Solidarity Networks Research Articles

TRAINING FOR CAREGIVER OF OLDER ADULTS IN ECUADOR: REPORT ON PRESENTIAL, DISTANCE, AND HYBRID MODALITIES

Abstract Caregiving for older adults in Ecuador is provided by family members, professional caregivers as well as untrained domestic workers. All three groups lack access to theoretical and technical training. The accelerating care drain towards Europe and North America, the fast-paced aging in the region as well as increasing trends of North American older adults migration to Ecuador, increase the need for large scale, quality and affordable caregiver training. We report the methods and outcomes of three modalities of training for caregivers of older adults combining over 100 individuals trained over the course of four years: a traditional presential training, which was offered prior to the COVID-19 pandemic; an online modality via Zoom during the pandemic; and the early outcomes of a novel hybrid modality, combining presential and asynchronous video-based learning. We found that social interaction, including the sharing of personal experiences, was an essential part of the training experience, which translated into long-term social bonds and early stages of solidarity networks between participants. Online synchronous training allowed a broader geographical coverage but failed to contribute to socialization as well as generated challenges related to the learning experience and efficacy. The novel modality offered the broad geographical coverage, lowered the cost and allowed socialization. It however created technical and quality control challenges. Training of caregivers is a key component to promote aging in place and age-friendliness. Our experience and conclusion aim to contribute to the future of training in the Global South as well as in the Global North.

From a dynamic integrated climate economy (DICE) to a resilience integrated model of climate and economy (RIMCE)

The emergence of cascaded risks we face at the Anthropocene raises new problems and demands for action. Climate change can be seen as the most critical world risk: it reflects the effect of human actions that promote several risks, it potentiates disasters and catastrophes caused by natural phenomena, and it can, ultimately, threaten human survival on the planet. Risks in the Anthropocene are a matter of governance and local actions. A reflexive analysis, in the context of the so-called risk societies, and of resilient local communities to cope with the impact of risks of climate change is carried out. A Resilience Integrated Model of Climate and Economy (RIMCE) is proposed. The model is based on the idea of a social economic view, which involves nation-states that focus on local communities, citizen responsibility, rights, and behavior, materialized through networks of social capital and solidarity. This local cooperation to cope with climate crises, is the motivation for a new tax, the resilience social tax. With this reflection, we hope to contribute to the understanding of the economic ties attached to anthropogenic risks, proposing criteria to change behaviors, and advocating public participation in defining local actions to restore the optimal operating conditions of the Earth System.

‘Volviendo a Vivir’ (coming back to life): Urban trauma, activism and building emancipatory futures

This paper engages recent writing on urban trauma, exploring its connection with the gendered forms of activism that displaced women practise as they seek to rebuild more emancipatory urban futures. Their activisms are situated in the context of multiple, ongoing and intersecting forms of violence from intimates, armed groups and the state, including institutional neglect (in and of the city) that is racialised and gendered. We draw on participatory action research undertaken with women in the Colombian cities of Bogotá and Medellín. Using creative audio-visual methods over several months, women co-researchers produced a documentary in which they chart the ways that they claim spaces of the city inside and outside their homes. We draw particular attention here to the temporal dimension of urban trauma as it intersects with migrant women’s spatial biographies; this has consequences for their activisms which also transcend the sites and scales of public and private spheres, national and global crises and individual and community responses. We argue that it is the gradually accruing and multiplying character of violence and trauma which in turn necessitates the gradual and multiscalar development of these activisms. The women used ecological metaphors of rooting and growth to explain how, through these activisms and directly informed by past traumatic events, they ‘come back to life’. Together, they build solidarity networks and alliances, and imagine and practise alternative feminist urban futures and modes of recovery in their new urban homes.

