Stacey Sutton

Stacey Sutton (Photo courtesy of Stacey Sutton)

Stacey Sutton is director of the Solidarity Economy Research, Policy & Law Project, which aims to advance interdisciplinary research, critical analysis and enabling policies; foster education, training and technical assistance; and illuminate the transformative potential of cooperative economies at the intersection of social movements and prefigurative politics.

Sutton’s scholarship, teaching and community engagement are grounded in two interrelated frameworks: advancing “cooperative cities,” with a central focus on economic democracy, worker cooperatives, prefigurative politics and solidarity economies and, second, critiquing “punitive cities” or processes of gentrification and dispossession, as well as racially disparate effects of purportedly neutral place-based policies on the other. Sutton’s new body of cooperative cities research, “Building Real Black Utopias,” is a multi-city exploration of infrastructures, ideologies and practices of Black-centered solidarity economy ecosystems in the United States.