Mutual-Aid Practice Research Articles

These Bars Can't Hold Us Back: Plowing Incarcerated Geographies with Restorative Food Justice

AbstractMass incarceration entrenches racial and class inequality and segregation. Before, during, and after low‐income people of color enter prison, they experience a range of barriers and biases that make it difficult to break out of the prison pipeline. This article investigates food justice and restorative justice activists in Oakland, California who are intervening at the point of reentry. I argue for the significance of teasing out the connections between food and carceral politics as a way to expand the practice and understanding of food justice. Specifically, I show how the incarcerated geographies of former prisoners, that is, perspectives and experiences that result due to the prison pipeline, motivate the formation of a restorative food justice. The associated healing and mutual aid practices increase social equity by creating spaces to overcome the historical trauma of mass incarceration, produce living wage jobs, rearticulate relationships to food and land, and achieve policy reforms.

Remittances, rituals and reconsidering women's norms in mahallas: emigrant labour and its social effects in Ferghana Valley

This paper describes recent economic and social changes in Central Asian neighbourhood communities known as mahallas, using data from a town in Ferghana Valley. First, it examines how the increasing costs of life-cycle rituals are damaging the harmony of mahallas. Since 2007, more and more hosts have begun to outsource the provision of food and services for these rituals, using money acquired mostly through emigrant labour. This in turn lessens mahallas’ mutual aid practices, and reveals emerging economic disparities between neighbours. Secondly, the paper argues that emigration has had transformative effects on the lifestyles of Muslim women in mahallas. With the globalization of their economy, conventional local norms are becoming harder to obey, and some young and middle-aged women are choosing to live outside these norms. Dependence on emigrant labour and the associated remittances has significantly affected the lifestyles and morals of mahalla inhabitants.

El «momento mutualista» en la formulación de un sistema de protección social en Argentina: socorro mutuo y prevención subsidiada a comienzos del siglo XX

In this article I study the foreigners’ mutual aid practices and their role in the diffusion of solidarist thinking that would provide a set of conceptual tools and techniques that would be essential in the demands for protection coming from workers and in formulating the first projects for putting in place a national insurance system. This research allow me to point out the transnational dimension of the construction of the field of social protection. The first part of the article is an empirical demonstration of this reality using qualitative and quantitative sources from public and private archives. In the second one I pay attention to the concrete mechanisms in the circulation of knowledge. In particular, the article analyses the different mutualist congresses organized in Buenos Aires during the first two decades of the twentieth century and the impact of the visit of Leopold Mabilleau, a French intellectual, expert in mutual insurance systems and «apostle» of solidarism.

Beyond coping? Alternatives to consumption within a social network of Russian workers

Research on the post-socialist lived experience of the working poor often focuses on reciprocity and economic survival. It is equally important to examine how social networks facilitate self-provisioning and mutual-aid practices for non-subsistence consumption (decorative, non-utility items) in the face of material want. The ethnography presented here of manufacturing workers in a Russian province shows how self-resourced homemaking and decorative practices, after MacIntyre (1981) , constitute an ‘internal good’ – a social activity valued for itself as much as the domestic production it results in. This good is important for workers’ mutual recognition as providers and their status as sufficiently resourceful subjects suitable for inclusion within a social network – itself an important resource for the working poor. The network provides opportunities for alternatives to consumption outside the market economy. Worker identities at work cannot be detached from those at leisure and at home, and even the meaning of the workplace is problematized by its special place within the network.

Exploratory study of the impacts of Mutual Health Organizations on social dynamics in Benin

The primary aim of Mutual Health Organizations (MHOs) is the financial protection of their members. However, given their community-based, participative and voluntary nature, it is conceivable that MHOs, as social organizations, would affect social dynamics. In an exploratory study in Benin, we studied social dynamics related to mutual aid, relationships of trust, and empowerment. Four MHOs, as contrasted cases, were selected from among the 11 in the region. Focus groups (n = 20) and individual interviews (n = 29) were conducted with members, non-members, and elected leaders of the four MHOs, and with professionals from the health facilities concerned. We carried out a qualitative thematic analysis of the content. Mutual aid practices, which pre-date MHOs, can be mobilized to promote MHO membership. Mutual aid practices are based on relationships of trust. The primary reason for joining an MHO is to improve financial accessibility to health services. Non-members see that members have a strong sense of empowerment in this regard, based on a high level of trust in MHOs and their elected leaders, even if their trust in health professionals is not as strong. Non-members share these feelings of confidence in MHOs and their leadership, although they trust health professionals somewhat less than do the members. The MHOs' low penetration rate therefore cannot be explained by lack of trust, as this study shows that, even with some distrust of the professionals, the overall level of trust in MHOs is high and MHOs and their leaders function as intermediaries with health professionals. Other explanatory factors are the lack of information available to villagers and, most especially, the problems they face in being able to pay the MHO premiums.

Mutual Aid: A Contribution to Best-Practice Social Work

This keynote speech, delivered in French and translated to English with minor adjustments for publication, presents some of the author's ideas about mutual-aid practice as best-practice social work. The author discusses the etiology and centrality of mutual aid in social work with groups, presents five characteristics of mutual-aid practice that reflect best-practice social work and identifies four key characteristics—joy in sharing, faith, courage, and curiosity—of mutual-aid practitioners. Similarities between mutual-aid practice and evidence-based group work, practice evaluation and participatory-action research are discussed as well. The author presents group work as inherently evidence based and challenges the idea that subjective measures alone may not be valid in reaching this determination.

The Impact of Time and Place on Mutual-Aid Practice with Short-Term Groups

ABSTRACT This paper aims to help practitioners promote mutual aid to short-term groups. It describes and discusses the impact of time and place on the process of such groups. The challenges of the short-term group are identified and implications for practice are drawn.