The moral economy project is a collaborative deep dive on the economic values and orientations of contemporary American working people. We aim to excavate popular economic views and aspirations, modes of economic evaluation, and practices by working inductively and qualitatively towards building more general survey-based investigations. We will endeavor to capture a variety of communities of interest like unions, cooperatives, and intentional communities representing a variety of American working people in a variety of regions.

The George Floyd Square Project

George Floyd’s murder on May 25, 2020 sparked a global wave of protests against police violence and brutality. In Minneapolis itself, it sparked a cross-race and cross-class rebellion that culminated with the burning of the 3rd precinct and the occupation of George Floyd Square—the intersection where Floyd was murdered. The uprising was not a “movement” composed of movement organizations attempting to influence legislation—though such actors were mobilized by the events surrounding Floyd’s murder.

The Ballot Initiatives Project explores the current fight over voters’ access to the ballot initiative process. In recent years, labor unions, rights advocacy groups, and grassroots organizations in multiple states have used citizen initiatives to pass policies that redistribute wealth, rights, and decision-making power to working people and marginalized communities—policies that are often treated as unrealistic or impracticable in partisan politics.