Year: 2025-2026
Research Team Type: Faculty-led
Team leads: Matthew Shutzer, Assistant Professor, Department of History; Chandana Anusha, C.W. Fellow, Department of Geography; Oliver Cussen, C.W. Fellow, Department of Geography
The planetary crisis has revived an interest in the past and future of “the commons,” where social relations and natural resources are governed outside the logic of the market and without the regulation of the state. Whereas the commons have typically been associated with delimited spaces and organizations, such as the agrarian village or local guilds, contemporary research explores the possibility of thinking about the commons on the scale of oceans, the species, or the planet.
This Matrix Research Team brings cutting-edge research into dialogue with established debates on the commons to interrogate a central research question: To what extent do historical, existing, and imagined examples of the commons — from the precapitalist village, the urban commune, or the global commons — offer models for sustainable and democratic forms of social ecology in an era of accelerated land grabs, resource extraction, and anthropogenic climate change?
The team will bring together researchers from Geography, History, Anthropology, Legal and Political Theory, and English Literature, each currently working on projects that explore the relationship between property, nature, and accumulation across different sites and periods. Our scales of analysis will move from the agrarian to the oceanic, subterranean to the atmospheric, built environments to the non-human world, and regional to the planetary. By sketching out the regimes, fantasies, and memories that drive the making and unmaking of commons, we hope that our conversations will contribute to policy-making on one of the biggest natural resource questions of our time.