Austin Locke, Toby. 2020. Fields of Commoning: Attempts at Creating (Un)Common Worlds in New Cross. Doctoral thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London [Thesis] https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/28399/

Abstract Based on three years participation in an attempt to establish a social centre in an abandoned building in New Cross, this thesis explores the forms of commoning practiced as part of that process. The commons here concern forms of interrelationships between beings (human and nonhuman) that cannot be appropriately understood through the idioms of narrowly defined economistic logics, such as extraction, resources, management, production, utility and exchange. Rather, the commons constitute a radically democratic, or transversal, site of encounter with difference, uncommonalities, and other beings. In the cosmopolitical modalities of interrelation that the commons and commoning constitute and seek to explore care and communication play fundamental roles. The modalities of care and communication that commoning explores and creates function as existentially constitutive gestures that define the interrelationships of beings brought together through commoning. Care, as such is not only people caring for one another, or their environment, but more intrinsically is a mode of relating to, and communicating with, difference and others. Commoning is found to be a process which starts from difference and creates further difference, revealing the uncommons as both the possibility and limit of the commons.