Commons and Internationalisms

Commons and Internationalisms represents a collection of student projects that address the anthropology of activism and social justice through multimodal storytelling. Each project in this collection has been developed through peer collaboration and anchored in three pre-assigned group exercises spanning the 2023 Winter semester course, ANT366HS: Anthropology of Activism and Social Justice, at the University of Toronto.

Commons and Internationalisms is grounded in critical thinking about the ways conceptualizations of the commons and internationalisms become enacted in practice and across media, and in conversation with ethnographic and historical contexts. Each project in this collection is inflected by different approaches to conceptualizing commons and internationalisms, ranging from the decolonial and anti-imperial struggles of Third World/Fourth World movements in the twentieth century to contemporary ethnographic case studies of anti-capitalist and enviornmental activism. Together these projects explore how alternative imaginaries of a socially just world in common exceed the narrow bounds of romantic, utopian thinking to shape and be shaped by experimental forms of everyday social activism.