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We present the Shareish web platform to foster diverse solidarity practices inspired by concepts of the gift economy. Its design is grounded in prior work (in CSCW and solidarity HCI), and in new qualitative research involving participants engaged in solidarity practices. Shareish aims at leveraging community assets through donations, free loans, requests of goods and services, free event announcements, and by enhancing the visibility of freely available resources. On a Shareish instance, users have the ability to view localized items on a map or in lists, utilize search filters, contribute new content with detailed textual and visual descriptions, engage in discussions with other users, and receive notifications when new content is added in their neighborhood. The platform can be replicated and improved by communities seeking autonomy as its source code is distributed freely under a permissive open source license (https://github.com/shareish). A research demonstration server is available (https://shareish.org). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Redes is the property of Redes-Revista Hispana para el Analisis de Redes Sociales and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Revista de Treball Social is the property of Col·legi Oficial de TreballSocial de Catalunya and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of MUSICultures is the property of Canadian Society for Traditional Music and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In the social movement literature, the relationship between the political work of collective survival and the politics of the streets remains undertheorized despite robust research on the significance of direct social actions (DSAs). This article revives the work of the Berkeley Free Church during the People’s Park struggles in 1969. Through waves of intense street conflict, the Berkeley Free Church ran grassroots health programs and helped launch a free healthcare clinic. The Free Church’s health programs served both those with daily needs and those needing urgent care in the streets when police responded to demonstrations with violence. This historical case adds complexity to the social movement literature because the Berkeley Free Church’s work reveals a dynamic, interconnected relationship: health mutualism became central to street protest, and street protest in turn made the goals of building projects of health mutualism more feasible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For instance, the authors asserted that Solaris founder F. Vidal is the author, under the pen-name Le Passeur (which means "The Smuggler" or "The Boatman"), of the long-running blog Urantia Gaïa. The Telegram message shipped with a link to a video, shared - like most other Solaris content - on the independent viewing platform Odysee. First Contacts To my surprise, I found that in the space of a few months since its creation, Solaris groups had spread all across France (and to other countries, largely francophone) - including to my neck of the woods. Vidal said that a "Great Call" (Grand Appel) was hereby being broadcast across various networks, including Solaris, which were uniting to create a new movement: Freedom March (La Marche pour la Liberté). [Extracted from the article]

Illnesses can highlight inequalities in young adult fantasy literature as characters undergo exclusion and self-empowerment tied to diseases, disabled bodies, and death. In recent fictions by Marissa Meyer, Marie Lu, and Margaret Owen, heroines navigate epidemics and pandemics inciting either mistrust or mutual aid. In Cinder (2012), the protagonist experiences bodily vulnerabilities via her cyborg prosthetics and a worldwide plague. The Young Elites (2014) shows survivors of a fever facing ostracism, while The Merciful Crow (2019) depicts immunity as a boon and a burden. These books on the interpersonal impact of sickness can resonate intimately with readers today due to COVID-19. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A large swath of research in mathematics education claims to serve an equity agenda. However, too often this research is conducted atheoretically, failing to disrupt the worldviews that produce injustice and oppression, for both the researcher and the reader. Responding to this commonplace divergence of intent and impact, we propose a methodological approach that anchors research and praxis in a sociopolitical foundation of anarchism. We seek cohesion of theory and practice by consciously demanding that values common to the equity agenda--cooperation, mutual aid, and freedom from hierarchy--provide explicit grounding for method and methodology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to scholarship on the political ecology of drinking water, water commodification, and its social and environmental effects by looking at Chile's Rural Drinking Water (Agua Potable Rural or APR) program. The APR program was created in 1964 to deliver drinking water to rural populations. I explore the actions a group of people undertake to secure drinking water in rural Northern Chile, an area experiencing a decade-long drought. I map how their efforts in securing drinking water coordinate with those of others at different institutional levels. This research relies on Dorothy Smith's Institutional Ethnography (IE), a bottom-up feminist sociology explaining how the social world is organised through the active work of people whose doings are coordinated through texts, language, and discourse. Using methodological devices such as the construction of 'facts' and 'ideological codes' this research shows how the categories of 'water rights', and 'vulnerability' are essential in ruling differential access to drinking water. The research unpacks the social organisation of 'community water management' which although discursively based on mutual aid and solidarity, is part of the larger neoliberal institution governing access to water in the