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.
Taylor Nelms (left) and Chris Hughes (right) in conversation, NYU Steinhardt Dean’s Public Square Series X OIKOS
Chris Hughes and Taylor Nelms join OIKOS for the NYU Steinhardt Dean’s Public Square Event on Marketcrafters: The 100 Year Struggle To Shape The American Economy. For the past half-century, public policy narratives have been dominated by the tendency to treat free markets as if they make and maintain themselves.
Marketcrafters interrupts this narrative with portraits of real people and institutions that actively shaped markets. Jesse Jones, for example, played a key leadership role via the Reconstruction Finance Corporation from the New Deal Era through the Second World War. From efforts to recapitalize American banks or to build out the housing market, to converting supply chains for aviation production as war efforts ramped up, the agency within agencies is fully in view.
Once we can see that intervention is not the exception but the rule, indeed that major zones of economic activity — Medicare, energy markets, inflation controls, semiconductors, financial innovations — have been generated through marketcraft, we can think seriously about what kind of industrial policy we want. What kinds of investments in making and maintaining markets are required to meet the challenges and opportunities of the twenty-first century in a fashion that is inclusive and sustaining for all?
Marketcraftersenters the conversation we are having around metamorphosis, or the problem of transformation. Whether through mythic transfigurations of bodies or subtler conversions structuring modern political economy, forms shift. Institutions harden and loosen. Households, firms, industries, and states reorganize. The question is never simply what changed, but what had to be made in order for change to appear as if natural.
Despite decades of scholarship and a generation of critiques of neoliberal rationality and governance, Americans — from the political center left to the business pages — continue to speak as though markets exist in the wild. We tell ourselves that markets hum along until policymakers intervene. But this story is false. The economy is not a natural ecosystem with occasional storms; it is a vast, continuously engineered infrastructure, stabilized and steered by people who have names, biographies, moods, moral sensibilities, blind spots, and institutional commitments.
This insistence on people is central. Hughes’ history of the American state moves through biographical portraits: Bill Martin at the Federal Reserve, Jesse Jones at the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, Katherine “Kay” Ellison at HCFA shaping Medicare, Robert Noyce and SEMATECH, the architects of Obama- and Biden-era industrial policy. These are not “great men” in the mythic sense. Rather, biography is a device for making institutional behavior graspable. Institutions do not think; people do. Bureaucracies operate, but only because individuals inside them are trying, improvising, arguing, and sometimes failing.
So too, stories matter because we remember them. The Presbyterian Fed Chair who withdrew from a tennis tournament because it violated the Sabbath. A way of thinking about rule-following becomes the moral architecture for short-term credit markets. Sometimes, religiosity is not a quirky sidebar but rather a clue about how ideas, habits, and ethical formations sediment into governance.
Throughout the conversation, Hughes and Taylor Nelms return to the foundational claim that ideas matter, that they are operative instruments in the production of economic worlds. Markets are constructed environments where the conceptual models carried by policymakers, economists, and industry leaders take material form. Marketcraft is a deliberate shaping of markets through state institutions to advance public goals. It is neither synonymous with “intervention,” (because that term presumes a prior natural order) nor reducible to fiscal or monetary policy. Instead, marketcraft names the thick middle where coordination, procurement, underwriting, standards-setting, liquidity management, and the like, shape outcomes as a matter of course.
Empirically, states are always actively shaping markets, the only question is how. The danger of imagining a natural market periodically disrupted by state excess is that it obscures the constant, constitutive work of governance.
Thus, metamorphosis returns. Markets are not static containers but shifting forms sustained by continuous work. If we continue to believe in the fantasy of a self-regulating market, we misrecognize our own capacity to shape economic futures. Rather than debate whether government should intervene, we might ask: what forms of marketcraft best advance collective aims?
In so doing, we can keep in view the malleabilty of technological futures. Artificial intelligence, clean power, and semiconductor fabrication do not evolve according to some inevitability of innovation; they are structured by procurement decisions, regulatory frameworks, and public investment strategies that could be otherwise. To abandon the fiction of the free market is to gain the capacity to debate the purposes markets should serve, rather than whether they should be left alone. The metamorphosis is cognitive before it is institutional: to change how we describe the world is to imagine what we can build within it.
Our special thanks to The Financial Health Network, Dean Jack Knott, and the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication for supporting this event.
Brought into relation through the concept of false witness, both authors unsettle received histories of kinship economy, racialization, and evidence by delivering deft forensic readings of visual culture. Together, they model an interdisciplinary media studies that opens images, architectures, documents, public rituals, and material culture to questions at the heart of political life. Social reproduction emerges as the terrain on which law, media, and governance are built and contested.
