Son[i]a #267 Maria Eugenia Rodriguez Palop

We cannot create an equal society without making community, and making community requires knowing and respecting what the community in question thinks, need, wants, and values. María Eugenia Rodríguez Palop contends that it is possible to achieve this through a politics of the commons based on more and better democratic participation, the redistribution of wealth, decentralisation and self-governance, identity and recognition, and the feminisation of public space. In other words, on a politics of the commons that revolves around life and relational law, in which civil rights coexist with political, social, and environmental rights. María Eugenia Rodríguez Palop is a jurist, teacher, researcher, essayist, and columnist.

In this podcast, María Eugenia Rodríguez Palop talks about “new municipalism” as a strategy and a springboard from which to stand up to neoliberal policies and start to recover public and common goods, and about the need to adapt justice and human rights to citizen empowerment. She also talks about the left’s failure to reconcile problems of redistribution and recognition – and the consequences of this incapacity in the Catalan context – and about the need to recognise ourselves as vulnerable, interdependent beings, and to adapt our public policies accordingly, from a feminist activist perspective.