Forms Of Mutual Aid Research Articles

‘splinter to the heart of the world’: Beverly Buchanan’s shack works

For 30 years of her art practice, the black queer land artist Beverly Buchanan (1940–2015) researched and reproduced, though aslant, subsistence housing in the South. Here, the author treats Buchanan’s shack works as an expanded aesthetic project, one explicitly embedded in the forms of indebtedness and indenture extracted from the black household after Emancipation. Buchanan’s shacks spanned sculpture, bric-a-brac assemblage, drawing, portraiture, writing, and oral history. The author argues that, by holding and withholding, giving and taking, building and grounding, the shacks make several interventions in the architectural afterlife of slavery – and dwell, explicitly, with those forms of mutual aid which subsist beneath, and ultimately exceed, the propertied household.

The Effect of the Innovative Healthcare Program "My Color Health" on Knowledge, Behavior, and Perception of Disease Severity in Patients with Diabetes and Hypertension

Motivational program as a form of mutual aid could offer great benefits to promote healthy eating among Thai elderly with Diabetes and Hypertension. The purpose of this study is to examine the average, knowledge, practice recommendations, and patients' perceptions of the severity of their diseases before and after receiving the My Color Health Innovation. This quasi-experimental research used a one-group pretest-posttest design that aimed to examine the effects of the innovation "My color health" on knowledge, behavior, and the perception of disease severity in patients with diabetes and hypertension. This study used the concept of the 7-Color Ball. The sample consisted of 20 elderly people and was selected through purposive sampling. The research instruments consisted of the innovation "My color health" knowledge test behavior, and perception of the severity of diabetes and hypertension questionnaires. The questionnaire in Google Forms was used to collect data. The data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and paired t-tests. The results revealed that after using "My color health", the differences in the mean scores of knowledge, guidelines for practice, and perceived severity of diabetes and hypertension were statistically significant (P< 0.05). This research shows that the innovation of "My color health" can increase knowledge, behavior, and perception of the severity of diabetes and hypertension. It can be used as a guideline for the care of patients with uncontrolled diabetes and hypertension.

“They Have Been United As Sisters”: Women Leaders and Political Power in Black Lay Confraternities of Colonial Lima

AbstractIn Lima in the seventeenth century, both free and enslaved black women held elected leadership roles in black confraternities (corporate bodies of lay Catholics). These women occupied a public position generally reserved for men; their Spanish and indigenous counterparts did not hold comparable roles. Though their experiences have not been documented in scholarly literature, they were highly visible in their own lifetimes. In ecclesiastical court, they acted as the confraternity's legal agents. In everyday operations, they were primarily responsible for collecting and managing funds. This gave them a large say in how money ought to be spent, whether on festivals, members’ funerals, medical aid, or financial support for imprisoned members. Though black limeños made up a majority of the city's population, other forms of mutual aid were often inaccessible to them. Confraternity leaders in general, and these women in particular, managed one of their community's only officially recognized spaces for civic organization. As the century wore on, men successfully challenged the women's authority in court, and militia officers became more and more central to leadership. Yet even with that curtailment, these positions gave black women in Lima a degree of publicly acknowledged power highly unusual for early modern women.

The injustices of school district fragmentation

The authors argue that from the perspective of distributive justice, school district fragmentation—meaning both the existing reality of hyper-proliferated school districts and the practice of further breaking larger districts into smaller ones—produces three distinct injustices. First, it undermines racial solidarity and the bonds of community. Second, it violates the demands of procedural justice. And third, it leads to substantively unfair outcomes. Taken together, these concerns suggest that to create a more just educational system we ought to resist further fragmentation and push for larger, more consolidated school districts coupled with progressive redistributive funding. To support this central normative argument, the article provides two justifications for conceptualizing education as a fundamental entitlement and its provision as a form of mutual aid.

