7 July 2025
16:00 - 17:30 (CEST)
Online Event
In everyday usage, the term “commons” has taken on a distinctly positive connotation. What was once dismissed as a “tragic” miscalculation doomed by prevailing self-interest (Hardin) has long since been rehabilitated (Ostrom) as a socially and ecologically mindful mode of world-making. In the face of planetary crises, “commoning” – releasing a good from particularistic (ab)use – has become a viable form of political action with transformative potential.
Our presentation explores these practices within the broader context of healing in the Anthropocene, without overlooking their inherent ambivalences. We understand “healing” as a future-oriented response to past or present injustices and crises, operating across different scales. Drawing on case studies from Indigenous communities, we show how the commoning of both material and immaterial goods can generate healing effects, such as individual well-being, the recognition of collective rights, and the pledge for environmental justice.
Based on four ethnographic case studies, we discuss: (1) the allocation of marine resources to Indigenous stakeholders in Chile, while questioning the role of the state; (2) the juridical codification of the rights of nature in Ecuador, and the role of (un)commoning knowledge in shaping ecological restoration; (3) the commoning of a benign, albeit structurally conflictive, sociality in the cosmology of Indigenous groups of Northwestern Amazonia; and (4) the growing commodification of healing powers in the Ecuadorian Amazon.
Finally, we engage with urgent theoretical questions around commoning as healing: What challenges does commoning entail—and can it “fail”? How do the heterogeneous (human and non-human) actors involved relate to one another, and what tensions may arise between them? What is the potential of healing practices to reconfigure human–environment relations and foster broader socio-ecological transformation?
Zoom Information:
https://uni-koeln.zoom.us/j/94465812447?pwd=AOJbpcOCqdwbspsSkxoXi4tEW7mpk1.1
Meeting-ID: 944 6581 2447
Passwort: 854180