What am I reading in ScholarWorks? November 2025

For this month’s What am I Reading in ScholarWorks I wanted to highlight one of our newest collections. The Design Thinking Initiative (DTI) is a Smith Center that brings “design methods, creative problem-solving, and hands-on making into the Smith experience.” Staff author Alix Gerber’s recently published open access article, “Building a New World in the Shell of the Old: Co-Designing Post-Capitalist Visions,” is a timely addition to our repository. It’s a bit of a deep dive into prefigurative politics and other social movement strategies. Rather than fighting against an unjust world, prefigurative work seeks to build anew within the old. There is a long history of groups (mutual aid networks, worker cooperatives, community and land trusts, etc.) that take up different strategies in the Valley that Gerber researches to get some understanding of what it might mean, for good or ill, to try to “align on a philosophical vision” even while we go from one crisis to another. A thought-provoking read. Enjoy!

View in ScholarWorks: https://scholarworks.smith.edu/dti_pubs/1/

Smith ScholarWorks is Smith’s institutional repository of digital scholarship and research materials created and curated by faculty, students, and staff at Smith College. Browse by collections, disciplines, and authors.