Research Articles

King's Meat Market and Grocery sits on the northern end of the Broad Street bridge in the midcity section of New Orleans. When storeowner Mike Tran returned to King's six weeks after Hurricane Katrina, he found only a shell of what once was.

This Article takes the form of a letter from Gulf Coast Katrina social justice advocates. Specifically, the Letter is addressed to those who work for social justice after a disaster strikes. This is our attempt to tell you some of our stories and some of the lessons we learned from our experiences with Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in the summer of 2005.

This final product explores how expressions of the solidarity economy function as social innovations with the potential to transform the economic status quo and promote economic democracy.

Despite highly specialised and capable emergency management systems, ordinary citizens are usually
first on the scene in an emergency or disaster, and remain long after official services have ceased.

If we think of Hurricane Sandy as the extreme weather that hit the New York City region on October 29, 2012, then the storm was one of the worst in the country’s history, killing dozens of people, affecting hundreds of thousands, and inflicting as much as $75 billion in economic losses.

The 2020 COVID-19 disaster triggered an educational crisis in the United States, deeply exacerbating the inequities present in education as schools went online. This primary impact may not be the only one, however: literature describes a secondary impact of such disasters through “disaster capitalism,” in which the private sector captures the public resources of disaster-struck communities for profit. In response to these warnings, we ask how schools, families, and communities can counteract disaster capitalism for educational equity.

Despite undeniable hardship, the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic also saw an outpour of community solidarity and mutual aid towards those in need. This study explored why people participated in mutual aid, as well as the factors that contributed to continued involvement and/or its decline.

This thesis assesses the role of the nonprofit industrial complex (NPIC) in neoliberalism’s material destruction of global community development and its exploitation of human benevolence. An examination of the institutionalization of high-profile social movements such as BLM and #MeToo demonstrates that the nonprofit industrial complex is built upon a misappropriation of feminist and liberation ideologies and practices, an insidious weaponization of our collectivist tendencies, and the systematic subjugation of mutual aid networks originally created and operated independent of systems of capital. The systemic and conceptual limitations of mainstream methods and the criteria by which nonprofit organizations’ effectiveness is evaluated are contrasted with the holistic and qualitative approach taken by mutual aid networks and grassroot social movements. The survival of a nonprofitized social movement relies on inconsistent financing from the state and wealthy donors, resulting in increasingly counter-revolutionary goals and values of the organization. By rejecting such monetization, solution-focused and community-led social movements preserve their authenticity, lending credibility to their demands for comprehensive and anti-capitalist structural changes. The inevitable demise of the nonprofit structure will be due to its fundamental refusal to reflect and meaningfully regroup, while mutual aid has survived by welcoming accountability and transformation. This thesis proposes a call to action for those seeking to "live their values" to assess their politics through an anti-capitalist framework and the principles of mutual aid, to challenge their individual and community’s feminism and praxis, and to acknowledge what has been lost and what remains at stake under neoliberalism.

The COVID-19 pandemic has amplified existing injustices in the United States, which is exemplified in Ypsilanti, Michigan. However, the pandemic also provides an opportunity to re-imagine existing ways of being in the world, and mutual aid networks that have provided for people's basic needs during multiple crises while also working towards more radical change provide an opportunity for social workers to examine their relationship to “helping.” The author uses their personal experience with a local mutual aid network to examine the power and possibility of mutual aid, particularly in times of crisis, as well as sources of social work resistance to decentralized and non-professional forms of helping and caring.

When central authority fails in socially crucial tasks, mutual aid, solidarity, and grassroots organization frequently arise as people take up slack on the basis of informal networks and civil society organizations.

Tying anarchist approaches to mutual aid and self-organisation together, it is argued that cybernetics and Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model (VSM) offer useful tools in helping both academic analysis and on-the-ground practice assess and improve the effectiveness of mutual aid in and beyond the COVID-19 crisis.

This paper examines disaster capitalism in Chile, that is, the relationships between disasters and neoliberalism. It looks at two post-disaster dimensions: disasters as windows of opportunity to introduce political reforms and disasters as occasions for the corporate class to capitalize on such disasters.

Making reference to recent scholarly discussions on neoliberalism and disaster recovery, in this paper I discuss how the implemented neoliberal doctrines of governance have reinforced the existing asymmetrical power relationships between the state, international agencies and citizens. This process constitutes a major barrier to achieving sustainable recovery after the 2015 Nepal earthquake.

In New Orleans, in late summer 2008, commemoration of the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina was punctuated by preparations for Hurricane Gustav.

The hazards and disasters field routinely emphasizes that there is no such thing as a natural disaster. This is a nod to the fact that environmental disasters are caused by the human actions or inactions intersecting with the occurrence of a natural hazard, e.g. hurricane, fire, earthquake. This essay argues that the disaster literature can help us understand the causes and consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic but only if we consider the pandemic as a disaster and its profound impacts as outcomes of racial capitalism.

Resilience has been criticised in many fields for focusing on attempts to bounce back or maintain the status quo following a disturbance.

A growing body of community resilience literature emphasizes the importance of social
resources in preparing for and responding to disturbances. In particular, scholars have noted that community based organizations and strong social networks positively contribute to adaptive capacity, or the ability to adjust and respond to change while enhancing the conditions necessary to withstand future events.

The aim of this brief intervention is to suggest that both approaches are needed, and that understanding life at the edges of capitalism, including possible emphases on relations of mutual aid instead of market competition, is necessary for a complete understanding of capitalism as a system.

Mutual aid is the fundamental basis of all human societies, an understanding that is exemplified with striking clarity during times of crises. The coronavirus pandemic has brought the caring geographies of mutual aid into sharp relief with the failings of both capitalism and the state.

How do people behave when disasters strike? Popular media accounts depict panic and cruelty, but in fact individuals often cooperate with and care for one another during crises. I summarize evidence for such 'catastrophe compassion', discuss its roots, and consider how it might be cultivated in more mundane times.

