Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

We All We Got: Urban Black Ecologies of Care and Mutual Aid

We All We Got: Urban Black Ecologies of Care and Mutual Aid Urban ecologies are fraught with inequities, often resulting in humanitarian or charity solutions that emphasize lack rather than communities’ self-determination. While these inequities have been widely documented, the COVID-19 pandemic further reveals how these crises are not the sum result of individual failures. Rather, they are systemically produced through policies that harm people. How do Black urban residents contend with the sociohistorical antagonisms between feelings of scarcity (e.g., food and housing insecurity, underemployment, and financial strain) and aspirations for abundance? Using ethnographic encounters in Chicago and Austin we consider how practices of mutual aid are meaningful both spatially and affectively. 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. Thinking these spatial and affective dimensions collectively, we work toward a framework of Black ecologies of care and mutual aid. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Environment and Society Berghahn Books

We All We Got: Urban Black Ecologies of Care and Mutual Aid

Download PDF
16 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/berghahn-books/we-all-we-got-urban-black-ecologies-of-care-and-mutual-aid-JEdk0J4AyT
Publisher
Berghahn Books
Copyright
© 2022 Berghahn Books
ISSN
2150-6779
eISSN
2150-6787
DOI
10.3167/ares.2022.130103
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Urban ecologies are fraught with inequities, often resulting in humanitarian or charity solutions that emphasize lack rather than communities’ self-determination. While these inequities have been widely documented, the COVID-19 pandemic further reveals how these crises are not the sum result of individual failures. Rather, they are systemically produced through policies that harm people. How do Black urban residents contend with the sociohistorical antagonisms between feelings of scarcity (e.g., food and housing insecurity, underemployment, and financial strain) and aspirations for abundance? Using ethnographic encounters in Chicago and Austin we consider how practices of mutual aid are meaningful both spatially and affectively. 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. Thinking these spatial and affective dimensions collectively, we work toward a framework of Black ecologies of care and mutual aid.

Journal

Environment and Society – Berghahn Books

Published: Sep 1, 2022

Keywords: activism; Austin; Chicago; food access; mutuality; organizing

References

  • Affective Economies
    Ahmed, Sara
  • he Interminable Catastrophe
    Alagraa, Bedour
  • A Call to Care
    Arnold, Lynnette, and Felicity Aulino
  • Marxism, Prefigurative Communism, and the Problem of Workers’ Control
    Boggs, Carl
  • Practicing Food Justice at Dig Deep Farms &. Produce, East Bay Area, California: Self-Determination as a Guiding Value and Intersections with Foodie Logics
    Bradley, Katherine, and Ryan E. Galt
  • Anthropology of Aging and Care
    Buch, Elana D.
  • Interview with Saidiya Hartman
    Bulley, Victoria Adukwei
  • The Medicine Wheel
    Dapice, Ann N.
  • The Rise of the War Metaphor in Public Policy
    Davenport, David and Gordon Lloyd
  • Entangled Roots and Otherwise Possibilities: An Anthropology of Disasters COVID-19 Research Agenda
    Faas, A. J., Robereto Barrios, Virginia García-Acosta, Adriana Garriga-Lopez, Seven Mattes, and Jennifer Trivedi
  • Fatal Couplings of Power and Difference: Notes on Racism and Geography
    Gilmore, Ruth Wilson
  • Black Ecology
    Hare, Nathan
  • To Refuse That Which Has Been Refused to You
    Hartman, Saidiya, and Fred Moten
  • The Black City Crisis
    Hatcher, Richard G.
  • On Abolition Ecologies and Making ‘Freedom as a Place.’
    Heynen, Nik, and Megan Ybarra
  • Radical Care: Survival Strategies for Uncertain Times
    Hobart, Hi'ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani, and Tamara Kneese
  • A Totally Different Form of Living: On the Legacies of Displacement and Marronage as Black Ecologies
    Hosbey, Justin, and J. T. Roane
  • Black Repression in the Cities
    Ladner, Joyce, and Walter Stafford
  • Balancing the Medicine Wheel Through Physical Activity
    Lavallée, Lynn
  • Doing is Believing: Prefiguration as Strategic Practice in the Alter-globalization Movement
    Maeckelbergh, Marianne
  • Plantation Futures
    McKittrick, Katherine
  • Mathematics Black Life
    McKittrick, Katherine
  • Chicago Model Cities and Neocolonization
    Metcalf, Ralph H. Jr.
  • ‘What Feels More Than Feeling?’: Theorizing the Unthinkability of Black Affect
    Palmer, Tyrone S.
  • A Not-So-Brief Personal History of the Healing. Justice Movement, 2010–2016
    Piepzna-Samarasinha, Leah Lakshmi
  • Flint, Environmental Racism, and Racial Capitalism
    Pulido, Laura
  • No Justice, No Resilience: Prison Abolition as Disaster Mitigation in an Era of Climate Change
    Purdum, Carlee, Felicia Henry, Sloan Rucker, Darien Alexander Williams, Richard Thomas, Benika Dixon, and Fayola Jacobs
  • Thinking with Flint: Racial Liberalism and the Roots of an American Water Tragedy
    Ranganathan, Malini
  • From Urban Resilience to Abolitionist Climate Justice in Washington, DC
    Ranganathan, Malini, and Eve Bratman
  • Tarry with Me: Reclaiming Sweetness in an Anti-Black World
    Reese, Ashanté M.
  • Economies of Affect
    Richard, Analiese, and Daromir Rudnyckyj
  • Plotting the Black Commons
    Roane, J. T.
  • Mapping Black Ecologies
    Roane, J. T. and Justin Hosbey
  • Belonging Through Land/scape
    Schein, Richard H.
  • What is Environmental Racism For? Place-based Harm and Relational Development
    Seamster, Louise, and Danielle Purifoy
  • Caring Geographies: The COVID-19 Interregnum and a Return to Mutual Aid
    Springer, Simon
  • Central Park as a Model for Social Control: Urban Parks, Social Class and Leisure Behavior in Nineteenth-Century America
    Taylor, Dorceta E.
  • What Mutual Aid Can Do During a Pandemic?
    Tolentino, Jia
  • The Links Between Policing and Environmental Justice
    Williams, Teona
  • Maroon Geographies
    Winston, Celeste
  • As Above, So Below: Anti-Black Violence as Environmental Racism
    Wright, Willie Jamaal
  • Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument
    Wynter, Sylvia