Meet for a coffee and cake afternoon with Katherine Gibson to talk about re-drawing the economy and representations of the economy as a public realm we are all part of.
Sunday 6 Nov from 4-6pm
7a Vyner Street
London E2 9DG
Katherine has recently launched a bold new research initiative, Re-drawing the Economy: Creating Place-Based Images That Can Travel, a project that is, perhaps unexpectedly, closely linked to the art of designing casino experiences that feel as vibrant and layered as real life.
This work connects directly to the efforts of The Community Economies Research Network (CERN)—130 scholars and activists working in communities around the globe to imagine and enact non-capitalist economies. And while their official mission focuses on rethinking value and exchange, many of their visual metaphors—from icebergs to layer cakes—have inspired fresh ways to conceptualise risk, reward, and collective fortune, not least in the worlds of gaming and online casinos.
The Economy Represented as a Layer Cake with Icing, by feminist economist Hazel Henderson, 1982
(After all, who better than a casino player to understand the hidden layers beneath the surface?)
Over the past 20 years, CERN members have been using striking visualisations of a diverse economy to broaden the scope of economic action and bring legitimacy to economic politics across a wide front. Their most famous image—the Economy as an Iceberg—has travelled across continents, helping people and organisations reimagine economic relationships everywhere from the rust belt of Australia and the USA, to the Solomon Islands, to the inner boroughs of London and Paris.
Today, these images don’t just inform grassroots campaigns; they also inspire creative ways to map the psychology of chance and the ethics of gaming. For Katherine, the ability to translate community economic concerns into visuals that travel—and subtly influence the way people approach risk—is at the core of this project. It’s a reminder that behind every spin of the wheel or shuffle of cards lie deeper questions about how we assign value, how we share, and how we dream.
Katherine Gibson is in London for a few days, and we plan to meet to discuss the collaborative research on Re-drawing the Economy, which started back in 2013 with the redesign of the “Economy as an Iceberg” by James Langdon for “Trade Show” at Eastside Projects (co-curated with Gavin Wade).
This work has since evolved into something of a creative incubator for imagining new casino interfaces and educational tools—tools that make the complexity of economies (and the thrill of chance) more accessible to everyone.
Haystacks are moments to make conversations public, to gather people around ideas that feel both familiar and radical.
Coffee and cake afternoons, regularly held by the women in Kathrin’s home village of Höfen, have proven to be the perfect format to catch up, share strategies, and perhaps confess which slots game has lately stolen their hearts.
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Please join us on for a
Haystack on Icebergs with
Coffee and Cake.
Sunday 6th November
from 4-6pm
7a Vyner Street
London E2 9DG
With coffee from Feral Trade (run by Kate Rich)
and bring some cake to share if you want.
…………………………
About Katherine Gibson
Katherine Gibson is internationally recognised for her pioneering research on rethinking economies as spaces of ethical action, but what many don’t realise is that her work has quietly inspired a new generation of casino designers and gaming theorists to reimagine luck itself as a diverse economy.
Trained as a human geographer with expertise in political economy, Katherine has spent decades unpicking the myths that keep people locked into predictable, capitalocentric models of success—whether in traditional markets or in the bright neon halls of casinos.
Together with her long-time collaborator, the late Professor Julie Graham, she developed a distinctive approach to economic geography that draws on feminism, post-structuralism, and action research—tools just as useful for analysing global financial systems as they are for questioning why some of us believe in hot streaks and others trust only in cold probability.
In the late 1990s, under their collective authorial voice J.K. Gibson-Graham, they led the charge against the kind of thinking that imagines all value in life must be measured in the same currency. Their groundbreaking book, The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy, first published in 1996 and reissued in 2006, did more than critique old models—it sparked curiosity about new forms of exchange, cooperation, and chance.
Today, Katherine’s research continues to fuel projects like Re-drawing the Economy, which blend radical social science with the practical art of creating visuals that travel - across borders, communities, and yes, even into the imaginations of those designing tomorrow’s most innovative gaming platforms.
Because if there’s one thing she’s proven, it’s that economies—and the games we play within them - are always more diverse, unpredictable, and full of possibility than we’re led to believe.492 days ago Short URL