Beginning on September 17, 2011, a few hundred people gathering in a small park in lower Manhattan and calling themselves Occupy Wall Street engaged in a series of street protests and built a small, ramshackle encampment that would capture imaginations around the world, inspiring hundreds of thousands of people to take part in marches and demonstrations, build their own encampments and “occupations” of public and sometimes
private property, and engage in other political acts.

Many New Orleans residents who were displaced in 2005 by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and the subsequent levee failures and floods are still displaced. Living with long-term stress related to loss of family, community, jobs, and social security as well as the continuous struggle for a decent life in unsettled life circumstances, they manifest what we are calling “chronic disaster syndrome.”

In this document we put forward eight simple but important “best practice” insights from psychological science to help people come to terms and cope with the profound implications of climate change, so that they can stay engaged with the problem, see where their own behaviour plays a part, and participate in speedy societal change to restore a safe climate

Research has been conducted to gather and evaluate experiences of marginalized communities impacted by climatological or natural disaster events. Results from this study can help inform, update, or create new and more-inclusive DRR policies that recognize the experiences and needs of minority communities, and improve outcomes for these individuals.

Hierarchical control models have dominated organizational structures for thousands of years. Increasingly, the power of distributed organizations for performing complex tasks is becoming apparent. The strength of centralized decision making systems lies in consistency, continuity, and availability of resources. However, the inherent structure which leads to these strengths also limits the ability to respond to highly complex information. In this paper we explore the strength of the Occupy Sandy mutual aid organization.

This report addresses a key aspect of the nation’s response to COVID-19: the hyper-local, spontaneous efforts of communities. These efforts do not reflect the traditional ‘helper and helped’ relationship, which prevails in public services and the formal charity sector. They obey the deeper obligations of mutualism: free citizens combining to protect their communities, and the most vulnerable, against a threat to all.

Five years ago, the Arab Spring reclaimed public spaces across the Middle East and North Africa, demonstrating to a new generation the possibilities for creative resistance and political imagination under even the most repressive circumstances.

Within hours of Hurricane Katrina's landfall, social justice organizers joined millions of Americans in responding to the humanitarian crisis precipitated by the storm. In addition to mobilizing to meet basic needs, however, organizers sought to cultivate a collective, political response to what they framed as government malfeasance before, during, and after the hurricane.

The beginnings of the COVID-19 pandemic caused panic over job losses, food and toiletry shortages, and social isolation, over and above the health impacts of the virus. People wanted to help on a mass scale and there was a huge community response. The pandemic brought energy into neighbourhoods and communities, leading to the rapid formation of mutual aid groups in many different forms all over the country.

This course ties together ideas and evidence about resilience. How do we keep ourselves and our children resilient in the challenging period of an unknown future catastrophe?

Climate change disproportionately impacts communities already challenged by structural oppression. Many mainstream resilience planning efforts focus on physical infrastructure. These efforts have, in many cases led to displacement through the phenomenon of Green Gentrification. An alternative framework of climate resilient design and planning considers the role of place attachment, social capital, and local knowledge in disaster resilience, here referred to as relational infrastructure.

This study examines the role of non-established relief groups (NERGs) and their involvement in the response to Hurricane Irma after it struck the state of Florida, United States, in September 2017. Its principal goal is to discover more about the engagement of NERGs in disaster response, as well as their motivations and their coordination with other emergency management agencies.

COVID-19 changed society in terms of employment, food security, and mental health, affecting all segments of the population. Surging demands for a wide range of support could not be met solely by government-led disaster assistance that experienced breakdowns in the initial phase of the pandemic.

Writing collectively from the relative privilege of our (often precarious) homes, we sketch out a space to reflect on the centrality of housing and home to the Covid-19 crisis.

The current revelatory moment of the COVID-19 pandemic offers an opportunity to find hope in the rubble through the deconstruction of framings of crisis as “error” and by homing in on the current and potential role of tourism to contribute to a more socially and environmentally just society. This reframing the pandemic as an "unnatural" disaster opens new debates at the intersection of tourism geographies and political ecologies of hope in revelatory moments of crisis.

As the COVID-19 pandemic spread across the globe in the spring of 2020, thousands of grassroots, participatory, and often social movement-connected community efforts to help feed, shelter, and care for one another through the crisis were launched, many of which identified their projects as “mutual aid.” This article presents an overview of mutual aid and gives an introduction to the legal issues being confronted by mutual aid groups.

Human behaviour, particularly the neo-liberal economic system that values unlimited growth and unsustainable extraction of natural resources, is contributing to climate volatility and exacerbating disaster risk.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, networks of community organizers and activists mobilized to support their neighbors as part of mutual aid groups across the United States. Emergent community response is a common phenomenon during crisis, but mutual aid in the pandemic took on a distinct character, drawing on traditions of political and community organizing. Our research into these activities suggests that mutual aid organizing in relation to disaster is growing practice but remains evolving and contested.

The central theme of these reflection is that although the Katrina disaster offers abundant evidence of how crisis creates ideal opportunities for intensified economic exploitation, what has since then come to be called “disaster capitalism,” and also for increased repression, brutality and ethnic cleansing, which might be called “disaster fascism,” it also creates the conditions for an extraordinary flourishing of mutual aid, solidarity and communal cooperation, something we might call “disaster anarchism.”

This article takes the notion of the ‘disaster utopia’ as a starting point for reconsidering the impact of the Japanese triple disaster of 11 March 2011 (3/11). It has often been observed that disasters may lead to utopian longings for a better world, and that these may, in some cases, lead to long-term social and political change.

The term “disaster capitalism,” launched in 2005 by activist journalist Naomi Klein, still has resonance within social movement circles. Yet its proliferation in media and social movements risks a confusion and weakening of the core concept and critiques.

