Associate Professor Anitra Nelson

Associate Professor Anitra Nelson joined MSSI as an Honorary Principal Fellow in 2020 after working for over 20 years in the School of Global Urban and Social Studies at RMIT University and, before that, in the Institute of Latin American Studies at La Trobe University. She finalised her book Small is Necessary: Shared Living on a Shared Planet (2018) as a Carson Fellow at the Rachel Carson Centre for Environment and Society at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (2016–2017) and spent three months as a Visiting Fellow in the Economic Department of the New School for Social Research in New York (2012).

Recently Anitra has worked on three books on degrowth. She is lead co-editor of scholarly collections Housing for Degrowth: Principles, Models, Challenges and Opportunities (2018) and Food for Degrowth: Perspectives and Practices (forthcoming 2020) both issued in the Routledge Environmental Humanities series. With Vincent Liegey, she is co-author of Exploring Degrowth: A Critical Guide (2020) in the FireWorks series of Pluto Press (UK).

Anitra has researched, published and taught on Australian housing research, with an emphasis on affordability, environmental sustainability and policy issues. She collaborated on significant Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute funded studies into mortgage default (2008–2010) and marginal rental housing (2011–2014) and, most recently, taught the RMIT Housing Policy Masters course (2019). She is an active member of Cohousing Australia’s Planning Policy Working Group.

Marx’s Concept of Money: The God of Commodities (1999, 2014), a book based on Anitra's doctoral thesis, is still in print and used internationally in courses. Her deep interest in money has been applied to environmental and social sustainability, including researching non-monetary economies for their sustainability potential. She is lead co-editor of Life Without Money: Building Fair and Sustainable Economies (2011) and her 2016 article on money in the scholarly journal Capitalism Nature Socialism was shortlisted for the 2017 Australian International Political Economy Network AIPEN Richard Higgot Journal Article Prize. Her current work, Beyond Money: A Postcapitalist Strategy, is to be published in 2021.

Anitra is a book series editor for the Pluto Press FireWorks series and the Palgrave Macmillan Alternatives and Futures series.

For publications and more about her work, see: https://anitranelson.info/publications/