Baghoolizadeh analyzed archival photographs of families from nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Iran against popular and official narratives that disavow racialization and enslavement. As abolition efforts took hold in the late 1840s, Blackness underwent hypervisibility in direct association with enslavement. Enslaved people ran public errands, served as chaperones and protectors, and functioned as status markers for wealthy families. The 1929 Manumission Law formally ended slavery, but its aftermath also produced an erasure so complete that African ancestry was invisibilized, and relationships between enslavement and racialization largely disappeared from public histories.
Baghoolizadeh emphasized her commitment, as an interdisciplinary scholar, to recovering suppressed histories, especially for oppressed peoples. Telling stories about the reconfiguration of kinship economies is a means of building communities better equipped to understand themselves.
Moore extended concerns about false witness by unsettling the category of “domestic violence.” Rather than treating it as a stable sociological designation tied to intimacy or private life, she constructs a media, legal, and architectural history in which the domestic names a problem of personhood, knowledge, and political order.
Her analysis begins with the Republican Guarantee Clause of the U.S. Constitution, where “domestic Violence” appears not as interpersonal harm but as a threat to the republic—a force the state must suppress to preserve political form. Close attention to this language reveals its entanglement with anxieties about Black freedom and the dissolution of the slave economy. By placing this constitutional “DV” alongside contemporary legal shorthand for intimate partner abuse, Moore stages a speculative reading in which capitalization, abbreviation, and bureaucratic coding carry historical meanings forward, even as their referents shift.
From legal text, Moore moves to the media architectures of courtrooms, slaveholds, domiciles, and other sites of witnessing, where optical devices operate as technologies of evidence management, visibility, and containment. The camera obscura, which is so often invoked as the origin point of modern spectatorship, is reread as an architectural form of captivity. This claim sharpens through Harriet Jacobs’s account of seven years spent hiding in a crawl space to evade sexual violence, watching her children through a narrow aperture.
Later chapters turn to anti–domestic violence campaigns and legal theater, where melodrama, cosmetics, and tactical strategies train spectators in what harm is supposed to look like. Moore develops the paired concepts of legal spectatorship and legal camp to describe a feedback loop between institutional seeing and aesthetic convention, where violence becomes information and suffering becomes data.
Moore has since expanded her work on ontological antagonisms between Blackness and visual technologies of proof through analyses of eye-tracking technologies in legal contexts; engagement with the works of artists who interrogate forms of violence materially—through hair, clay, wire, and replication; and through court watching projects that treat public attendance as a constitutional obligation and an evidentiary absence.
In conversation with the audience, Moore and Baghoolizadeh explored a distinction between genres of photography and bodies of images. They considered how legibility emerges when conventions haven’t yet emerged, and interpretive zones are unstable.
They discussed marriage as an institution that reveals social contest. Through divorce testimony, domestic disputes, and property transfers via dowries and marriage contracts, violence travels by proxy. Enslaved people functioned simultaneously as witnesses, assets, and persons. Slavery, domesticity, and legal form are bound into a shared communicative ecology.
The Q&A closed with reflections on method. Court watching, drawing, linguistic estrangement, and slow critical reading are practices of staying with uncertainty. Drawing in court is a mode of knowledge-making that resists evidentiary closure. Knowledge emerges from inhabiting spaces together, attending to their rhythms, architectures, and silences, rather than mastering them. Court watching can be practiced by artists, students, scholars, and community members. In its traces and public witnessing, it provides a vision of infrastructure for social life.
Finally, these authors urged us to let work take time. Grappling with settled accounts and evidentiary certainties means resisting erasure, and that requires stealing time from acceleration and professional churn, and spending it instead on noticing, attending, thinking. This is a call to serious intellectual engagement in civil society that is rigorous, imaginative, and unapologetically slow.
OIKOS members Erica Robles Anderson and Patrick Coffman recently traveled to Palermo, Italy, to participate in the first Arteficium Conference on “Exploring the Fate of Intelligence.” Organized as a multi-day engagement with the city, civic associations, and an exploration of the recently renovated Palazzo Butera.
Palazzo Butera
Estate accounting documents were discovered in the walls during the renovation of Palazzo Butera.
We pick up conversational connections developed as part of the 204-2025 OIKOS series on Accounting. The Palazzo itself is what Paolo Quattrone calls a “rhetorical machine,” organized as a site of revaluation and exploration to move an institution from where it was to an open field of where it might be going, this time with a different set of engagements with people, traditions, innovation, and the city.
The Princes of Butera, part of the Branciforti family, owned several towns prior to the abolition of feudalism in 1812. The restoration of Palazzo Butera began in 2016 after the space was purchased by Francesca and Massimo Valsecchi. The rooms bear traces of both the historical project of renewal, and an open and undone quality that emphasizes how the structure operates and which layers hold the architecture together as not-yet-complete.
