Surfacing the Economy: Representation, Valuation, and the Diverse Economies Iceberg

ABSTRACT How are economic relations made apprehensible, valued, and consequential, and for whom? Work in critical human geography, economic sociology, and science and technology studies shows that “the economy” is not a pre‐given domain but an effect of material, institutional, and representational practices that render some relations legible as economic while marginalizing others. Interventions such as the diverse economies framework have been central to this rethinking, particularly through the widely circulated “iceberg,” which foregrounds forms of labor, exchange, and interdependence marginalized in capitalocentric accounts. This paper uses the iceberg as a focal representational device through which to synthesize debates about economic representation and valuation. Building on diverse and community economies scholarship that has developed heterogeneous practices of inventory, measurement, recognition, and intervention, the paper develops surfacing as a comparative vocabulary for examining how actors, devices, and socio‐technical arrangements make economic relations apprehensible, valued, and consequential for particular audiences and institutional settings. Surfacing distinguishes recurring configurations of commensuration and incorporation, recognition without commensuration, and residualization and overflow without treating them as sequential stages or fixed outcomes. Reinterpreting the iceberg through this lens shows how economic boundaries and forms of value are produced, contested, and reorganized through differing relations among representation, valuation, recognition, and institutional uptake. The paper thereby offers a framework for comparing how economic plurality becomes consequential in different ways and settings.