The ANSO Department is delighted to announce that ANSO PhD student Ieva Snikersproge has been awarded the Doc.CH grant, a career grant for PhD students given by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF). For the period running from the 01.09.2015 until 31.08.2017 she will be funded for her doctoral research entitled "Working Alternatives to Capitalism: Factory Take-Overs and Return to the Land in Early 21st Century France".

Her research project examines the possibility of implementing alternatives to capitalist ways of (re)production in a capitalist society. A scholarly tradition that draws on the work of Marcel Mauss has documented that such alternatives are not only possible but already existent in cooperative institutions where decisions about how to produce and distribute are made collectively. On the other hand, seen from a macro-historical perspective, these alternative spaces remain subjugated to the larger capitalist economy due to its inbuilt mechanism that drives for profit and the fact that exploitation can take a variety of forms. In the post-2008 crisis France, two types of alternatives are resurfacing – worker-managed recuperated factories and the so-called “return to the land.” As ideal-types, the former is a case that is urban, industrial and responds to a crisis within capitalism, i.e., the question of “how to make living”, whereas the latter is rural, non-industrial and responds to a life-course crises, i.e., the question of “how to live.” By using the extended case method and paired comparison, this project aims at mapping how alternatives to capitalism are envisaged and practised. More specifically, it aims to map the constraints to and the conditions for enacting alternatives which would also permit to sketch the contours of the present-day capitalism in France.

More information on her research project can be found in the SNF's data base.