The effort to endure: Mutualistic experiments beyond the emergency

Keywords: Mutual aid; endurance; pandemic; Naples; Rome
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Sunday
Session Start / End Time: 2/27/2022 11:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/27/2022 12:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 61

Abstract

During the lockdown phases of the Covid-19 pandemic, Italian cities saw a panoply of mutualistic experiments developing across existing networks of activist solidarity as well as in spontaneous ways at the neighbourhood level. Within the emergency, Naples and Rome attracted special attention because of the intensity of their solidarity experiments. In Naples, urban-commons community centres as well as ordinary citizens supported homeless people and needy families in unprecedented ways. In Rome, housing rights movements mobilised their broader networks to ensure the housing squatters’ access to institutional welfare provisions. In Rome and Naples like in many other cities across the world, the emergence of these ‘ecosystems of solidarity’ suggested the possibility for a ‘biopolitics from below’ as a grassroots response to the Covid-19 sanitary crisis (Sotiris 2020). But what is the persistence of solidarity ecosystems beyond the emergency? In dialogue with theorists like Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri and Elizabeth Povinelli, this paper discusses I) how new possibilities of life in common can maintain their force beyond emergency contingencies; and specifically II) how we can create lasting institutions enabling these life possibilities to persevere and become new social relations (Povinelli, 2012; Hardt and Negri, 2017). It does so by looking at activists in Naples and Rome currently engaging in mutualistic practices and grassroots welfare. Through a direct observation of these experiments, the paper highlights the possibilities, and limits, of a mutualistic politics of the common in the conjuncture of the post-pandemic transition.