Exploring the Demand-Side of the Informal Economy during the COVID-19 Restrictions: Lessons from Iași, Romania

Little attention has been paid to why consumers choose to purchase goods and services from the informal economy. Similarly, few studies have been conducted on consumer behaviour in relation to informal markets during the COVID-19 pandemic. The aim of the article is to evaluate, for the first time, whether the COVID-19 pandemic influenced consumer behaviour in relation to the informal economy. Qualitative evidence collected in Iași, Romania, is reported. The finding is that the most important motives for purchasing goods and services from the informal economy are related to social ends, such as supporting local businesses, maintaining relationships with others, and enhancing sustainable development. The novel finding of this research is that community exchange in the form of mutual aid and reciprocity is not activated only for friends, neighbours, kin or work colleagues but also for local businesses facing financial difficulties. The customers are displaying solidarity and empathy for their situation. As such, this article adds to previous findings indicating that the motivation of lower cost is not the universal rationale for purchasing from the informal economy as many consumers choose to make purchases from informal market driven by social rationales. The paper ends by discussing the policy implications of the findings.

The Political Ecology of COVID-19 and Compounded Uncertainties in Marginal Environments

In this paper, we use a political ecology lens to look at how COVID-19 adds to a set of existing uncertainties and challenges faced by vulnerable people in the marginal environments of coastal India. Over the last few decades, local people have been systematically dispossessed from resource commons in the name of industrial, urban and infrastructure development or conservation efforts, leading to livelihood loss. We build on our current research in the TAPESTRY (https://tapestry-project.org/) project in coastal Kutch and Mumbai to demonstrate how the pandemic has laid bare structural inequalities and unequal access to public goods and natural resources. The impacts of COVID-19 have intersected with ongoing food, water and climate crises in these marginal environments, threatening already fragile livelihoods, and compounding uncertainties and vulnerabilities. Extreme weather events such as cyclones, droughts, heatwaves and floods in the last couple of decades have also compounded the problems faced in these regions, affecting seasonal migration patterns. We demonstrate how responses from “above” have been inadequate, failing to address problems, or arriving too late. Authoritarian leaders have used the pandemic to “other” and victimise certain groups and polarise society along religious lines. Lockdowns and covid restrictions have been used to surreptitiously complete environmentally destructive infrastructure projects, while avoiding resistance and opposition from affected local communities, who have also been subject to increased surveillance and restrictions on movement. While state responses have often been unpredictable and inadequate, there has been an outburst of local forms of mutual aid, solidarity, and civic action. There are also many examples of resilience at the local level, especially amongst communities that have largely relied on subsistence production. Despite the acute suffering, COVID-19 has also prompted civic groups, activists, and local communities to reflect on the possibilities for reimagining transformative pathways towards just and sustainable futures.

Keeping Time

My first inclination to this prompt, what of Black temporalities in crisis, was to ask a small group of Black familiars (friends and colleagues) to talk with me about their current experience of time in quarantine, and under the present articulations of racial injustice and economic crisis. Many remarked on awaiting moments of dance and embodiment, or the body after surgery during COVID, to the forms of mutual aid arriving, just on time. Others expressed holding patterns of rage, when being called forth in work environments to engage in conversations about race, others of the crushing aftermath of an intimate partnership in quarantine that went awry, only to arrive at new forms of intimacy in self-reflection and community co-counseling, or deep expressions of freedom, when invited to social distance with a family member, and doing so outside clothing. Still others reflected on mourning a relative, loved one, distant friend, and the uncertainty of the living body, through measures that are within and outside of human control. As the call for this special issue of SAQ noted, “Black temporalities of crisis might consist of subtle, collective and individual experiences of anticipation, drawn-out boredom, acceleration, or the feeling that something has ended before something else begins, among other possibilities.” In this instance, I focus on how the stretchy drawn-out and quickening qualities of time in crisis persist. By drawing on the anonymous experiences of loved ones and moments of rebellion toward fugitivity (e.g., the maroon communities of the Great Dismal Swamp and Harriet Jacobs’s neo–slave narrative), I ruminate on the in-between moments of Black life that show up in and around ongoing crisis.