Sea otters have barely survived centuries of colonial and capitalist development. To understand why, I examine how they have been oriented in capitalist social relations in Alaska, and with what effects. I follow sea otters through three overlapping political economic episodes, each of which shapes the next: colonial expansion and the fur trade; petro- capitalism and the negligent neoliberal state, culminating in the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill; and finally, spill cleanup and “green” capitalism, when sea otters are produced as data points and spectacle. In each episode, I describe (1) sea otters’ orientation in relation to capitalism and the state, and (2) the nature and temporality of violence and ecological loss that attends their orientation. In conversation with theorisations of extinction as a “slow unravelling”, I suggest animal life can unravel less slowly than haltingly—quick, quick, slow—and that the unravelling and animals’ orientation in capitalism are co-constituted.

This study will examine how NGO:s can work to counteract disaster capitalism. This is done by looking at how Swedish NGO:s implement their work and whether this is compatible with Loretta Pyles’ decolonising disaster social work framework (2017), which is deemed to contain measures which can hamper disaster capitalism. Furthermore, it also delves into NGO perception of privatisation of the humanitarian sector, which consociates with disaster capitalism, which is done by looking at how Swedish NGO:s experience the expansion of privatisations into the humanitarian sphere.

We situate disasters, their making, and their politics within the Capitalocene and argue that disasters and the physical processes that underpin them are not natural: they are unevenly produced through, and exacerbated by, processes inherent in the capitalist system, with uneven consequences

Calls from the climate change community and a more widespread concern for human security have reawakened the interest of geographers and others in disaster politics. A legacy of geographical research on the political causes and consequences of disaster is reviewed and built on to formulate a framework for the analysis of post-disaster political space.

Why do large-scale disasters produce such mentally healthy conditions?
What therapeutic principles can we derive from a study of the natural human adjustments that develop among disaster survivors?

This paper highlights a variety of studies on disaster recovery and reconstruction, some showing that political, economic, and social change is unlikely after disasters; some showing that change occurs frequently after disasters; and still others showing that both are true, depending on who you are.

Scholars have highlighted the role of disturbance and crisis in enabling systemic change towards sustainability. For example, disasters can, under some circumstances, serve as catalysts of such change.

I have become increasingly interested in making sense of the post/disaster politics that have unfolded in the Caribbean since the devastating 2017 hurricane season. A situation which surprisingly, has little to do with the actual hurricanes themselves, as it does with the ways these disasters become embroiled in a longer history of structural violence that undergird the way the Caribbean has long been experimented with and exploited.

We are honored to be part of this symposium issue envisioning the transformation of family support and honoring the work of Dorothy Roberts. The symposium is both essential and timely. It is essential because abolition of the family policing system is needed, and needed now; it is timely because the inequality exposed by the pandemic and the overdue reckoning with state violence, particularly against people of color, have mobilized communities bringing new energy and hope

We sketch an agenda for research on economic practices and institutions without markets by posing nine broad questions about non-market food systems and exploring the evidence and theory around each. By ignoring and demeaning non-market economies, researchers contribute to creating markets' dominance over social life. Observing, analyzing, theorizing, supporting, promoting, creating, and envisioning non-market economies challenges market hegemony.

Attributions of panic are almost exclusively directed at members of the general public. Here, we inquire into the relationships between elites and panic. We review current research and theorizing about panic, including problems of identifying when it has occurred. We propose three relationships: elites fearing panic, elites causing panic and elites panicking.

Spontaneous responses by self-organizing, “emergent” voluntary groups and individuals are a common feature of urban disasters. Their activities include search and rescue, transporting and distributing relief supplies, and providing food and drink to victims and emergency workers.

We develop questions for a COVID-19 research agenda from the anthropology of disasters to study the production of pandemic as a feature of the normatively accepted societal state of affairs. We encourage an applied study of the pandemic that recognizes it as the product of connections between people, with their social systems, nonhumans, and the material world more broadly, with attention to root causes, (post)colonialism and capitalism, multispecies networks, the politics of knowledge, gifts and mutual aid, and the work of recovery.

Droughts, floods and other natural catastrophes related to climate change belong to a class of global risks that have downstream effects on the economy and productivity of settlements, social cohesion and administrational institutions. This represents growing challenges for adaptation strategies and disaster management.

Disaster associated with natural hazards can lead to important changes—positive or negative—in socio-ecological systems. When disasters occur, much attention is given to the direct disaster impacts as well as relief and recovery operations. Although this focus is important, it is noteworthy that there has been little research on the characteristics and progress of change induced by disasters.

Vulnerability is a label and a concept that is widely used in disaster studies. To date the meaning has been quite limited and implied “weakness”, with criticisms arising periodically but not halting vulnerability's reproduction. In this paper, the authors offer a new theory of vulnerability for the field, suggesting that complicating the concept can create space for liberatory discourse and organising.

This study examines the role that local grassroots efforts play in disaster response and recovery. Drawing on findings from an ongoing research project on the experience of Hurricane Sandy in New York City since 2012 as well as new data from more recent hurricanes and other events, we show how volunteers, community-based organizations, and activist groups often play an important role in both immediate response and longer-term recovery efforts.

Climate change affects the health of all Americans - right now. There are no exceptions. Although needed adaptation will reduce risks for all, only prompt, significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions will stave off a crescendoing public health emergency. Children, the elderly, and those with pre-existing conditions or who are socially the most vulnerable will be the most susceptible to the ravages of climate change.

Is uncertainty a vulnerability and justice problem? Historically the conversion of uncertainty into risk through research and knowledge gathering has been a key mechanism to reduce vulnerability, minimize disaster risk, and enhance adaptation and resilience. Climate change, ineffective disaster governance, democracy deficits, inequality and discrimination, and inadequate research / knowledge, are among key factors which enhance uncertainty at individual, household, community, neighbourhood, regional, national, and planetary scales.

This series of workshops is about gaining an in-depth understanding of how the history of food systems have come to shape our perceptions of food and embodiment and how this relates to social and ecological sustainability. The target audiences are individuals who have struggled with food and embodiment and eating disorder professionals, but an eating disorder diagnosis is not required to participate.

