Personal Statement
Peter North is Professor of Alternative Economies at the University of Liverpool, UK. He gained his BA in History and Politics in 1984, his MA in Peace Studies from the University of Bradford (1993) and his PhD from the School for Advanced Urban Studies at the University of Bristol (1997). His current research focuses on diverse economies and social and solidarity economies as tools for constructing and rethinking alternative geographies of money, entrepreneurship, and livelihoods. He has also researched and published on low carbon transitions at the city and community level, especially processes of policy formation and partnership working between the public, private and community sectors around strategies for local economic development within an overall framework of resource constraint, climate change and economic crisis. He contrasts this with a focus on more radical politics of climate change, especially ecologically-focused social movements engaged in struggles about the implications of anthropogenic climate change and resource constraints for both humans and the wider ecosystems upon which we depend. In this way he is interested both in how we might challenge problematic practices, and develop better ways to live ‘well’. He is currently the co-lead of the Social and Solidarity Economies theme in the ESRC-funded JUST Centre for Joined-Up Sustainability Transformations, a member of the Community Economies Institute, and part of the Polička Collective researching diverse economies in East-Central Europe. He is currently completing a manuscript on radical politics in post-communist Poland.

Research Overview
My research focuses on social movements that develop alternatives to 'capitalism', within a diverse economies framework. I am interested in thinking about links between economies, livelihoods and environments that are not exploitative and which provide an alternative to forms of 'growth' and 'development' that may not be sustainable in the long term. I am interested in conceptualisations of local economic development that facilitate action against dangerous climate change, and how we might develop social and solidarity economies. At heart, I want to know what it means to 'live well' in the Anthropocene, while enabling future generations and other species to do the same. More recently, I have been developing an interest in these ideas in contemporary Poland in the context of post-socialism.