Anja Decker

As transformative visions for more just and sustainable societies multiply around the globe, the Diverse and Community Economies approach presents one of the most influential strategies to advance postcapitalist visions. In this paper, we contribute to this project based on our research and activism in the Global East, intended here as Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. We argue that engaging with the Global East is not only a matter of epistemic inclusivity but also a (too‐often‐neglected) opportunity to learn from a region with a history of dramatic economic transformation and diversity. We highlight examples of community economies already contributing to more‐than‐human wellbeing, and we present emerging theoretical insights concerning temporality, the multi‐sitedness of the enterprise, and diverse economic subjectivities. With that, we articulate our ongoing research agenda and advance conversations with postcapitalist scholarship and politics.

When social and spatial disadvantages meet, are they doubled? Empirical studies have convincingly demonstrated that disadvantages tend to accumulate. Our paper advances this scholarship by focusing on the under‐researched issue of social positions, subjective perspectives, and agency among single mothers in rural peripheries characterized by weak labor markets and accessibility issues. Drawing from problem‐centered interviews conducted in eastern Germany and Czechia, we investigate how single mothers perceive and evaluate the local and regional opportunities available to them. Additionally, we employ the concept of coping to analyze how they navigate spatial constraints. Our findings reveal that while our respondents encounter various spatial limitations and some feel ensnared in cycles of accumulating disadvantages, they often view these constraints as balanced or outweighed by the advantages of their living environment. Our in‐depth analysis identifies room to maneuver in coping with spatial disadvantages and sheds light on the costs and risks associated with different coping strategies. In conclusion, we argue that incorporating a perspective on agency and subjectivity into research on inequalities allows for a nuanced understanding of the interrelation of social and spatial disadvantages.

This article presents a mixed-methods research protocol suitable for studying everyday mobility and its effects on life chances for a wide range of populations. We argue that it can address, among other issues, two important methodological challenges in the study of mobility: addressing pre-reflexivity and habits, as well as differentiating between voluntary and forced movements. The research protocol combines a problem-centered interview, two weeks of GPS tracking, and a subsequent mobility interview. It has been shaped by its application to more than 60 socially disadvantaged residents of rural peripheries as part of an international research project. It contributes to existing qualitative methods of spatial analysis because its design incorporates not only theoretical considerations but also insights of real-world application from conducting it in varied contexts and with different populations, which are typically underrepresented in more elaborate research designs. Nevertheless, due to its thematic openness, the design is not only interesting for mobility research, but also for other research focusing on spatial phenomena at the individual level. We provide a detailed account of the method’s implementation, contextualize it in relation to previous approaches, and discuss the analytical potential of the data obtained. We suggest that by triangulating movement data with interview data, perceptions and meanings of everyday mobility can be uncovered that would otherwise remain at a pre-reflexive level.

Perspectives from Central and Eastern Europe rarely find their way into the debate on rural gender inequality. In this article, I aim to mitigate this imbalance by exploring everyday arrangements of women with dependent children in a peripheralised rural region of the Czech Republic. Using an expanded framework of precarity that integrates different spheres of work, I demonstrate that in the spatial context studied, motherhood increases the social disadvantage women face while simultaneously constituting an important field of female agency. I further show that in order to identify room for manoeuvre within configurations of insecurity the whole life‐situation of women must be taken into consideration. My findings add to a nuanced and context‐sensitive understanding of gender inequality in the European countryside, in particular by highlighting the field‐specific interaction of low‐wage economy, gendered division of work and mobility, and concepts of rural childhood, good (grand)parenting and self‐sufficiency. The study draws upon semi‐structured interviews and ethnographic research.