For Health Autonomy: Horizons of Care Beyond Austerity, Reflections from Greece by CareNotes Collective

Reviewed by: For Health Autonomy: Horizons of Care Beyond Austerity, Reflections from Greeceby CareNotes Collective Heath Cabot (bio) CareNotes Collective, For Health Autonomy: Horizons of Care Beyond Austerity, Reflections from Greece. Brooklyn, NY: Common Notions. 2020. Pp. 110. Paper $15.00. For Health Autonomy: Horizons of Care Beyond Austerity, Reflections from Greeceis a collection of essays and interviews focused around radical healthcare [End Page 571]movements in Greece. Initiated by the CareNotes Collective, the book is grounded on the premise that—in the ongoing crisis of capitalism—there are crucial lessons to be learned from individuals and collectives in Greece that have responded to entrenched economic downturn, and the violence of austerity, by reconfiguring how care is conceptualized, organized, and (re)distributed. As the Collective notes in Chapter One, the book seeks to "illuminate the radical imaginings and creation of new care spaces that will allow us to build power to confront the systemic crises we face collectively" (12). As I write this review, the United States is closing in on 80,000 deaths from Covid-19. Who knows where we will be once it is published? Covid-19 has thrown into relief the extraordinary (if not unexpected) costs of privatized, profit-driven healthcare; the flows of people, goods, money, and contagions that accompany global capitalism; and the ways in which a constant focus on the health of markets renders lives expendable (Stuckler and Basu 2013)—even on a massive scale. In the past few weeks, municipalities and communities across the United States have responded in highly variable, often contradictory, ways. My own small neighborhood in Pittsburgh is a microcosm of these variations, as well as the entrenched individualism through which ideas of health and the good are almost always inflected in this country. I hear guidelines to "shelter in place" met with frustration as an infringement on freedom (individual freedom, of course—I cringe to think how my neighbors would respond to the lockdown measures that stereotypically noncompliant populations of the European South have followed with great self-sacrifice). Neighborly requests that people wear masks in businesses and on the street engender not just friendly compliance but also responses like, why don't you stay home? Or, if you don't like how we conduct things go somewhere else. Getting back to business is persistently framed as more urgent than cutting down on infections and deaths. But there has also been an explosion of networks of mutual aid, a term that I myself first encountered in Greece, in Greek, and which I heard increasingly frequently when I began research on the social solidarity initiatives that began to emerge in Greece in the early 2010s. These initiatives focus on horizontalized forms of redistribution (of medicines and care, food, education, and other crucial resources). While described as a form of mutual aid (αλληλοβοήθεια), solidarity in Greece has a much longer history—often cited as a core value in Greek rural life (Friedl 1964; Du Boulay 1972), which transferred later to urban contexts (Bakalaki 2008) and has been revivified and granted new meanings under austerity. Clearly, Covid-19, like many events codified as crises, is engendering forms of widescale critique and questioning ( krisi) challenging even us here in the United States, that bastion of individualism, to reimagine aspects [End Page 572]of health and community. Among those reimaginings are micropractices of commoning (such as those described in the preface to For Health Autonomyby Silvia Federici), either through more organized networks or informal modes of exchange and redistribution that groups of neighbors and friends have instituted. All this is to say that the premise of this collection—to learn from radical imaginings that challenge us to rethink health and care in terms of collective notions of human, multi-species, and planetary flourishing—is particularly relevant and even urgent now. This volume is quite short (just 110 pages), and the contributions are overall relatively free of jargon and engaging to read. Contributors range from engaged visitors to Greece (Cassie Thornton and Marta Perez) who seek to narrate what they learned from their meetings with local activists and stakeholders, to a variety of key figures (individual and collective) in the solidarity-based healthcare...

Say ‘Yes!’ to peer review: Open Access publishing and the need for mutual aid in academia

Scholars are increasingly declining to offer their services in the peer review process. There are myriad reasons for this refusal, most notably the ever-increasing pressure placed on academics to publish within the neoliberal university. Yet if you are publishing yourself then you necessarily expect someone else to review your work, which begs the question as to why this service is not being reciprocated. There is something to be said about withholding one’s labour when journals are under corporate control, but when it comes to Open Access journals such denial is effectively unacceptable. Make time for it, as others have made time for you. As editors of the independent, Open Access, non-corporate journal ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, we reflect on the struggles facing our daily operations, where scholars declining to participate in peer review is the biggest obstacle we face. We argue that peer review should be considered as a form of mutual aid, which is rooted in an ethics of cooperation. The system only works if you say ‘Yes’!