country. This research expands knowledge about the institutional mechanisms preventing rural people from accessing a basic human right, going beyond the naming of phenomena as 'commodification' or 'neoliberalisation' to explaining how these are organised and implemented, through texts and people's work, with detrimental effects for communities and their environments. • Institutional Ethnography shows how differential water access occurs. • 'Water rights' based on ideology benefit transnational companies and Chile's elite. • Drinking water denied to '(non)vulnerable' people when living in rural Chile. • Chile's Constitution and Water Code prevent access to drinking water. • International institutions should listen to people before endorsing policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alcohol addiction is a disease that engulfs not only addicts but also their significant others around them. The psychosocial and economic disruptions it can cause in the dependent family members' lives lay the study's background. The immediate and most significant persons facing the consequences are the spouses of addicts. They are labeled as an alcohol addict's spouse and attributed to be responsible for the addict's irresponsibility over his life and time. Al-Anon Family Groups are a Self-help model of group education for spouses and those who are affected by the alcoholism of an addict. This paper shares the results of an ethnographic study among two selected Al-Anon group meetings in Tamil Nadu, India. Al-Anon group meetings were chosen in concordance with strict adherence to anonymity. It was observed that the women participating in Al-Anon groups could develop confidence in dealing with their alcoholic husbands and select strategies to face their life situations resiliently. The study is relevant as significantly few structured programs are designed to care for the most critical caregivers of the addicts. The study calls for the attention of health givers, psychologists, social workers, and psychiatrists to the plight of alcoholics' wives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What do art and community spaces look like when no one can use them to gather? Academic research into neighbourhoods and urban art scenes have focused on the power of such spaces to bring people together. Using the framework of Oldenburg’s notion of ‘third places’, sociologists have recognized the importance of places like art galleries, bars, restaurants, coffee shops, and anywhere else people gather in providing a physical site of orientation outside work and the home for people to be together and communities to amalgamate. While there have always been critiques of such places and their role in urban space, e.g. their part in gentrification and potential displacement, positive accounts of their role in neighbourhood life have typically focused on their ability to draw people together, so a situation like the current pandemic – when such gatherings are forestalled – raises an obvious question about their current utility. Using two case studies on the South Side of Chicago, this paper leverages interview data with merchants involved with socially engaged commercial spaces to examine some of the ways that community spaces in Chicago shifted in light of the pandemic. The article concludes with policy and theoretical considerations based on these case studies, extrapolating lessons beyond the South Side of Chicago. Specifically, it suggests that in addition to offering limited versions of their traditional facilitation of physical co-presence, art and community third places can also leverage their importance in social networks to help distribute information and resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Copyright of Open Education: The Journal for Open & Distance Education & Educational Technology is the property of Hellenic Network of Open & Distance Education and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Recherches Feministes is the property of Groupe de Recherche et d'Echange Multidisciplinaires Feministes and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

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Mutual Aid Houses enjoy a long presence on the Romanian market of nonbanking services. Unlike mutual organizations from other European countries, in Romania mutual organizations have a much narrower field of activity. They may loan and provide an array of social services to members. Our study aims to highlight the benefits of Mutual Aid Houses as a support of person's preference to this form of association and financial loan. After a briefly presentation of the situation of Mutual Aid Houses in Romania, based on statistical data, we show the results of a qualitative study based on in-depth interview, conducted in a Mutual Aid House for employees. The purpose of this case study is to highlight the perception that members of the Mutual Aid House have on services provided, the extent to which these services are used by members, as well as the appreciation they show to a number of attributes that define the offer of the Mutual Aid House. In addition, our analysis brings information by outlining the main aspects that define the presence of Mutual Aid Houses on the market of non-banking services, through a detailed presentation of the situation of a Mutual Aid House of employees and especially by highlighting opinions of its members regarding the offer advantages, elements contributing ultimately to a better understanding of Mutual Aid Houses position among non-banking financial institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Studii de Ştiintă şi Cultură is the property of Studii de Stiinta si Cultura and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The COVID-19 pandemic and resulting lockdown have compounded existing inequalities in India. As a second wave of infections hit, there were shortages of medicines, vaccines, oxygen cylinders and hospital beds, and healthcare professionals were overworked and