Dr Timothy Joubert (he/him)

My research investigates the potential of 'public-commons partnerships' as a strategy for expanding the sphere of collective ownership and de-commodifying and de-privatising essential urban assets, infrastructures and services. The public-commons partnership model envisions state institutions underwriting and de-risking common ownership and cooperative economic activity, and entering into partnerships that help to democratically coordinate a wider ecology of commons projects and distribute their surplus. In particular I am interested in how such projects can take shape in the 'everyday' - the bureaucratic spaces of English local states, the activist practices of community organisations, and their ordinary encounters across the state-society boundary.

More broadly I am interested in critical political economy, urban economic governance, and urban contestation and radical social movements. Where these overlap, I am especially interested in the question of how urban activists can drive change through engagement with (local) public and state institutions, and in the particular dilemmas of pursuing anti-systemic activist commitments 'within' the state.