Crowdfunding and New Organizational Forms

Do web-based crowdfunding platforms expand the possibilities for new forms of long-distance and transnational association? This paper explores the relationship between a proliferation of web-based platforms in the last decade with the development of new forms of philanthropic, fraternal and cooperative association. This paper uses the process tracing case study methodology to demonstrate the causal relationships between the emergence of new platforms and the development of new forms of association. Specifically, I examine whether particular rule structures associated with the platform tend to promote a particular associational form. In addition to tracing the development of associations, I attempt to quantify the effect of funding platforms in terms of network scope, revenues generated and substantive outcomes. I argue that these technologies have and will continue to expand the possibilities for substantive forms of mutual aid.

Mechanisms of Motivational Program to Increase Perceived Self-efficacy of Healthy Eating among Thai Elderly with Hypertension and Hyperlipidemia

The purpose of this study was to identify the mechanisms of a motivational program to increase perceived self-efficacy of healthy eating among Thai elderly, 60 years of age and older, having diagnosed with hypertension and hyperlipidemia. Purposive sampling was used to obtain 66 elderly to participate in the motivational program. The program comprised health education, focus group discussion, eating monitoring, and counseling. Quantitative data assessing the elderly’ perceived self-efficacy of healthy eating, blood pressure and triglyceride levels were analyzed by one-way repeated measure ANOVA. Qualitative data from focus group discussion and counseling were analyzed by content analysis. The results revealed that at the 1-month, 3-month and 6-month motivational program, elderly reported significantly increased perceived self-efficacy of healthy eating while their blood pressure and triglyceride levels significantly decreased. In addition, gaining knowledge, a sense of empowerment and self-confidence that elderly received from focus group discussion and counseling increased their self-efficacy to better managing their eating behavior. The recommendation was that the motivational program as a form of mutual aid could offer great benefits to promote healthy eating among Thai elderly with hypertension and hyperlipidemia. Keywords: elder, healthy eating, hyperlipidemia, hypertension, self-efficacy

Women, Public Space, and Mutual Aid in Rural China

As rural Chinese women’s social networks are restricted by traditional, patriarchal gender norms, and poor geography and infrastructure, there is little chance for these women to build new social contacts or even to maintain existing networks. Based on qualitative data collected through participant observation, focus groups, and interviews in H village, this research indicates that public spaces provide rural women a platform for the enhancement of social networks through frequent interaction with other participants. It is interesting to find that strengthened relations and established social networks formed in public spaces positively contribute to village women’s daily lives, especially in the form of mutual aid when rural women need help during illness, need to borrow money for building a house, or need an extra hand to finish the harvest. Thus, through public spaces, rural women experience higher levels of mutual aid provided by the actors in their social networks, who can even replace the function of kinship to some extent by acting as a “functional alternative.” For instance, during the agricultural busy period, friends from public spaces can help left-behind women with the paddy harvest, substituting for the out-migrating men who would have customarily performed this function.

