Link to Session Platform

Chairs(s):

Adam Badger, Royal Holloway, University of London

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Description:

The COVID-19 crisis has seen monumental shifts in our understanding of the world and of each other. Yet, despite dystopian fiction often painting of picture of a Hobbesian world of mistrust, violent competition for resources and default to a self-survival mode, the crisis saw a wellspring of communality, empathy and perhaps most visibly, mutual aid (Pretson & Firth, 2020; Spade, 2020). Through digital media, community notice boards or simply knocking on doors, people mobilised extremely quickly to make sure vulnerable neighbours were fed, supported and not isolated in their homes. However, as individuals and groups – including mosques, charities, schools, sports clubs, churches etc. – began to coalesce into larger networks of community support, which Local Authorities took time to mobilise. All under the term ‘mutual aid’, these groups have radically shifted the terrain of post-crisis community care, and expanded the definitional and practiced boundaries of what constitutes mutual aid to provide community care and support to the most vulnerable – around food justice, housing justice, companionship, financial support – often exceeding the original remit of the groups and institutions they represent.

These sessions discusses the changing nature of mutual aid; transitioning it from Kropotkin’s anarcho-communist counterbalance to the social Darwinism of neoliberalism, and placing it in the context of our contemporary Covid-19 society (Springer, 2020). It is of pressing importance now, because Covid-19 has the potential to reframe how we see our shared world and our responsibilities and actions within in it. This will be of increasing significance in forming a critical response framework to the increasing climate emergency. As the agile community support groups that have sprung up around the UK become more established and embedded, will they change to face the challenges the future presents, and if so, how? If not, why did they not endure beyond the sprawling ends of the Covid-19 pandemic?

This session therefore aims to explore the types of mutual-aid efforts that took place to understand how they transgressed the fractured political climate across the world; often occurring outside of what many would have considered an overtly ‘political’ act. In this sense, the pandemic – whilst forcing us apart – has brought many of us closer together, inspiring interactions and solidarities between strangers who otherwise, may never have met; and opening the eyes of more privileged members of society to previously present but less visible injustices and poverty on their doorsteps. Much of the population now has a shared experience of living under a capitalistic system that actively disregards people’s health and wellbeing in pursuit of expansion.

Non-Presenting Participants Agenda