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This episode is in French. The full video with English subtitles will be available on degrowth.info on Nov. 26.

Julie Chateauvert, professor at the Elisabeth Bruyère School of Social Innovation, comes to democratic economic planning from art, activism and sign-language communities and says openly that 'planning' was no other favourite word. She tells the story behind her approach to power and to collective practices and describes the residency she is preparing: a week of work that brings a research team on democratic economic planning together with six artists, among them writers, visual artists, a video game artist and an architect. The aim is to shake up habitual ways of thinking and to ask what art brings to the imagination of post-capitalist societies.

This episode is hosted by degrowth.info member Joëlle Saey-Volckrick.

About this series: Democratic Economic Planning and Degrowth is a four-part series on a question at the heart of degrowth: how to plan democratic post-capitalist economies? Each episode is a full-length conversation with a researcher working on planning, care, commons or art: Bengi Akbulut, Sophie Elias-Pinsonnault, Krystof Beaucaire and Julie Châteauvert. Together they explore how communities, workers, and public institutions could plan production democratically, to respect ecological limits and foster a good life for all. This podcast is produced by degrowth.info in collaboration with the research group on democratic economic planning, which is hosted by the Research Center on Social Innovation and Transformation (CRITS) at Saint Paul University in Ottawa, Canada.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

What happens to a tailings dam once the mine closes? Krystof Beaucaire, PhD student in sociology at the University of Quebec in Montréal, introduces the concept of “ruins and “ghosts”, which are both "negative commons": infrastructures, objects and knowledge that lose their use in a transition beyond growth and still need someone to look after them. From the concept in the work of Maria Mies and Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen to the tragedy of the Mariana dam in Brazil, this conversation asks what would change in today's political debates if these negative commons were taken seriously.

Hosted by degrowth.info member Joëlle Saey-Volckrick.

About the series: Democratic Economic Planning and Degrowth is a four-part series on a question at the heart of degrowth: how to plan democratic post-capitalist economies? Each episode is a full-length conversation with a researcher working on planning, care, commons or art: Bengi Akbulut, Sophie Elias-Pinsonnault, Krystof Beaucaire and Julie Châteauvert. Together they explore how communities, workers, and public institutions could plan production democratically, to respect ecological limits and foster a good life for all. This podcast is produced by degrowth.info in collaboration with the research group on democratic economic planning, which is hosted by the Research Center on Social Innovation and Transformation (CRITS) at Saint Paul University in Ottawa, Canada.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Cooking, cleaning, caring, educating: the work that sustains life has been left out of most research on democratic planning. Sophie Elias-Pinsonnault, PhD student in economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, explains how capitalism organises social reproduction around accumulation and how a democratically planned economy could organise social reproduction around collectively defined needs. Based on her collective work with Audrey Laurin-Lamothe and Bengi Akbulut, she presents three open research paths: coordinating production and reproduction across scales, the roles of welfare states and communities, and the governance of disagreement.

Hosted by degrowth.info member Kélian Bouhafs.

About the series: Democratic Economic Planning and Degrowth is a four-part series on a question at the heart of degrowth: how to plan democratic post-capitalist economies? Each episode is a full-length conversation with a researcher working on planning, care, commons or art: Bengi Akbulut, Sophie Elias-Pinsonnault, Krystof Beaucaire and Julie Châteauvert. Together they explore how communities, workers, and public institutions could plan production democratically, to respect ecological limits and foster a good life for all. This podcast is produced by degrowth.info in collaboration with the research group on democratic economic planning, which is hosted by the Research Center on Social Innovation and Transformation (CRITS) at Saint Paul University in Ottawa, Canada.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

What can democratic economic planning learn from the Global South? Economist Bengi Akbulut, associate professor at Concordia University, describes a plan built from the bottom up, where councils and assemblies at different scales let everyone affected by a decision shape it. She turns to the communes of Venezuela and the Kurdish freedom movement in Rojava, alternatives that exist alongside what she calls imperial global capitalism, and asks how they can build a front strong enough to push at different scales. Along the way, she discusses how degrowth in the North can support the visions of a just future that emerge in the South, from post-extractivism to the pluriverse, and why degrowth needs planning to decide democratically which sectors grow and which shrink. She closes with a word of hope: people develop these forms of self-governance as an answer to poverty and precarity, so we do not have to wait.

This episode is hosted by degrowth.info member Kélian Bouhafs.

About the series: Democratic Economic Planning and Degrowth is a four-part series on a question at the heart of degrowth: how to plan democratic post-capitalist economies? Each episode is a full-length conversation with a researcher working on planning, care, commons or art: Bengi Akbulut, Sophie Elias-Pinsonnault, Krystof Beaucaire and Julie Châteauvert. Together they explore how communities, workers, and public institutions could plan production democratically, to respect ecological limits and foster a good life for all. Produced by degrowth.info with the research group on democratic economic planning, hosted by the Research Center on Social Innovation and Transformation (CRITS) at Saint Paul University in Ottawa, Canada.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Most debates on the economy happen in soundbites or in specialist journals. We wanted something in between: long conversations where researchers have the time to build an argument and where you can follow it on a walk, on the bus or while cooking. Democratic economic planning is an open field, full of unfinished questions and disagreements, and these interviews leave that visible.

It is our first experiment with audio, and we are curious to hear how it lands.

All four episodes drop together on 5 November. Stay tuned!

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