Participatory Action Research as a Form of Mutual Aid and Self-Help in Malawi

Participatory Action Research as a Form of Mutual Aid and Self-Help in Malawi

Progressivism and Philanthropy

Progressivism and Philanthropy Lenore T. Ealy (bio) and Steven D. Ealy (bio) Toward the end of the nineteenth century America faced unfamiliar circumstances that seemed to make its traditional social institutions obsolete and threatened the hope for social stability. Steady immigration swelled the ranks and diversity of the urban poor, and headlong industrialization radically changed the ways in which people worked and lived. The growing complexity of social and economic affairs contributed to a widespread belief that a new social and political order must be created. The response of many social critics and scholars, today known broadly as "Progressives," was to forge an approach to social and institutional change rooted in evolutionary philosophy, enamored with scientific objectivism, and often infused with German ideological statism. Traditional Anglo-American common sense and the rule of common law were increasingly suspect as the new "social sciences" emerged with hopes of rationalizing social control. In the decades that followed, most American institutions were organized or re-organized according to the Progressive prescription. The flow of social responsibility was away from more primary, local, and voluntary institutions to those more centralized, professionalized, and tax-supported. This transformation was financed in part by the fledgling philanthropic foundations of Carnegie, Rockefeller, Sage and others who subscribed to some version of the new corporate liberalism. The hierarchical, corporate organization of business entities created a work force with middle-class means and proletarian status, and many of the society's major responsibilities were newly assumed by remote national organizations or assigned to some level of government. By mid-century, in the wake of the New Deal, America's institutions and practices of mutual aid were widely displaced by specialized professionals. Those in need of assistance became clients or "cases." Today, at the turn of another century, new circumstances are rendering the Progressive prescriptions largely obsolete. American society is outgrowing the institutions the Progressives designed for it. The practical virtue and utility of classical liberal principles have triumphed over the ideologies of socialism and statism. Government administration has been shown to suffer from and to reinforce significant knowledge problems. The electronic revolution has suggested and enabled a more horizontal corporate organization in which more and more working people are self-managed. In short, the centralizing thrust of the 20th century seems to be giving way to a decentralizing tendency in the 21st. The purpose of this paper is to foster better understanding of the origins and rationale of the Progressive "old order" and of its continuing impact on American philanthropy. Drawing upon dozens of readings from Progressive-era journals and popular magazines, we seek to uncover the intellectual foundations of Progressivism and to identify its strengths and vulnerabilities. Part of our exploration is also intended to understand how we might best articulate a new rationale for philanthropic enterprises that are today working to return social responsibility to local communities and to support the emergence of new forms of mutual aid and voluntary action. A more robust understanding of the promise of decentralized voluntary action is needed to facilitate the reclamation of responsibility from the outdated, bureaucratic institutions born in the Progressive era. Philanthropists who are today glimpsing the opening of new paths for human action and who wish to encourage the present transformations must understand the challenges in proceeding. A better understanding of the "old order" as well as the entrenchment of contemporary institutions in Progressive assumptions can help promote more effective action in the present. Only when we understand the old assumptions and their compelling hold on the present can we begin fruitfully to challenge these assumptions with a new vision for the future. I. What's Wrong With Charity? A hallmark of the Progressive movement was its effort to reform politics and government administration, to reclaim them from the corrupt patronage system of the party bosses and to apply new, more professional means to accomplishing the ends of government. In the name of reform the Progressives viewed the legitimate ends of the national government as more expansive and substantive than in previous eras. Ever present in the minds of many reformers was the fear of popular revolution, and "the labor question" was of central importance. In the years...

Geographical variations in the nature of undeclared work

Inspired by a stream of cultural economic geographical thought that has sought to deconstruct the view that monetary transactions are everywhere market‐like and profit‐motivated, this paper seeks to reread the nature of undeclared work. Conventionally, such work has been seen as epitomising unbridled profit‐motivated market‐like monetised exchange, and depictions of the geographical variations in its character have distinguished only between various types of profit‐motivated informal employment in different area types. Drawing upon detailed empirical evidence from eleven deprived and affluent localities in urban and rural England, however, it is here displayed that universally portraying undeclared work as a form of profit‐motivated informal employment over‐simplifies and obscures its spatially variable nature and heterogeneous meanings. Although undeclared work in affluent locality types and urban areas is more likely to be market‐like and conducted for profit‐motivated purposes, undeclared work in deprived locality types and rural areas is revealed to be much more a form of mutual aid conducted for kin, neighbours and friends and embedded in non‐market motives. The outcome is not only a refiguring of the geographical variations in the nature of undeclared work but also clear evidence of the need to investigate other mainstream economic spaces so as to explore further the heterogeneous and spatially variable nature of monetised transactions.

Beyond Deterrence: Rethinking the UK Public Policy Approach Towards Undeclared Work

The aim of this article is to evaluate critically the UK public policy approach towards undeclared work that targets deprived populations and seeks to deter people from engaging in such work by ensuring that the expected cost of being caught and punished is greater than the economic benefit of participating. Reporting evidence from an extensive study of undeclared work in 861 households in contemporary England, this article reveals not only that such work is concentrated in relatively affluent populations rather than in deprived areas, but also that the vast majority of such work in deprived populations is conducted for friends, neighbours and kin for rationales associated with redistribution and building social capital rather than making or saving money. Given this recognition that undeclared work in deprived populations is in major part a product of a culture of paying for favours and a form of mutual aid, the argument of this article is that the current deterrence approach needs to be replaced by an approach that seeks to provide substitute mechanisms to enable such populations to continue to engage in such paid favours but in a more legitimate manner than is currently the case.