under-resourced. However, in the midst of these stories of systemic inadequacy, there are rich and powerful stories of collective care and resistance. People stepped in to create alternative forms of community care and mutual aid. This paper describes three stories of community response in the context of systemic collapse. There have been countless other such stories of action and resistance throughout the course of the crisis period as well as in the co llective history of the country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Española de Sociología is the property of Federacion Espanola de Sociologia and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This essay argues that abolitionist struggle is necessary to preserve academic freedom and combat the increasing austerity measures and carceral logics of the neoliberal university. Drawing on our example organizing at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, we examine how campus labor organizations like the Graduate Employees’ Organization, UIUC’s graduate worker union, can enact abolitionist practices of mutual aid and demands for police divestment. The union’s commitment to social justice and coalitional organizing has enabled the emergence of Defund UIPD, a campus movement that stands against structures of violence like policing and for life-affirming institutions. Amid widespread academic precarity, this nationally growing movement exemplifies the radical potential of organized labor to evolve from social justice unionism to abolitionist unionism. Abolitionist unionism not only promotes a more liberatory and expansive vision of academic freedom but necessarily struggles for and against the university alongside movements for radical social change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents forum of community pod experts and organizers on November 25, 2020 for a York University second-year social work undergraduate course titled "Identity, Diversity, and Anti-Discriminatory Practice," with topics covered such as the work of mutual aid group Mutual Aid Parkdale (M.A.P.), partnership between M.A.P. and Toronto Bike Brigade to address the urgent need for food security, and the shutdown of some businesses due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

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. In this commentary, I challenge the idea that philanthropy can be the solution to all of our problems, and highlight some of the problematic issues that emerge when philanthropy is put at the forefront of the discussion. Also, I point out to other elements that have been left out, including the wave of collective solidarity that has been channelled through mutual aid groups and organisations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This profile details the ethos and emergent growth of Writers Warehouse, a collective project founded in 2016 with a focus on creation, craft, collaboration, and community. Based in Colorado, Writers Warehouse now aims to position itself as a mutual care collective through curating inclusive, non-hierarchical spaces, developing open access resources, and establishing a microgrant program for local writers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista de Indias is the property of Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Recent work by comparative philosophers, global ethicists, and cross-cultural value theorists indicates that, unlike most Western thinkers, those in many other parts of the globe, such as indigenous Africa, East Asia, and South America, tend to prize relationality. These relational values include enjoying a sense of togetherness, participating cooperatively, creating something new together, engaging in mutual aid, and being compassionate. Global economic practices and internationally influential theories pertaining to justice, development, and normative economics over the past 50 years have been principally informed by characteristically Western and individualist values such as utility, autonomy, and capability. In this article I consider what economic appropriation, production, distribution, and consumption would look like if they were more influenced by relational values typical of non-Western worldviews, and especially the sub-Saharan ethic of ubuntu. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• South Sudanese refugees in Uganda rely on kin, neighbors, and community organisations for mutual aid in their displacement • Relational aid transcends humanitarian binaries such as 'principled', 'international', 'professional', and 'formal'. • Binary humanitarian classifications ignore the collective coping mechanisms of crisis-affected populations. • Integrating crisis-affected individuals and civic humanitarians into humanitarian practice and policy is key. The work of 'local responders', including crisis-affected populations and civic humanitarians have gained more attention in humanitarian practice following the 2016 World Humanitarian Summit's call for localising humanitarian aid. In this article, we draw on research conducted among South Sudanese refugees in Uganda to examine how crisis-affected people and their neighbours support themselves and each other in situations of protracted displacement. Through the lens of 'critical localism', we present narratives of how individuals and groups of refugees engage in and are shaped by different aid practices over time, unsettling conventional humanitarian binaries such as the international-local, principled-non-principled, professional-non-professional, and formal-informal. The discussion concludes by reflecting on the implications unsettled binaries have for both the understanding of humanitarianism, and the development of more inclusive practices that encompass crisis-affected people and civic humanitarians, not only as recipients, conduits, or facilitators of aid, but also as active agents who shape humanitarian policy and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Foresight practice can help