The COVID-19 pandemic has shed light on the norms, patterns, and power structures in the United States that privilege certain groups of people over others. This article describes COVID-19 as an unprecedented catalyst for social transformation that underscores the need for multilevel and cross-sectoral solutions to address systemic changes to improve health equity for all.

The current health crisis, triggered by the spread of COVID-19, has mobilized activist groups and individuals within social movements worldwide to respond with actions of solidarity and mutual aid. In Greece, during the lockdown between March and May 2020, several mutual aid initiatives emerged in Athens to offer support to those who needed it.

How to respond quickly, effectively, and sensitively to large-scale crises is debated at length in the aid sector. Institutional focuses on projects and outcomes have led to abundant literature on the efficacy of external interventions, while the actions of individuals and communities to meet their own needs remain under researched. This paper seeks to close the gap by joining global trends and specific case studies to explore the scale, breadth, and characteristics of citizen and community-led responses to the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020–21.

This article provides an interdisciplinary examination of race and gender intersectionality in the context of disaster “recovery” in New Orleans. Based on a case study of a grassroots relief organization, the Common Ground Collective, the findings demonstrate that in the absence of intersectional practice, sexism furthers racism and racism furthers sexism.

This critical essay argues that disaster capitalism in the Philippines has specific nuances that mirror the pre-existing characteristics of the Philippine political economy, which is a combination of patronage politics and neoliberal policies. The article also highlights the role of people's movements in resistance and efforts of insulating the country from disaster capitalism.

The COVID-19 pandemic ushered in an era of unprecedented hard- ship across the United States. In response, local community members leveraged mutual aid as a form of citizen-based, peer-to-peer care. In this paper, we are interested in teasing out significant de- sign features that support the facilitation of mutual aid on online platforms. To this end, we conducted a scenario-based claims analysis of the two most widely used platforms for mutual aid, based on three primary user groups. Our analysis suggests that design for mutual aid platforms considers features which support request standardization

Within the United States, many marginalized communities have long-standing food growing traditions, which is relevant to responding to the growing climate crisis that imperils global food security and disproportionately impacts marginalized communities. In this community-engaged qualitative dissertation, I broadly ask, what can we learn from marginalized agrarian traditions that might be useful to those marginalized communities in collectively surviving global environmental change?

Gender and disaster scholars note that during and after disaster traditional gender roles and patterns can be either exaggerated or subverted. The temporary dissolution of normal life can facilitate the reversion to extreme forms of the gender binary or, conversely, the transgression of normative arrangements and production of new opportunities for gendered practice.

While community solidarity during emergencies and disasters is common, previous studies have shown that such solidarity behaviors tend to decline over time, even when needs remain high. In this study, we address how mutual aid groups can be sustained over time in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.

This thesis explores the experiences and practices of disaster relief volunteers. This thesis is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted over a period of fifty-three days in the summer of 2007 at the post-hurricane Katrina Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans, Louisiana.

This is the manuscript of a guest lecture I gave in MIT 3874G: Disaster Capitalism, a course designed and delivered by Dr. Warren Steele of the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario. The theme for the day’s lecture was ‘Exit Strategies.’

From the spring of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic and the social distancing measures introduced created a series of social problems and needs that were partially addressed in Italy as well as in other countries by grassroots mutual aid initiatives. This article analyses these initiatives as direct social actions: actions that do not primarily
focus on claiming something from the state or other power holders, but instead on directly transforming some specific aspects of society by means of the very action itself.

Faced with an onslaught of disasters, government mismanagement of
life-threatening crises, and the injustices of colonialism, Puerto Rican
communities have bet on their own survival. Their mutual aid efforts testify
to both the power of grassroots organizing and the scale of state neglect.

We build on the critical environmental justice (CEJ) framework by exploring mutual aid as a means of practising and realising transformative environmental justice that allows activists to build environmentally resilient and just communities beyond the state. We draw on the work of W.E.B. Du Bois, the Black Radical Tradition, and other critical approaches to demonstrate how mutual aid offers a meaningful point of conjunction for uniting ideological approaches to environmental justice that are often understood as being at odds with one another.

Prisons, jails, and detention facilities, by definition, are designed to isolate and separate people from their communities. To challenge and upend carcerality requires not just dismantlement, but radical revisioning, a building – of flourishing, free and caring communities. Collectively developed responses and resources for people and ecosystems, led by those with lived experience of oppression, are the foundation for a world without prisons.

This commentary piece will provide a brief summary of mutual aid literature, followed by a case study of Occupy Sandy and an overview of the still evolving COVID-19 mutual aid practices in New York City and beyond.

Alongside the charity framework, the more effective altruist ought to consider a mutual aid framework, which better acknowledges and honors the unavoidably political commitments of effective altruism to reimagine and remake the world.

For years, I have been sad about how mutual aid rarely gets taught in classes about social change and social movements. It is such a vital part of movement building and transformation, and often very mobilizing for students to learn about it. I hope this will be changing as the concept of mutual aid is circulating more. I made a Teaching Guide to go with my new book about mutual aid being published by Verso Books in October, wanted to share now in case anyone is considering the book for fall syllabi.

I’m teaching a class this fall at University of Chicago called Queer and Trans Mutual Aid for Survival and Mobilization. Here is the syllabus. I will be posting the discussion questions and class exercises for each week here, so you can use them if you are reading along alone or in a reading group.

Between March and June 2020, residents in north London faced the Covid-19 pandemic by creating neighbourhood Mutual Aid groups on WhatsApp and Facebook. These groups not only addressed basic survival needs such as bringing groceries and medicines to
infected people, the elderly, and other vulnerable populations in quarantine; they also offered opportunities for social interactions between strangers living in the same neighbourhood during lockdown. Their success was linked to their rapid mobilization, adaptability and local knowledge.