Appropriate Technology for Oil Spill Management in Developing Nations

Abstract It has been estimated that some 6 million tonnes of crude oil is routinely transported by tankship around the world's oceans on a daily basis. Despite the introduction of stringent operating and safety regimes there remains the possibility of an incident occurring that could threaten the waters and shorelines of countries that are in the vicinity of these routes. Shipboard and international contingency plans assume a level of preparedness which may be limited in some of the countries that lay along these shipping lanes. Although the probability of significant oil pollution incidents occurring whilst the vessel is on the high seas is m minimal, they have occurred, some with considerable impact on the areas concerned. Whilst the majority of countries have some form of mutual aid and agreements in place and a number have access to equipment stockpiles, there are still a significant number of areas where there is heavy reliance on local resources. This paper addresses ways in which countries with limited resources can best be prepared for an oil spill and some of the challenges, which this entails.

Economic Development and Conflicting Values: A Social Experiment in Tristan da Cunha1

In the small, utopian community of Tristan da Cunha, the core values of equality, anarchy, and individual integrity find expression and reinforcement in an intricate system of selective reciprocity that takes the form of mutual aid, services, and gifts in a network of overlapping and interlocking personal relationships. This pattern of selective reciprocity is closely tied in with activities connected with the traditional subsistence economy.After the war, South African interests established a commercial fishing industry on the island, introducing a cash economy that supplemented the traditional subsistence economy, resulting in “progress” and an increased material affluence for the community. This new value, however, was only obtainable by submitting to a contract relationship that was soon felt to be an infringement on traditional core values. A conflict of values ensued.In this case, because of a particular awareness of traditional core values among the people of Tristan, the ethos of industrialism was rejected within the community, or accepted only in second place to independence, individual integrity, and selective reciprocity.

Can the United States Contribute Further toward International Solvency?

THE United States, through her policy of economic assistance, first in the form of the Marshall Plan and since I952 in the form of Mutual Aid, has helped many friendly countries to recover from the ravages of war without any appreciable reduction in living standards. Had the United States not come to the rescue, a highly developed area like Western Europe would have been forced to adjust herself in one way or another to hard economic circumstances. In the process she would surely have had to suffer a decline in living standards productive of social unrest and possibly of communal strife sufficiently violent to have brought into power in some countries political parties of extreme doctrines and hostile toward the United States. If that danger has been avoided, it is by no means over. Though production in the rest of the world, and in Western Europe in particular, has recovered and advanced beyond its prewar standards, there is still some evidence of a dollar shortage suggestive of a structural disequilibrium which is unlikely to be solved with the mere passage of time. The question naturally arises what further measures might be undertaken by the interested countries to promote the expansion of world trade on a multilateral basis. If we agree that in the immediate future the prospects of a substantial contribution to this end by West European countries are rather poor, our main concern will be to reconsider the efficacy of those policies by which, it is frequently alleged, the United States might further contribute toward its realization. First, however, let us appraise briefly the existing imbalance. From June I95I to June I952 the United States current account had a surplus of $4,I00 million.' From June I952 to June I953 the current account surplus was roughly $68 million. One concludes the United States surplus on current account is tending to disappear completely, a conclusion which has promoted some cautious optimism. But optimism is warranted only if the situation has been brought about without further trade restrictions; in the present situation, that would be largely by an expansion of the value of to the United States in a way which would be unlikely to prove merely temporary. Glancing at the figures we discover that, of the reduction in the surplus from $4,I00 million to the present insignificant figure, the in to the United States accounted for less than $I,400 million. Of this increase in exports to the United States, about $500 million was an in United States government expenditure on purchases by its personnel abroad, and an estimated $250 million was on offshore purchases. Of the reduction in from the United States of close to $2.6 billion, a small part was accounted for by an in the output of coal in Western Europe and by better harvests abroad. The remainder is attributable largely to the effects of a further of import restrictions abroad in late I95 i and in I952. If these import restrictions are considered temporary, then the potential deficit is still very large. It would be larger still if the political situation were other than it is. For then the United States item imports of government services, which provided some $I,900 million in the period I952-53, would be reduced to a fraction of this sum. As a final damper to the optimism, it may be pointed out that should the high level of economic activity in the United States recede, even slightly as in I949, to the United States would fall off rapidly. At any event it must not be assumed that as soon as the surplus in the United States balance This figure results when we include government of services (largely on its military personnel abroad), offshore purchases both for the United States forces stationed abroad and NATO forces, and private remittances, and when we exclude all military-aid (in the form of goods and services).