13673: Negotiated Root-Stocking: Entrepreneurship-as-Practice From the Margin in Seeking Social Inclusion (session 26056)

Research on how marginal communities address grand challenges often assumes these challenges represent their sole existential priority. However, human decisions and actions are rarely singular, unfolding instead through the negotiation of multiple, intersecting priorities. Addressing this gap, we explore how marginal communities integrate diverse life priorities while responding to a grand challenge. Using a year-long ethnography of a prominent community marketplace (bazaar) in Kazakhstan, we examine how traders from a marginalized community navigate social exclusion and stigmatization. Our inductive study, positioned at the intersection of societal grand challenges, life priorities, and practice theory, introduces the concept of negotiated root-stocking. This process comprises prospected situating, vascular rooting, and intracommunity movement, enabling individuals to achieve inclusivity through adaptive, collective practices. We further propose a typology of four approaches to integrating life priorities within grand challenge mitigation, with the bazaar serving as a platform for negotiation and exchange. Our findings contribute to understanding how community processes and practices generate multiple pathways for marginalized individuals and families to address grand challenges. This study advances theorizing on the emergent, complex, and nonlinear nature of collective human action in the pursuit of societal transformation.

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