Turning off Middletown’s Main Street, I pass a neon-painted Jamaican restaurant on the corner, which I’ve never been inside. I drive under the familiar sneakers hung from a telephone line high above and see people heading in and out of their homes. The street is narrow. One side is lined with newly rebranded fivestory apartment units, the other with a series of small, mismatched duplexes in need of painting. Right before I reach the railroad tracks which house a freshly spray-painted old railcar that overlooks the Connecticut River, I pull into a long,
crowded driveway between a garden and brick building. The garden is overgrown, with bits of green onion and lettuce popping up between the hastily made garden beds, and the plants need water. There is a shed near the back painted in bright colors which reads “Ferry St. Community Garden.” At the front of the garden, where Wesleyan students once tried to plant a pear tree, there is a chalkboard. Faded by the rain, it reads, “Community Fridge! Free Food,” with a smudge of the Spanish translation below.

This article aims to describe the unique role and contributions of mutual aid organisations in addressing food insecurity and food access disparities in Chicago’s communities of colour during the COVID-19 pandemic.

COVID-19 elicited a rapid emergence of new mutual aid networks in the US, but the practices
of these networks are understudied. Using qualitative methods, we explored the empirical ethics guiding US-based mutual aid networks’ activities, and assessed the alignment between principles and practices as networks mobilized to meet community needs during 2020–21. These findings underscore the importance of mutual aid praxis as an intersection between ethical principles and practices, and the challenges that contemporary, and often new, mutual aid networks responding to COVID-19 face in developing praxis during a period of prolonged crisis. We develop a theory-of-change model that illuminates both the opportunities and the potential pitfalls of mutual aid work in the context of structural inequities, and shows how communities can achieve justice-oriented mutual aid praxis in current and future crises.

This paper argues that Hurricane Katrina accelerated ongoing social processes involving neoliberal policies, labour migration and racial boundary shifts. In the storm’s wake, neoliberal policies promoted the reorganisation of the local labour force and stimulated the immigration of vulnerable Latino immigrant workers.

Disasters are becoming more frequent and destructive while the consequences for incarcerated persons have grown increasingly visible. Simultaneously, scholars, individuals, and communities are grappling with police brutality and systemic anti-Black racism in the criminal legal system by engaging with the concept of abolition. In this article we demonstrate that these issues are not disconnected and argue that the abolition of the prison industrial complex (PIC) would mitigate the impacts of disasters for incarcerated persons and their communities.

The focus of discussion about the ethical issues associated with the COVID-19 pandemic has been on the great suffering to which it has given rise. However, there may be some unexpected positive outcomes that also emerge from the global disaster.

My paper looks at the use of communication technologies by Occupy Sandy, a relief network developed initially by Occupy Wall Street activists to address the devastation of Hurricane Sandy.

St. Augustine Church, widely regarded as the oldest African-American church in the country, was slated for closure only six months after Hurricane Katrina. Since its opening, St. Augustine has always been a vital cultural nexus in the city's Afro-Creole community, and closing the parish at a time when it was most needed would have been a devastating blow.

A pervasive sense of uncertainty permeates individual and collective life today. The political economic, cultural, infrastructural, and environmental changes, neoliberal development ushers in, manufacture insecurity at scales stretching from the molecular to the global.

This paper describes our internship experiences with Newton Neighbors, a mutual aid group based in the greater Boston area. Throughout our time with Newton Neighbors, we have gained in experience in community and public health work. This involved completing tasks such as conducting a community needs assessment, distributing health information, and evaluating the impact of the mutual aid work. We have reflected on our experience and learned a variety of lessons such as community mobilizing efforts are able to support public health efforts, increasing accessibility to public health information is essential, diversity in privilege exists in wealthy communities, and diverse women role models in leadership are significant for inspiring and leading young female public health professionals.

Community responses to the impacts of COVID-19 in working-class communities of color in the Boston area are examples of resilience in action. Building climate resilience is not just about hardening physical infrastructure but also about strengthening social and civic infrastructure to reach and protect the most vulnerable. This article explores the lessons learned from the pandemic for more equitable approaches to climate resilience.

One of the most obvious problems for those involved with disaster relief work is coordination with other teams in the field, with headquarters, with the mother organization in the home country and having to deal with unanticipated situations. The central dilemma appears to be this: disaster relief workers either have the knowledge to know what to do or the authority to do it.

This critical discourse analysis of the American Red Cross (ARC) interrogates the discourses of situated ARC stakeholders following their participation in the 2005 hurricane disaster relief efforts. The author uses critical discourse analysis as a guiding theoretical framework and method of analysis to reflect on how the language and practices of the ARC, on a variety of levels, normalizes Whiteness and maintains White privilege.

Rooted in a participatory action research framework, this is an in depth
exploration of two mutual aid disaster relief organizations: Common Ground and Occupy Sandy, and what makes their approach distinctive and effective.

Disaster capitalism is typically defined as a systematic and opportunistic reconfiguration of economies and economic regulations in service of capitalist interests under the cover of environmental crisis. This article offers another complementary variety of disaster capitalism—the production of capitalist subjects, petit capitalists “empowered” by the state and nongovernmental organizations via initiation into the special knowledge and crafts of small enterprise. This is at once a well-intentioned strategy and one that reveals the limits of neoliberal imagination—the inability to envision recovery but through individualistic, entrepreneurial endeavors.

So here we are and there we were. The maligned, mythologized state of Louisiana: a state whose history is steeped in the transatlantic slave trade, the domestic slave trade, Jim Crow, mass incarceration, mass surveillance, disaster capitalism, and disaster resistance. Strike that, just call it resistance—all resistance is against a disaster, be it white supremacy, capitalism, violent infrastructure by design—including draconian limitation on abortion access.

How might critique and transformative education play a role in resisting various manifestations of disaster capitalism? Can ideas from Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Pedagogy of Hope, and Henry Giroux’s critical pedagogy inform our systematic conceptualization of alternatives to harmful emergency management strategies?