Paintings of Principalities owned by Princes of Butera within a semi-restored room in the Palazzo.
The collection is unlabeled. Every room invites the viewer to make their own kind of sense of relationships between works and the situation.
Butera’s approach to curation, restoration, and display frames a conversation about the status of the city and its history both to itself and to visitors. The Palazzo is also home to a foundation that hosts workshops, classes, research fellows, and artists. The setting itself borders a historic district of bustling marketplaces, piazzas, and narrow streets, and waterfront redevelopments ushering in new attention and flows of global capitalism that always threaten to flatten the rich diversity and mixture that gives the region its deep character and cultural sensibility. The question being posed at the scale of architecture is: what role can institutions play in cities, and how might the city reshape or reconfigure where education happens?
City as University
Recently, The New York Times reported that political leadership in Palermo is fed up with the onslaught of cookie-cutter businesses popping up to serve an endless supply of arancini and Aperol spritz to tourists from around the world. These are the ordinary troubles of global capitalism and tendencies to generate throngs that stand ready to see “tradition” and “heritage” through forms of consumption and amusement park caricatures. In response, desirable places become locked into local resistance to the gentrification that inevitably makes downtown cores unlivable, and developers’ enthusiams for bringing landmark architectures and commerce on-scene.
How do places, organizations, and institutions work with flows of mobility, migration, capital, and sociality in ways that generate deeper relationships, engagements, and connections? How do we learn from places, and how do places learn from us?
To learn from Palermo, sound artist Manfredi Clemente created an installation within a small back stairwell at the Palazzo. In it, the listener hears field recordings from a different moment in the city, years ago, but decidedly not now. Juxtaposed are many people’s transcribed thoughts about the city and its restoration in the present. To read the collective visions and wishes alongside the atmosphere of sound from another time is to think with the deep layers of growth and transformation that are a constant fabric of city life. Now is never enough to understand the layers of the present and its possibilities.
no blank pages, Manfredi Clemente
Every small space is teeming with a density of diversity.
The deep time and diversity of Palermo are visible everywhere. The architecture and stonework infrastructures bear traces of empires past and present. The styles and people carry traditions from so many parts of the world. The plants, even in the smallest containers on any given street, teem with a diversity and density that baffles the sense of what is possible for living together and doing it well.
Given time and protection, diverse entanglements can reach monumental proportions. In the city’s various botanical gardens, there are impossibly vast trees whose roots grow thick like architectural walls. They do not grow alone, isolated as pristine examples of purity or monoculture. Instead, they are structural supports and protections for one another. Growth is a form of variegation, not sameness. If there is a lesson for universities in what the city offers, it is that combinations and multiplicities are the grammar of the good life.
At least three distinct tree species from different parts of the world grow into monumentality through interdependence.
The Associations of Palermo
Between the experience of being in a city and living well as part of a community lies the forms of support that allow people to find what they need, to grow their attachments and engagements, and to become participants and provisioners of care for others. We were fortunate enough to be offered a glimpse into the work of several civic associations where community-building efforts have been ongoing for decades. These organizations play transformational roles in reimagining the city as a place for many people to live good lives.
booq, a social promotion organization, began its life as an activist group organizing for human rights. They now hold more institutional status, provisioning libraries for adults and children, community space, repair shops, shared tools, and neighborhood development workshops. In taking up the role of sustained engagement with public and private institutions, self-income, and an ongoing mission-driven focus on generating space for all community members, they are an example of the work of oikonomia within the context of the polis and its pedagogical needs.
booq provides access to services and cultural infrastructure to combat marginalization and exclusion.
Palma Nana has developed a robust pedagogical methodology of observational work and conversation.
Palma Nana, named after a plant endemic to the Sicilian Coast, is an environmental education cooperative now in its fifth decade of continuous operations. Offering summer camps, school programs, and community space. Through slow walking, the pursuit of beauty and relationships, and an ecological approach to living, they materialize belonging within a rich urban environment and community. Their educational methods are based on decades of research on learning by thinking, doing, and loving one another and one’s environment as the basis for social change.
At the Center Sviluppo Creativo Danilo Dolci we learned about the peace activist Danilo Dolci’s methods of non-violent and creative community development. Dolci, nominated nine times for the Nobel Peace Prize, devoted his life to fighting the mafia and poverty through hunger strikes, protest marches, civic actions, and the development of educational centers. Today, Dolci’s work continues through the training of facilitators who work to help communities develop dialogic skills in reciprocal communication to meet the needs of all. We see in this approach the seeds of broader pedagogical projects that could bring universities, cities, and civic associations into new kinds of relationships for inclusion and sustainable, mutual thriving.
