︎STAYING WITH THE TROUBLE︎ THE ALTERNATIVE SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS ︎
︎STAYING WITH THE TROUBLE︎ THE ALTERNATIVE SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS ︎
A reading SERIES
WITH
THE ALTERNATIVES SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS
AND THE LEFTOVERS READING GROUP
24 APRIL 2026
All reading sessions start at 19:00.
Food and drink will be provided.
Everyone is welcome to turn up to attend this event. However, we encourage you to join the group mailing list and receive details of texts and event sessions.
Staying with the Trouble is a reading group series that considers conflicting ideas of co-operativism, imperialism, and the building of a neighbourhood.
The reading group is inspired by the local Bostall Estate, built by the Royal Arsenal Cooperative Society (RACS) between 1900-1914, a large and successful co-op which served employees at Woolwich’s arms factory.
Each session will draw on both the RACS history and wider historical perspectives to look at militarism, cooperativism, housing ownership, peace, and the history of the local estate.
Led by The Alternative School of Economics, each reading works within the framework of Leftovers, a group for reading otherwise, which meets monthly at TACO!
All texts will be shared with attendees two weeks before the reading group takes place, and will be downloadable from this page. While it is not essential to have read the texts before the event (we will be reading extracts together during the session), we do encourage you to read them if you can, to make the most of the sessions.
Staying with the Trouble will meet on the following dates and locations:
* all sessions start at 19:00
︎24 April @ TACO!, Cygnet Squrae
Our last session will consider the peace movement and anti-fascist support in Plumstead & Abbey Wood.
Previously :-
The first session on 30 Jan explored the history of cooperatives, from the the Royal Arsenal Co-Operative Society (RACS) to the wider cooperative movement, towards finding more equitable ways of living. We read:
Humanizing the Economy: Co-operatives in the Age of Capital, John Restakis (2010) (download PDF)
An Arsenal for Labour: The Royal Arsenal Co-operative Society and Politics 1896-1996, Rita Rhodes, 1998 (download PDF)
Beyond Racial Capitalism: Co-operatives in the African Diaspora, Ed. Caroline Shenaz Hossein, Sharon D. Wright Austin, and Kevin Edmonds, 2023 (download PDF)
Our second session on 27 Feb considered the British war machine and the lives of the workers in the factory. We read:
The Economics of Killing: How the West Fuels War and Poverty in the Developing World by Vijay Mehta (2012) (download PDF)
Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire by Caroline Eklins, (2022) (download PDF)
Peace or War? The National Control of Armaments, a pamphlet by Gilbert Slater (download PDF)
Our third session on 27 March considered communal living and the building of the bostal estale
- All that is Solid: How the Great Housing Disaster Defines Our Times, and What We Can Do About It, by Danny Dorling, 2015 (download PDF)
- These Houses Are Ours: Copoperative and Community Led Housing Alternatives, 1870-1919, by Andrew Bibby, 2023 (download PDF)
- The History of the Royal Arsenal Co-operative Society, Ltd., 1868-1918: being a record of fifty years' progress and achievement, prepared on the occasion of the Jubilee of the Society by Walter T. Davis, 1922 (download PDF)
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TACO! encourages a range of diverse voices to join the group, to participate in generous and respectful discussion.
To take part in group reading sessions, receive reading texts and future discussion dates, or to find out more information, please sign up to the Leftovers mailing list.
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About the Bostall Estate
The Bostall Estate was built by the Royal Arsenal Co-Operative Society , a large consumer co-operative that took its name from the historical munitions factories in Woolwich. Its motto was ‘All for Each, Each for All’.
The society adopted the ‘Rochdale Principles’ for profit sharing and undertook a range of activities. It ran shops, produced its own dairy, bread and farm produce, and ran educational and cultural activities for families.
In 1900, the RACS became a housing developer and built the Bostall Estate in Abbey Wood, constructing over 1000 homes for workers. Many of these houses are now in private ownership.
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The Alternative School of Economics is a collaboration between artists Ruth Beale and Amy Feneck, formed in 2012. They make art that questions economic doctrine and knowledge hierarchies. Working and collaborating with communities, and using feminist and alternative economics and pedagogies as forms of resistance, they explore global political issues in relation to the complexity of lived experience. They produce film, graphics, photography, texts and clothing, as forms of activation, dissemination and reflection, shared to publics in art and non-art contexts. Recent projects include A Lexicon of Debt with At the Library, Bootle, and What did you do... a poster commission for Bookworks, London, in support of Medical Aid for Palestinians.
Staying with the Trouble forms part All for Each, Each for All a new research project into the Bostall Estate and its social and co-operative heritage by The Alternative School of Economics.
Staying with the Trouble takes its title from the book of the same name by Donna Haraway, published in 2016.
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Leftovers is an informal reading and discussion group. The group meets monthly and provides a supportive, peer-led space for close and speculative readings of texts from cultural and critical theory, philosophy, literature, poetry, and popular media.
Texts shared and read through the group are made permanently available via the TACO! Artist Research Library.