Translocal interconnections of the Chilean student movement: widening socio-political imaginaries, strengthening organisations

ABSTRACT This article examines the translocal relations of the Chilean Student Movement. While existing research has primarily focused on the movement's national context, this study explores its broader global interactions. Drawing on life stories and secondary sources, the article examines three pivotal scenes of translocal relations that shaped the movement's socio-political imaginary and organisational strategies. The Chilean Student Movement's translocal relationships, integrating narratives from the Latin American tradition and global organisations like the United Nations and OECD, deepened the movement's understanding of educational inequality and enhanced its mobilisation power. Furthermore, the connections with the Colombian student movement, highlighting the production of solidarity networks and collaborative knowledge efforts, raised awareness about neoliberal educational agendas and developed effective strategies against repressive measures. In the long term, the translocal connections between political collectives and former activists emerging from the Chilean student movement and the Spanish Indignados broadened the movement's political strategy beyond university campuses to institutional politics. To conclude, the article discusses the significance of translocal relations, stressing the importance of evaluating long-term consequences and addressing methodological challenges in such projects.

Women’s Rights in India’s IT Sector: Does Equality Work Across Continents?

The paper investigates the experiences of women IT professionals in India from two groups: the first group comprises women experiencing differences in work–life balance (WLB), inequalities and challenges of equal rights when they are working on different IT projects with a Swedish or US client. The second group of women comprising activists who have initiated to set up solidarity network groups on social media to ensure better WLB and equal rights. An interpretive research approach with 150 semi-structured interviews with IT professionals and an inductive analysis was adopted for this study. Findings highlight how equality, diversity and inclusion policies from the West are transformed in the Indian context, and how this has implications for women’s WLB and retention in transnational organizations in India. The importance of women’s activism in IT is highlighted as it contributes to creating solidarity networks providing unique bonding space and comfort for women IT professionals.

Stories of Antiracist Gay/Lesbian Gender Alliance: Articulating Intersectional Solidarity in the 1980s

This article shows how in the early 1980s, Black and White Men Together (BWMT), an interracial group of antiracist gay men, constructed relations of connection with antiracist feminist lesbians of color. My analysis details how BWMT engaged in storytelling through newsletters, reporting their creation of relations of connection with Black, “Third World,” antiracist lesbians and constructing these relations as a multidimensional gender alliance involving important processes of creating networks of reciprocal solidarity, forging political alignment, and creating intentional spaces of camaraderie to sustain intersectional solidarity. This research substantively expands our understanding of U.S. LGBTQ+ intersectional movement(s) activism with the concept of multidimensional gender alliance and analytically expands our understandings of intersectional solidarity.

CENTRAL AMERICAN MIGRATION TO THE UNITED STATES IN THE YOUNG ADULT NOVEL WE ARE NOT FROM HERE, BY JENNY TORRES SANCHEZ

This article analyses We Are Not from Here (2020), a young adult novel by Jenny Torres Sanchez. The book follows the journey of three adolescents from Guatemala to the United States on top of La Bestia, the train that goes across Mexico. This article analyses the different narrative techniques thatTorres Sanchez utilises to cover the themes and topics that structure the novel. The novel focuses onthe network of altruistic solidarity that has bloomed all over Mexico to assist migrants while illustratingthe brutality of an exhausting journey towards the north, a fact connected to the theoretical frameworkused to approach the text. Accordingly, diaspora theory (Bromley, Ashcroft et al., Brah, Fuentes Kraffczyk) will play a fundamental role in the following analysis exploring the way in which trauma, vulnerability and affect (Pollock, Tal, Butler, Ganteau, Thrailkill) complement each other in the text; and how the Latin American Gothic (Casanova-Vizcaíno and Ordiz) juxtaposes magical realism (Di Iorio Sandín and Perez, Murwood) in certain episodes.

