Potluck Economics: An OIKOS X Wicked Zines Research Zine, in Partnership with the Society for Cultural Anthropology (2025).
How do we provision research when traditional funding models fail? How do we support each other in the collaborative research that private and federal grants have not always supported? How do we provision intergenerationally across life stages, and sustain connections in and across disciplines? What is to be done, given these conditions?
“Mauss tells us that the potlatch is a way of using generous tables to build status and power…
…This workbook outlines an alternative model for research funding: the potluck.”
–Potluck Economics
On May 11, 2025, a group of scholars came together for the “Provisioning Collaborative Research” workshop at the 2025 Society for Cultural Anthropology Biennial. The unconference, themed around “Restorative Relations,” invited organizers and attendees to experiment with genres of convening. OIKOS co-founders Lily Chumley and Erica Robles Anderson took the opportunity to reflect on a decade of work provisioning interdisciplinary readings groups, workshops, and conferences.
Academia is a strange organizational world, and it’s only getting stranger. Demographic shifts, political realignments, technology transformations, funding cuts, and administrative reorganization mean that higher ed is operating with institutional volatility. The very departments and disciplines that traditionally supported research on gender and social reproduction are being minimized, terminated, or folded into one another. Ironically, the importance of understanding kinship economies is only becoming more apparent.
Thus, workshop contributors came together to share strategies and approaches for building and provisioning together so that more students and researchers can secure the resources that they need. We mapped the space of shared problems, and we discussed various potential solutions. Our collective insights were gathered to produce a guidebook for working from inside, outside, or across institutions.
Potluck Economics is our first research zine. Designed by Nick Kawa and produced in collaboration with Wicked Zines, and in partnership with the Society for Cultural Anthropology, it asks questions such as:
How do we continue doing the work we want to do?
How do we build and sustain a sense of community?
How do we (as faculty) fund our students and build pipelines for their futures?
How do we imagine different approaches to provisioning collaborative research and share knowledge about funding?
The zine invites readers to scheme, riff, and cobble, leaving space throughout for organizing around needs, wants, and what one already has that goes under- or unused. Potluck scheming takes social relations seriously as a primary site of wealth. It divests from the network strategies of patronage logics, status hierarchies, and zero-sum logics that all too often turn colleagues into competitors.
Scheme a little…
Potluck thinking is open to speaking in different registers, at times more entrepreneurial and collaborative than we may have been trained for. It takes value-added accounting seriously as fundamental to assuring that projects and relationships fulfill multiple theories of the good, rather than any single bottom line.
What are our projects? Who is participating in them? Who could participate in them?
Potluck Economics is filled with space for making notes and filling out project plans. It invites readers to share their creative accounting strategies so that we can build a corpus of actions from different organizational contexts in order to keep the work going, come what may, over time.
Join the potluck! Share your ideas and notes on creative accounting
Copies of Potluck Economics are available upon request.
Contributors include: Monica Barra, Alex Blue V, Lily Chumley, Annie Claus, Nicole Cox, Kyle DeCoste, Priscilla Ferreira, Ali Feser, Liam Greenwell, Nick Kawa, Erica Robles Anderson, Stephanie Sadre-Orafai, LaShandra Sullivan, Victoria Xaka, and Heyu Zhang.