The year 2015 marked the tenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, which made landfall just outside of New Orleans on August 29, 2005. Critical narratives point to the glaring racial and economic inequality that contextualized the catastrophe. However, most Katrina discourse has been limited by its neglect of intersectional feminist analysis. In this article I introduce a model for making intersectional sense of Hurricane Katrina with lessons for the study of other disasters.

Care has reentered the zeitgeist. In the immediate aftermath of the 2016
US presidential election, op-eds on #selfcare exploded across media platforms. But for all the popular focus on self-care rituals, new collective
movements have also emerged in which moral imperatives to act — to
care — are a central driving force.

When we, the editors of this special issue, decided on the theme of politics, radical philosophy, and climate change, we had not imagined that we would complete this project in a time of pandemic, a crisis that seems on “fast forward” as compared to the “slow violence” of the climate crisis.

This paper’s purpose is to develop a concept of radical resilience. We do so by drawing from both agonistic and anarchist planning theory. Radical resilience exists when people mobilize their ability to manage their affairs for themselves. This ability often emerges following an agonistic conflict with a governing power.

Can professional caregivers respond to the needs of the individuals and families who face life threatening experiences, or "crises," such as the effects of chemical waste in Love Canal, the nuclear explosion on Three Mile Island, the hostage taking in Iran, the volcanic destruction of Mount Saint Helens, or the crash of a DC-lO airplane in Chicago?

Emmett Till's body arrived home in Chicago in September 1955. White racists in Mississippi had tortured, mutilated, and killed the young 14-year-old African-American boy for whistling at a white woman. Determined to make visible the horribly mangled face and twisted body of the child as an expression of racial hatred and killing, Mamie Till, the boy's mother, insisted that the coffin, interred at the A.A. Ranier Funeral Parlor on the South Side of Chicago, be left open for four long days.

The World Trade Center attack, though constituting an unprecedented disaster, nevertheless generated many of the features seen in other disasters in the U.S. Such features include the convergence of volunteers and donations of supplies, which are welldocumented in the literature.

Across three years (2017-2020), the ESRC Seminar series, ‘Civil Agency, Society and
Climate Adaptation to Weather Extremes’ (CASCADE-NET) critically examined the changing
role of civil society in extreme weather adaptation. One full-day seminar explored “less heard
voices” within Civil Society, considering ways of engaging diverse groups in resiliency,
knowledge exchange, and capacity building. A small interdisciplinary group from the seminar
followed up with a roundtable discussion, conducted online, discussing first who the lessheard voices in society are, and how labels, such as ‘vulnerable’ and ‘hard-to-reach’, might
need to be reappraised, and concluding that it is often those in power who make themselves
‘hard-to-reach’ and who fail to listen. The group then discussed how deeper engagement
with citizens and communities can be achieved through improved relationships and
networks. A transformation in orientation to community engagement is in order if we are to produce effective, locally attuned, collective action in the face of social shocks.

Community gardens have historically played an important role in the social–ecological resilience of New York City (NYC). These public-access communal gardens not only support flora and fauna to enhance food security and ecosystem services, but also foster communities of practice which nurture the restorative and communal aspects of this civic ecology practice. A

This study analyzes the politics and lived experiences of debt and climate disaster recovery in Puerto Rico. It examines mutual aid and debt resistance in relation to governance techniques and overlapping crises marked by the U.S. territory’s bankruptcy, the aftermath of Hurricane Maria (2017), and culminating with popular mobilizations in the summer of 2019 that propelled the governor’s resignation.

It is reasonable to assume that, if we could find a way to open a permanent door to this paradise, a breakthrough could occur in Japanese society. The most real and practical problem is, hence, how to maintain or resume this state of paradise in society. The present study attempts to solve these problems using action research and focusing on disaster volunteers. It first introduces the outline of the author’s own longitudinal fieldwork after the Great East Japan Earthquake. Secondly, based on this fieldwork, it describes action research in terms of which previous disaster survivors who received support were motivated to assist survivors in the disaster-affected area of eastern Japan. Finally, it discusses the psychological and sociological implications of this process not only for disaster-affected areas, but also for the whole of Japanese society.

Like sustainable development, disaster resilience can be conceptualized as a collective surge in science, policy, and practice. The strength of the resilience surge is based on the concept’s usefulness as a boundary object and in particular its resonance with the discourses and practices of neoliberalization, in which the role of the state is diminished and superseded by private–public partnerships and contracts.

Resilience has fast become a popular catchphrase used by government, international finance organisations, NGOs, community groups and activists all over the globe. Despite its widespread use, there remains confusion over what resilience is and the purpose it serves.

In North American cities, a great deal of effort is needed to enhance equity-centered climate resilience. To date, most community resilience work focuses on identifying and managing vulnerability and risk through top-down approaches that often fail to meaningfully include equity-centered strategies considering the most vulnerable populations.

Through a combination of research and interviews, this paper unpacks the policies that expose
colonialist realities and how Puerto Rican mutual aid societies engaged with those policies in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. Policies and decisions such as cabotage law under the Jones Act; the quality of Puerto Rican bonds being triple-tax exempt; the inability to refinance or default on debt; the Insular Cases and other Supreme Court cases; and PROMESA, have established a colonial relationship with significant material and political consequences for Puerto Rico. These consequences were brought to light after Hurricane Maria, where the U.S.’s inadequate response resulted in an unprecedented loss of lives. Following the hurricane, Puerto Rico experienced a surge of mutual aid societies and non-profit organizations that were crucial in providing disaster relief as they supplemented many gaps left by federal disaster relief. By interviewing some mutual aid societies, I excavate their perspective on the sharp growth of the third sector and analyze their short-term work providing disaster relief as well as long-term efforts towards the recovery, rebuilding, and resiliency planning of the island. These mutual aid societies underscore Puerto Rico’s new agency, providing unique insights into the ways colonial policies restrict the island’s self-determination while simultaneously providing a model for decolonizing at the root. I hope this project helps delineate the colonial policies that informed or exacerbated the federal response but also recognizes the growth of mutual aid networks as a source of material gain and hope.

