Cog•nate Collective’s practice seeks to document and theorize markets as important nodes of exchange, facilitating – especially within immigrant, working-class communities – social, cultural and economic transactions that articulate individual and collective relationships to the communities we call home.

One thread of this research has explored how it is that objects/goods circulated within public/popular marketplaces (e.g. Swap Meets, tianguis, craft markets) mediate our relationships to place and to others. And, how such objects could be mobilized to interrogate and/or reconstitute these relationships: inviting us to reflect upon the ways we establish and express forms of affinity that link communities across borders (both physical and symbolic). In other words, they have been interested in how it is that they might critically amplify the political-dimension of public/popular marketplaces – and craft-made/mass-produced goods produced/consumed therein – as vehicles to generate, cultivate and/or express political exigencies and solidarity with/in immigrant, working-class communities.