South Africa-sur-Nemunas1 : Transnational Hinterlands in Dan Jacobson’s Heshel’s Kingdom

The paper investigates the representation of Central Europe and its hinterlands in selected works by 20th-century South African writers. It pays special attention to Dan Jacobson’s Heshel’s Kingdom about Jacobson’s travel to Lithuania in search of the writer’s “middle-European” patrimony. Drawing on previously unpublished archival records, the study argues that Jacobson’s book merges Central European hinterlands (their histories, identities, landscapes) with South African ones in a radical act of re-mapping both areas. The paper also insists on recognising a distinctive mode of conflating Central Europe and South Africa. This hinternational poetics annuls the existing imperial cartography and builds transnational connections between different hinterlands and their pasts. Additionally, the article demonstrates how the need to “unlearn” imperial history allows for a geographic/spatial overlap between the “heart of the country” and the “core of Europe,” as well as creation of a network of transnational solidarity and implication across nations and ethnicities.

The porous boundaries of public and private messages: Solidarity networks of Latin American food delivery workers in NYC

In this article, I argue that indigenous Latin American food delivery workers organize to defy information and knowledge asymmetries by utilizing technology built to mediate online social interactions. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, this paper investigates transnational modes of community-building and network formation and examines how these networks are instrumental for delivery workers in New York City to exercise agency, forge their narrative, and resist platform control by resisting, pushing, and extending a variety of digital and communication technologies. I analyze how public and private means of communication facilitate and constrain social forms of organization by mapping how delivery workers communicate and engage collectively both in the physical and the digital worlds. My research reveals two platforms that workers use to share information: one that operates inwards (WhatsApp) and another that operates outwards (Facebook). These channels represent opposite sides of the spectrum between public and private and synergize to form a transnational distributed knowledge network to shape and interpret the collective identity of Latin American delivery workers. Overall, this article sheds light on how the flow of information through different spaces and times enables delivery workers to construct a place for subversion and negotiation with roles assigned to them by broader socio-political forces.

Shared Reflections Offered by Listening to Johnny Mbizo Dyani's Born Under the Heat

Originally written as a lecture-presentation for the 2021 South African Society for Research in Music (SASRIM) conference, this text shares our ongoing collaborative study of Born Under the Heat, an album by Johnny Mbizo Dyani. Our research tracks the record(ings) to mark potential pathways for thinking about networks of sociality and solidarity that underpin the production of such politicised cultural work, as well as how we listen to and/or may read it. We trace how the album, recorded in 1983, was born out of festival-gatherings in Lagos, Gaborone and Amsterdam as well as Dyani's memories/remembering of home (from Duncan Village to Dorkay House, perhaps) when exiled in Scandinavia. By reiterating literal and symbolic modes of travel which Born Under the Heat took, as an object and as a concept/project, we aim to explore multiple routes and forms archival, repatriation and restitution projects continue to find in the postapartheid present.

Solidarity through mail-based participatory visual research: exploring queer and feminist futures through an art, activism and archiving project with 2SLGBTQ+ youth amidst COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic posed a logistical problem to our normal ways of engaging in participatory visual research. Our in-person art, activism and archiving with 2SLGBTQ+ Atlantic Canadian youth pivoted to use distanced engagement strategies that met the demands of the pandemic. We sought to create networks of solidarity while we were apart. Monthly, over the course of a year, we mailed out themed packages of art supplies and directions to fifty-five 2SLGBTQ+ youth situated in the Canadian provinces of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland and Labrador. Participants then created the artworks, photographed them and contextualised them through text. While the resulting co-curated digital archive includes multiple mediums, here we focus on the participants’ zines and dioramas for what they taught us about 2SLGBTQ+ youth’s identities, activism, beliefs, friends, home, family, fears, strengths and futures. The digital archive of our artwork deconstructs, explores and affirms identities and functions to build solidarity during a time of increased isolation. We argue that collaboratively building the digital archive was a feminist act of reclamation and a declaration of youth queer activism.