On September 19th, 1985, at 7:14 a.m. an earthquake reaching a magnitude of 8.1 on the Richter scale and lasting almost two full minutes hit the coast of Mexico

Through a critical discourse analysis of news media after the US Gulf Coast hurricane Katrina and the Haiti earthquake disasters, we draw from Soss et al.’s (2011) ideas about US poverty governance – neoliberal paternalism – to identify how a similar phenomenon of ‘neoliberal disaster governance’ (NDG) operates in these contexts. NDG is a set of discourses, policies, and practices, we argue, which endeavors to control disaster survivors in order to further the ends of neoliberal capitalism. Specifically, we find several key story lines that legitimate and perpetuate NDG, namely disaster capitalism, securitization and militarization of disaster settings, discourses of racial cleansing, and displacement.

Around the world, disaster is providing the means for business to accumulate profit. From the Asian tsunami of 2005 that allowed corporations to seize coveted shoreline properties for resort development to the multi-billion dollar no-bid reconstruction contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan, from the privatization of public schooling following Hurricane Katrina in the Gulf Coast to the ways that No Child Left Behind sets public school up to be dismantled and made into investment opportunities—a grotesque pattern is emerging in which business is capitalizing on disaster.

Using our professional experiences with natural disaster relief, as well as existing theory, the authors introduce an equity-oriented framework—Social Justice Disaster Relief, Counseling, and Advocacy.

In the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, the concept of mutual aid was rapidly taken up as an ideal model for solidarity. This paper examines why mutual aid may have found such popularity in this moment by examining the affective underpinnings of risk, vulnerability and the imperative to care. Rather than celebrate the turn to mutual aid as the best path towards justice, however, the paper suggests that we think strategically about the models we use for survival, by considering mutual aid as one strategy among many for generating our responses to the harms that predate, and are intensified through, the pandemic

As a scholar on social movement democracy and an activist scholar working on neighbourhood relations, we are curious about the political and transformative potential of solidarity in action during this crisis. Hence, we analyse different initiatives of mutual aid during the pandemic in our city

Long-term volunteers at Common Ground Health Clinic (CGHC) in New Orleans speak resolutely, passionately, and extensively about their “New Model” of healthcare. Important to their project is not just providing any type of “medical care” to the previously underserved New Orleans neighborhood of Algiers but providing a specific type of care – “what we would want for us.” This goal is explicitly political, like that of the Black Panther clinics, and it challenges the methods and discourse of traditional biomedicine.

The COVID-19 pandemic brought wide-ranging, unanticipated societal changes as communities rushed to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus. In response, mutual aid groups bloomed online across the United States to fill in the gaps in social services and help local communities cope with infrastructural breakdowns.

In this paper we map out how mutual aid has been enacted during the COVID-19 pandemic by charity, contributory and radical groups to address specific and novel forms of vulnerabilities, and the opportunities and challenges this offers for the future. In particular we highlight potential tensions between the enacting of mutual aid practices and the political activism (or not) of the mutual aid actors.

This paper focuses on Mutual Aid Disaster Relief (MADR), a grassroots organization providing natural disaster relief rooted in the principles of mutual aid and autonomous direct action. Through participant-observation of a series of workshops and semi-structured interviews with activists and organizers, this research explores why it is that individuals are motivated to act within this grassroots network, as opposed to participating in other efforts in response to natural disasters.

In the current political moment in the United States, defined by climate crisis, increased border enforcement, attacks on public benefits, expansive carceral control, rising housing costs, and growing white right-wing populism, leftist social movement activists and organizations face two particular challenges that, though not new, are urgent.

The Superstorm Research Lab (SRL) is a mutual aid research and writing collective working to understand the changes in how New York City policy actors, NGO leaders, activists, volunteers, and residents are thinking about social, economic and environmental issues following Hurricane Sandy.

Nearly four years after Hurricane Harvey struck Houston in 2017, thousands of Houstonians remain displaced or are still living in damaged homes that endanger their health. This working paper uses participatory action research to identify and analyze the barriers to recovery from the perspective of residents living in low income Black and Brown neighborhoods in Northeast (NE) Houston.

Mutual-aid communities are normally built voluntarily in disaster-struck areas. Similar kinds of communities formed after the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. In this case, calls for collaboration between all Japanese people such as Ganbaro Nippon (“carry on, Japan” or “hang in there, Japan”) appeared on posters and stickers in towns throughout the country.

Although not always recognized as such, catastrophes are complicated systems that are built on the social production of vulnerability. This thesis considers how responses to catastrophes are usually built on an oversimplified understanding of what they are, and argues that more nuanced, multi-faceted understandings of catastrophes can guide us to more effective solutions.

In this article, I discuss some aspects of disaster governance, focusing on the long-term recovery process. Speciically, I analyze the fundamental biopolitical assumptions of the discourses and practices on the part of governmental disaster response agencies in São Luiz do Paraitinga, Brazil.

Can bottom-up relief efforts lead to recovery after disasters? Conventional wisdom and contemporary public policy suggest that major crises require centralized authority to provide disaster relief goods. Using a novel set of comprehensive donation and expenditure data collected from archival records, this paper examines a bottom-up relief effort following one of the most devastating natural disasters of the nineteenth century: the Chicago Fire of 1871.

This paper addresses the relationship between resistance and building in collective political struggle. Although protests, strikes, and other repertoires of contention are well-studied in the contentious politics literature, relatively few scholars examine the interplay of contentious strategies and tactics with constructive action that builds social-relational infrastructure to meet collective needs. I draw on a case study of the campaign to divest from fossil fuels and reinvest in climate solutions to illustrate how contentious and constructive dimensions are intertwined in the climate movement. I generalize from this example to argue that constellations of ideologically-saturated constructive strategies and tactics – what I call repertoires of construction – have unique dynamics and implication.