societies creatively imagine and prepare for possible futures. The current qualitative study uses a foresight lens to consider the ways communities in the Western United States use mutual aid as a collective care strategy and preparative tool to address social justice challenges. Using Dator's (2009) four futures framework, this study constructed four future scenarios through the creation of composite personas which exemplify scenario archetypes (growth, constraint, collapse, and transformation). The researchers used data from interviews of mutual aid participants and organizers (N = 25) during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic about the future of mutual aid in 5–10 years. Using these interviews, researchers constructed an artifact of a message board where each composite persona exemplifies what happens 10 years post-COVID-19 through a series of message board forums. The paper ends with implications for the use of foresight practice to help prepare researchers, practitioners, and educators interested in understanding mutual aid as community-based solution to the complex crises to come. ● Researchers interviewed mutual aid participants and organizers (N = 25) about the future of mutual aid in 5-10 years. ● Researchers used Jim Dator's (2009) four future scenario archetypes to create composite personas in conversation on a message board artifact. ● Research participants identified each future of mutual aid as part of a changing landscape that centered solidarity and collective care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this commentary to the 2019 Geoforum Annual Lecture, I engage with Beverley Mullings' provocations, and in particular the "life-work" concept, to critically examine the work being done in post-disaster spaces across the Spanish Caribbean. I ask: In a world marked not only by the threat of automation, precarity and market fundamentalism but also by climate change and its associated risks, what can we learn about the labour of communities responding to severe climate calamities? In documenting recovery work in post-hurricane Maria, Puerto Rico, I show how communities working toward reconstruction blur the lines between economic production and social reproduction. In addition, I also point to finance capital's ability to extract value from both productive and reproductive work, thus calling attention to labour geographers' need to analyze both categories simultaneously. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In August 2022, when heavy rains led to localized flooding and damaged the O.B. Curtis Water Treatment Plant in Jackson, Miss., the city faced a drinking water crisis. This was combined with a malfunction of the pumps at the J.H. Fewell Water Treatment Plant. Ohio water professionals were among many deployed to get services back online, and in the process, they learned unforgettable lessons in the value of utility mutual aid and public service. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ubuntu is an African concept referring to humanness. It gives expression to deeply-held African ideals of one’s personhood being rooted in one’s interconnectedness with others. Social workers seeking to develop an African framework for decolonial social work practice turn repeatedly to ubuntu for aid. But the term has, for the most part, been limited to the idea of mutual aid – people helping each other in a spirit of solidarity. This article endeavours to extend and deepen the ubuntu concept to strengthen its potential as a theory informing social work practice. This is done by interweaving other African ideas with ubuntu in three domains: ethics, sustainable development and ecospirituality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Claver Haragirimana is the co-founder of OPROMAMER, an association to promote solidarity among people with mental illness in Rwanda. OPROMAMER is working to transform understandings about mental health and to reduce the significant burden of stigma faced by mental health patients and ex-patients in Rwanda. Founded by former patients of a psychiatric hospital with which it is now affiliated, OPROMAMER has grown from a single person's vision to become a nationwide organisation with twenty independent groups and 1000 members. In addition to advocacy work, Claver's organisation runs a savings club that has supported the development of small economic projects and enabled members to access loans to pay for school fees or healthcare. This interview of Claver Haragirimana was conducted by David Denborough. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Optimal Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) design with practical finite-alphabet inputs instead of ideal Gaussian inputs has been addressed in this paper. With the aid of tight mutual information neural estimation, a capacity-driven end-to-end learning communication framework is proposed to acquire optimal superposition coding and thus approach the capacity region of NOMA with finite-alphabet inputs. For such a purpose, we firstly give a closed-form expression of conditional mutual information to define the capacity region of NOMA with finite-alphabet inputs. A natural tight bound on mutual information is then derived for simplifying the closed-form expression, which is needed to establish a consistent and tight mutual information neural estimator. Lastly, in the end-to-end learning framework, an encoder and a self-attention, which are respectively responsible for constellation learning and power allocation, are guided by the capacity approaching method based on mutual information estimation, while successive interference cancellation (SIC) is designed as a neural unit embedded in the decoder to guarantee decoding performance. Numerical results show that the proposed capacity-driven end-to-end learning scheme achieves the achievable rate region for NOMA, with SER performance comparable to state-of-the-art decoding schemes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]