Building Autonomous Power: Solidarity Networks in Precarious Times

Building Autonomous Power: Solidarity Networks in Precarious Times

An Autoethnography of and in Solidarity: Post- and Decolonial Critique and Autoethnographic Positioning Analysis

This article explores autoethnography as a critical research methodology in dialogue with post- and decolonial critique. It draws on an (auto)ethnographic research on and within the transnational solidarity network of the Mapuche people in which encounters of solidarity across difference are understood as postcolonial “contact zones.” This contribution hereby suggests three important opportunities for autoethnographic positioning analysis by looking at (a) different layers of the author’s field access, (b) the author’s strategic membership within the international solidarity activism, and (c) experiences of being rejected. This article argues that the careful and systematic analysis of such ethnographic episodes is able to (a) generate important epistemological insights within a particular research field, in this case transnational solidarity and networked social movement activity, and (b) highlight and reflect upon the researcher’s “complicity” within fieldwork. The first part of this contribution briefly introduces post- and decolonial debates on solidarity across difference and moves on to suggesting autoethnographic positioning analysis as a methodological approach for studying/supporting the transnational solidarity activism, drawing upon the author’s research with the Mapuche.

“The heat of a multitudinous assembly”: Striking short fiction and the rise of feminist potencia

AbstractThis article considers how a recent wave of Latin American short fiction captures with immediate topicality new forms of transversal political subjectivity engendered by the international feminist reinvention of the strike in the 21st century. Drawing on Verónica Gago's theorization of the political cartography of feminist potencia (power), alongside the work of Silvia Federici, Rita Segato and Sayak Valencia, it considers how the short story form facilitates a strategic recognition of interconnected violences perpetrated against women and feminized bodies, “mapping forms of violence based on their organic connection, without losing sight of the singularity of the production of the nexus between them” (Gago, 2020, p. 58). In particular, the article examines two exemplary short story collections, Cars on Fire (2020) by Mónica Ramón Ríos and Things We Lost in the Fire (2017) by Mariana Enríquez, considering how these writers repurpose the potential for socio‐criticism embedded in the fantastical short story by offering a multi‐focal critique of how patriarchy and gender violence interact with the structural inequalities unleashed by neoliberal capitalism. The article also considers how these riotous collections mediate the transversal fabric of communitarian struggle in feminist imaginaries, drawing narrative energy from the localised proliferation of neighbourhood assemblies and solidarity networks, while speaking to transnational feminist movements more broadly.

‘We Thought We were the Only Lesbians in the World’: 1971 Vancouver and the Rise of Lesbian and Transnational Feminist Identities Between Canada and the USA

AbstractLesbian feminists in Vancouver cite the 1971 Vancouver Indochinese Women's Conference (VIWC) as a critical moment in the formation of solidarity networks and community building. In the months leading up to, and during the 1971 VIWC, lesbians forged long‐lasting connections with one another across regional and international borders. As a result of these efforts, these early lesbian feminists developed meaningful lesbian support networks that would continue for over fifty years. The VIWC was a watershed event for lesbians across the North American West.

The Task of Envisioning Security for the Anthropocene

Our Anthropocene age is defined by a wide array of anthropogenic pressures on planet Earth, which have produced multiple human and environmental insecurities. From climate change to population displacements, from ecosystem degradation to global pandemics, we are faced with unprecedented human and environmental emergencies. Safeguarding the future hinges on generating a wider understanding of ‘security’ that sees the need for holistic strategy, global solidarity and multilateral cooperation. We need a security imaginary transformed by critical and responsible thinking on economic production and planetary precarity, and we require such a vision to manifest in new governmentalities that set us on the right path towards a shared future. This paper reflects on the challenge of establishing holistic understandings of security which can be drawn upon more effectively to respond to the intersecting crises unfolding on the planet. In seeking to reframe global security strategy, the paper underscores an interlinked sense of human-environmental security which extends the UN’s human security concept to address the overlapping precarities of our human and non-human worlds. It considers in particular the role of legal and regulatory mechanisms in curbing the ecological excesses of late modern capitalism; and in seeking to transcend narrow statist formulations of security, the paper illuminates our global interconnections, which require us to renew and support networks of international solidarity and multilateral cooperation.