“We have all experienced the devastating effects of natural and unnatural disasters in America.” So began a speaker at a post-Hurricane Sandy rally at Zuccotti Park on July 31, 2013, recalling two previous disasters that the audience knew well: the World Trade Center attack of September 11, 2001, and Hurricane Katrina’s flooding of New Orleans on August 29, 2005

Many groups and agencies have a vital need of accurate information on how people behave during disasters. This article presents information which seems to have particular pertinence for disaster preparedness, control, and amelioration

This article provides an analysis of Occupy Sandy – a New York-based activist organization that was formed in response to superstorm Sandy in October 2012 – in order to demonstrate what we might
learn from its emergency (im)mobilities. Specifically, it suggests Occupy Sandy's myriad forms of movement and emplacement, can help us find a way toward an insurgent infrastructure beyond racial liberalism, one predicated on and productive of a radical reconceptualization of the city and urban citizenship itself.

This chapter is an effort to synthesize these lessons and make practical recommendations to other librarians and knowledge professionals. Mutual aid - including and beyond the COVID-19 pandemic - is a case study in how social movements can facilitate transformative community development through grassroots knowledge production, reliant on information management.

It is Thursday, November 8, 2012 at St. Jacobi Church in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. It’s a bright, dry day. Just one week earlier, Hurricane Sandy made landfall on the East Coast, ravaging everything in its wake. In New York City, thousands of houses are destroyed or flooded.

After Hurricane Katrina of 2005, New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward became an icon for the failure of recovery efforts and the persistence of inequality and poverty in American society. However, for as long as this community has been marginalized it has been creating advocacy organizations and counter-narratives that battled discrimination and imbued its cultural practices with meaning.

Collaborative authors discuss the "millennial turns" of the Left - "anarchist, democratic, global" - before/during/after Seattle '99, and the shift toward a reimagined socialism in recent decades.

Twenty-first century activists—inspired by recent social movements and criticisms of the “non-profit industrial complex”—have increasingly sought to avoid pursuing their activism through the hierarchical, professionally managed non-profit corporations that have been the norm for social justice organizations since the 1970s

Editors Rachel Brown and Deva Woodly bring together Mara Marin, Shatema Threadcraft, Christopher Paul Harris, Jasmine Syedullah, and Miriam Ticktin to examine the question: what would be required for care to be an ethic and political practice that orients people to a new way of living, relating, and governing? The answer they propose is that a 21st-century approach to the politics of care must aim at unmaking racial capitalism, cisheteropatriarchy, the carceral state, and the colonial present.

Latin America is one of the regions facing many disasters with some of the worse impacts. The current governance model has not proven successful in disaster risk reduction. This article aims to theoretically analyse the relationship between ideal regional disaster risk governance (DRG) and the actual production of disaster risk in Latin America.

Within hours of Sandy’s landfall, members from the Occupy Wall Street movement—a planned social movement comprised of social activists who protested income inequality in the United States—used social media to tap the wider Occupy network for volunteers and aid. Overnight, a volunteer army of young, educated, tech-savvy individuals with time and a desire to help others emerged.

Following Hurricane Katrina, observers worried that New Orleans might continue on a path of citizen passivity, inter-communal conflict, and corruption that was part of its long-standing reputation. Instead, observers have been struck by the outpouring of citizen engagement, the rise of new or invigorated community organizations, and the calls for government responsiveness.

The tourism industry is often complicit, helping the reconstruction industry to take land from people under the guise of providing post-disaster aid.

As disasters increasingly affect a greater proportion of the population with growing strength and frequency it is becoming even more important to comprehend how recovery from these events is mediated and managed by society.

When people ask me, as a climate reporter, what I think will happen next, my answer has been cruel and blasé in its bluntness: "More pandemics." There will be more pandemics, driven by deforestation, habitat destruction, and disease vectors extended due to warming climates, all egged on in their spread by the global nature of our economy. We also know there will be an increase in other kinds of climate disasters: wildfire, drought, hurricane, flood. The future is packed with relentless catastrophe.

Our study aims to understand the values and beliefs underlying mutual aid practices in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. These findings could inform mutual aid organizers, social workers, and scholars, enhancing their understanding of how mutual aid—as both a longstanding and emerging practice— may uniquely respond to the ongoing pandemic and compounding crises, such as economic distress and climate change, as government and nongovernmental (e.g., nonprofit) systems fail to keep up with increasing needs.

On the morning of August 23, 2014, a young man in his mid-20s, Jefferson Custodio, was delivering farm implements to farmer beneficiaries in Barangay Punong, Carigara, Leyte. A survivor of super Typhoon Haiyan (locally known as Yolanda), Jefferson was involved in numerous relief activities intended to alleviate the conditions of farmers who had lost seeds, farming implements, and capital when the winds and rain of Haiyan destroyed their crops.

This is a study about disasters, vulnerability and power. With regards to social justice organizing a particular research problem guides the work, specifically that emancipatory projects are often initiated and steered by privileged actors who do not belong to the marginalized communities they wish to strengthen, yet the work is based on the belief that empowerment requires self-organizing from within.

Using ethnographic encounters in Chicago and Austin we consider how practices of mutual aid are meaningful both spatially and aff ectively. First, we explore how mutual aid transforms “decaying” urban spaces to meet residents’ needs. Second, we explore felt experiences of mutuality in social relationships as distinct from authoritarian, charity-based relationality. Th inking these spatial and affective dimensions collectively, we work toward a framework of Black ecologies of care and mutual aid.

Feminist scholars have long argued that a “crisis of care” is characteristic of capitalist societies — capitalism has a tendency to jeopardize and destroy the very process and conditions of social reproduction upon which it depends.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, philanthropy has been quick to react to the call for help from Governments and International Organisations. And yet, despite the overwhelming response, increasing attention has been brought to the intricate ways in which philanthropists and billionaires have been asserting their presence through their actions and influence in different spheres of power.