ECOLOGIES OF THE COMMON: FEMINISM AND THE POLITICS OF NATURE
By MIRIAM TOLA

Dissertation Directors:
Ed Cohen, Elizabeth Grosz
https://rucore.libraries.rutgers.edu/rutgers-lib/51479/PDF/1/play/

ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION
This dissertation proposes a theory of the common beyond the modern figure of Man as
primary agent of historical transformation. Through close reading of Medieval debates on
poverty and common use, contemporary political theory and political speeches, legal
documents, and protests in public spaces, it complicates current debates on the common in
three ways. First, this work contends that the enclosures of pre-modern landholdings, a
process the unfolded in connected and yet distinct ways in Europe and the colonies, was
entangled with the affirmation of the European white man as proper figure of the human
entitled to appropriate the labor of women and slaves, and the material world as resources.
Second, it engages contemporary theorists of the common such as Paolo Virno, Antonio
Negri and Michael Hardt. Although these authors depart from the prevalent assumptions of
modern liberalism (in that they do not take the individual right to appropriate nature as the
foundation of political community), their formulation of common is still grounded in Marx’s
view of labor as the primary force making the world. As a counterpoint to this position, this
dissertation draws on feminist and science studies to bring into relief the entanglements of
human and other-than-human entities (including water, soil, and technological
infrastructures) that constitute the common. Finally, it examines connections and
divergences between Western notions of the common-as-resources and contemporary
indigenous communal politics in Latin America that unsettle the divide between nature and
politics. Ecologies of the Common mobilizes the pre-modern past and indigenous forms of life
obliterated by Western narratives of development as living forces that might generate the
future of the common as mode of living together in the ruins of capitalism.