Reciprocal Maiuetic Approach to Nonviolent Communication, Danielo Dolci.
The Oikos in The Polis
Medusa brings the multitudes to the island.
OIKOS was founded in New York City at a university that began its existence with the mission to operate as a “private university in the public service.” It has now become emblematically the “Global Networked University.” As we do the work of understanding what it means to build relationships, organizations, and approaches to pedagogy and civic life, we are working with an eye towards consortia with other groups and networks who are thinking about the needs of people who are and will continue to move across the planet seeking new ways to live together. We are interested in models that take heterogeneity and diversity seriously, not as luxuries but as necessities. We are interested in all the forms of invention and innovation that come from people who would provide care and support to one another within urban ecologies and dense, populated settings.
Our sincere thanks to Arteficium organizers: Paolo Quattrone, Santi Furnari, Fabrizio Panozzo, and Angela Nativio who remind us that no island is an island unto itself.
“I’m the Island” Domenico Pellegrini (2019), Venice Biennale, Bangladesh Pavilion, Palazzo dei Normanni, 2025.
OIKOS members Lily Chumley, Arelí Rocha, and Erica Robles Anderson join Takuya Maeda and Luke Stark to discuss Alternative Frameworks for Computing in the Age of AI at the annual SIGCIS conference (Special Interest Group on Computing, Information, and Systems).
Brain-computer metaphors have long dominated accounts of computing. No matter how often the limits of the analogy are pointed out, they persist as explanations of the state-of-the-art and as narratives for investment. At the core of this fantasy lies an idealized model of communication as dialogue between two reasoning partners. Yet today, computing is anything but a bounded system of rational exchange.
The panel highlighted approaches to computing-human interaction that foreground collectivity, context, environment, genre, and text. Together, these papers suggest that it is time to turn the page. Computing has taken many forms. If we are to guide what comes next, frameworks centered on individual intellect will not adequately describe the present or provision more inclusive futures for social action.
In “AI Has Entered the Chat–Is Anyone Else There?” Rocha drew from her recent Signs and Society article, “We Share an Unbreakable Bond: Sociality and Language Ideologies in Human Relationships with Artificial Intelligence,” to explore sociality and language ideologies in relationships with AI. As chat-based interfaces proliferate, familiar anxieties about alienation resurface. Yet for users of Replika, a chatbot built for hyper-personalized, often intimate experiences, chat is multivocal all the way through. Conversations with Replikas are collectively interpreted and debated in digital spaces, raising questions about humanness, intimacy, and the realness of love and heartbreak. Rocha’s talk traced how computational sociality emerges through vulnerability, multivocality, and shared linguistic practices that exceed dyadic frames of human–machine dialogue.
In Generative City, Robles Anderson argued that Cold War–era dreams of thinking machines still shape today’s AI discourse, even though we already inhabit dense ecologies of platforms, protocols, and services. Rather than dwelling on apocalyptic anxieties, she proposed the city as a model of participatory artifice. Urbanization—our species’ oldest techne—offers an abstraction for imagining multi-scalar, collective experience. It shifts the paradigm from dialogue as the gold standard of human–computer interaction toward demotic speech and civic multiplicity. By reframing computing through urban metaphors, Robles Anderson developed a critique that applies as much to smart machines as to master planners, opening space for more generative, civic-oriented concepts of computation.
In Open States of Command: Power, Deference and Demeanor in Interactional Text Production Chumley examines the dynamics of power, deference, and disobedience in interactions with writing assistants. Situating the prompt within a long history of interactional writing—dictation, transcription, and textual commands—she highlighted how the “open state of command” recurs across contexts. From secretaries taking dictation to wives that type and chatbots that generate text, refusals, failures, and other breakdowns of imperative, she explains how LLM metadiscourses reveal the social orders modeled in AI systems as well as continuities in how power and deference shape text production despite shifts in mediating technologies.
Finally, in Human Enough: How the Eliza Effect Became a Design Strategy, Maeda and Stark argued that the “Eliza effect”—users’ tendency to attribute human qualities to computing systems— has evolved from a psychological quirk into a deliberate design philosophy. Tracing how “human enough” intelligence functions as a strategy of social engineering, they showed how design features—from 1990s animation techniques to reinforcement learning with human feedback—align systems with human emotional cues. The Eliza effect succeeds not through capability but by exploiting users’ instincts for social interaction, encouraging misplaced trust and obscuring questions of accountability and labor. Their analysis reveals how anthropomorphic design, far from neutral, serves economic and political interests by defining what counts as human—and who can be displaced.
