How are communities of color across the Americas building economic democracy and self-determination? What potentials exist for coordinating across geographies? This panel explores movements and strategies to build healthier, more just economies in the U.S. and Latin America, and will examine how thinking transnationally can strengthen economic democracy theory and practice.

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How are communities of color across the Americas building economic democracy and self-determination? What potentials exist for coordinating across geographies? From 2016 to 2018, twenty leaders working to transform economies across the U.S. and Latin America came together to explore these questions. As part of a fellowship program run by the MIT Community Innovators Lab, they traveled to Colombia, Brazil, Mississippi, and New York City to learn about each other’s work, construct a transnational analysis of the systemic inequities affecting their communities, and build new collaborations. Exploring how global systems of oppression and extraction have structured economies in the Americas – as well as powerful efforts to build alternatives – these conversations generated unique insights for disrupting dominant development logics and transforming the economic system. This praxis panel will share lessons from this process of transnational knowledge co-creation – highlighting not only strategies for building shared ownership and collective governance in diverse places, but also the significant role of ethnic identity, culture, and ancestral knowledge in efforts to create healthier, more just economies. In so doing, it seeks to reflect on how thinking transnationally can strengthen economic democracy theory and practice.