The intimate life of criminalization. Affective governance in contentious migrant solidarity

ABSTRACT This essay analyzes the affective and intimate dimensions of the criminalization of solidarity towards migrants. The core argument is that the criminalization of solidarity is a form of governance that acts through affectivity. It is mainly a way of containing migration by trying to govern the emotions of citizens, fostering feelings of hostility and fear while discouraging feelings of solidarity and empathy. The data that will be discussed comes from broader ethnographic research, investigating the affective transformations in solidarity networks supporting migrants. Data collection took place between 2020 and 2021 in Turin and Florence, Italy. It will be shown how, in the everyday life of supporters, the most pervasive forms of criminalization do not come from political discourse, but rather from the people to whom they are most attached (friends, partners, siblings, parents, etc.). This is the intimacy of criminalization. The situated, vernacular, and more socio-psychologically painful form of criminalization.

Expedient, Affective, and Sustained Solidarities? Mediated Contestations of Islamophobia in the Case of Brexit, the Christchurch Terror Attack, and the COVID-19 Pandemic

This article advances research on mediated solidarity, by analyzing the contestation of Islamophobia on the social media platform Twitter, in the context of Brexit, the Christchurch terror attack, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on a unique longitudinal dataset, gathered over a 5-year period, we elucidate how evolving relations between platforms and trigger events can enable solidarity networks to shift dominant narratives. Taking each event in turn, we demonstrate how on initial analysis these events appear to generate solidarities that fall within a spectrum of solidarity. Brexit produced “expedient solidarities” where Islamophobia was leveraged in support of wider political identities and commitments. The Christchurch terrorist attack engendered “affective solidarities,” wherein expressions of empathy gained visibility but gave way to a long tail of hate. Finally, in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic, we analyze how sustained solidarity networks arose through antagonistic exchanges with nationalist movements that propagated Islamophobic misinformation. Yet our longitudinal and comparative methodology allowed for a more complicated picture to emerge, which troubled existing typologies of digital solidarity. The broader implications of our findings for social media research are therefore twofold. First, we underline the empirical value of mixed methods approaches, as these complex forms of solidarity only became legible through combining computational, qualitative, and quantitative methods. Second, we argue for the theoretical importance of conceiving how the entanglement of platform affordances and events gives rise to multi-dimensional solidarities that offer the potential to sustain counternarrative content over time.

Czechoslovakia and its Position within the Solidarity Network of Chilean Communism: A Reflection on the Coup and Resistance against Pinochet from a Country with Worn‐out Revolutionary Ideals

The article will analyse the development of the Chilean cause in the politics of Eastern Europe countries since 1973, focusing on the Czechoslovak case. On the one hand, it will prove that during the communist government Czechoslovakia played an important role in the international campaign for the resistance against the dictatorship at a worldwide level. On the other hand, it posits that the propaganda aimed at Czechoslovakia, which sought to kindle society's belief in the revolutionary ideals strongly affected after the Soviet invasion in 1968, turned out to be much less effective.

Exploring resilience in public services within marginalised communities during COVID-19: The case of coal mining regions in Colombia

This paper examines the impact of COVID-19 on marginalised communities and its effects on the provision of public services. Focusing on two coal mining regions in Colombia during the pandemic crisis, and examining Indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities, we analyze the provision of public services at a local level, identifying both shortcomings and resilience. Findings show that the lack of resilient public services amplified the effects of COVID-19 and its containment measures, exacerbating existing structural inequalities within local marginalised communities. It also reinforced the control exercised by coal mining companies within local economies. However, the substantial lack of public service provision also provided space for the development and strengthening of several resilience strategies among local communities, such as solidarity networks and schemes and the revitalization of local environmental knowledge. The study identifies multiple shortcomings in how the national and local administrations handled the COVID-19 outbreak and highlights the potential of enhancing resilience in public services to support marginalised communities in times of crisis.