Faculty Focus: Professor of Political Science Craig Borowiak

When Professor of Political Science Craig Borowiak first encountered the term “solidarity economy” at the World Social Forum in Caracas in 2006, he had no idea what a seismic impact that simple two-word phrase would have on his scholarship. 

A political theorist by training, Borowiak had arrived on Haverford’s campus just two years earlier to teach courses on the global economy through normative and theoretical lenses. But after taking that trip to Venezuela with some of his students, he was struck by the collection of activists, nonprofits, and nongovernmental organizations that gathered to envision an alternative to capitalism. He found their ideas spoke to his long-standing fascination with the intangible threads that connect global communities through economic systems.

“Someone was giving a presentation, and they used the term solidarity economy. I didn't know what it meant at the time, but it resonated very powerfully,” Borowiak recalls. “I study the political economy, and I'm really interested in solidarity across invisible lines. So I embraced it, and it's defined my research and my teaching to a great extent since then.”

The pure definition of a solidarity economy, Borowiak says, is somewhat contested, but the idea of a system that prioritizes community development and shared values over profit grew simultaneously in France and Latin America in the 1990s. For Borowiak, the components driving solidarity economies include things like worker and consumer cooperatives, credit unions, mutual aid, and community-supported agriculture. 

As he dove headlong into solidarity economies and their spread, Borowiak began tracing how such networks are formed and how the concept has evolved around the world. He attended conferences in Luxembourg, Quebec, and the Philippines. But a chance conversation at one of these events helped provide a necessary narrowing of his focus. After listening to a presentation on a women-led cooperative in Bangladesh, the speaker asked him, “What’s going on where you’re from?” Borowiak found he couldn’t respond.  

“I was dumbfounded and a little embarrassed that I didn’t have an answer. I realized that I was going about this in the wrong way,” he admits. 

That conversation proved to be a turning point. Borowiak, who until then had been enmeshed in a much more global view, redirected his attention and research closer to home. He found himself eager to identify and understand the nation’s network of community gardens, credit unions, and other hallmarks of solidarity economies. Supported by a 2014 National Science Foundation grant and a burgeoning academic partnership with three peer scholars—two geographers and an economist—Borowiak created an interactive map of the entire nation’s solidarity economy. 

The success of that project led to a greater interest in mapping several cities, including Philadelphia, a city Borowiak says is marked by racial capitalism, disinvestment, and a vibrant community response to those issues. 

“I wanted to map Philadelphia’s solidarity economy and show that community gardens are disproportionately found in low-income neighborhoods of color that have seen stark disinvestment,” Borowiak says. “Those spaces are often thought of as lacking—they lack capital for sure—but they are also spaces of abundance in the community building that’s happening there.”

Borowiak and his team’s decade-long work was encapsulated in Solidarity Cities: Confronting Racial Capitalism, Mapping Transformation, published late last year by University of Minnesota Press. The book, which examines the solidarity economies of Philadelphia, New York, and Worcester, Massachusetts, was the result of a highly collaborative and interdisciplinary process. 

“We wrote basically everything together,” Borowiak says. “When I read it, I can’t tell which words are mine and which are my colleagues’.”

With the book complete, Borowiak continues to remain focused on Philadelphia and its sprawling network of community gardens, building a complete dataset with his highly engaged students. Last summer, he led a small team of students from Haverford and Villanova University to verify, in person, nearly 700 land parcels across the city, and found 425 community gardens housed on them. 

Borowiak admits he’s very protective of the data they’ve gathered, since many of the city’s lush gardens were erected on lots owned by absentee landlords. Despite that, the city drew on the data Borowiak and his students have stewarded for the past decade to develop its first-ever urban agriculture plan, Growing from the Root, in 2023.

“A lot of the gardens in the city are on land they don’t own. Abandoned land,” he says. “And there are absentee landlords who might come around and sell it. Or, if it’s tax-delinquent, developers might try to get their hands on it. So the data isn’t something we look to advertise.”

As much as Haverford students have supported Borowiak’s work and research, they’ve also influenced it. After more than 20 years on campus, he’s noticed that they arrive on campus adept at digesting multimedia formats that his previous students were not. That’s prompted him to incorporate new media, like podcasts and visual storytelling, into his syllabi. 

His students’ politics and world view have also shifted, he notes, and they’re keenly aware of the climate crisis and the structural forces that have shaped their lives and futures. 

“They’re overwhelmed by capitalism,” he says. “I think students are more revolutionary than they were a decade ago, and the entire political system is more destabilized, which is reflected in their attitudes about politics and ecological consciousness. They recognize that it’s not just their lives but the entire human race that’s at stake.”

The urgency he’s seeing in his students has informed his next project, a faculty seminar called Waste:Life. Borowiak has long taught about the political economy of waste and the questions surrounding it, like what happens to your cell phone when you discard it. But he’s also interested in how waste can generate forms of life, like the thriving ecosystem found in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch or the species of South Asian crane that is flourishing in urban dumps. The seminar, which will launch next year, will include an interdisciplinary team of Haverford faculty, a postdoc, a conference, and an exhibition in the Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery. 

“I figured Solidarity Cities sustained me for a decade,” Borowiak says. “I’m hoping Waste:Life could do the same.”