Mutual Aid Research

An extraordinary wave of grassroots solidarity activism emerged across the world in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, with the aim of helping communities get access to food, medicine, and other basics. These grassroots efforts chose to call themselves mutual aid, using a label which has a long history for social movements, and which describes a form of activism that creates political solidarity while offering material support to people.

Since 2020, I’ve been working on a research project that examines mutual aid in the United Kingdom, Italy, and the United States. Drawing on interviews with mutual aid activists and digital ethnographic data, my work focuses specifically on how activists conceptualized and practiced mutual aid and on how activists navigated the potentialities and limitations of digital technologies to organize for solidarity. My project takes a unique comparative angle and contributes to ongoing debates about contemporary activism, the role played by digital technologies under conditions of emergency, and the renewed importance of collective care.

I am currently working on a book manuscript and different journal articles. Here is some some of the work on mutual aid that I have published so far. You can also read about this project here. I have also given conference presentations, invited talks, and guest lectures related to this project.

This research project received a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant, funded by the Wellcome Trust between 2022 and 2024 (grant number: SRG22220713). I also received support through a fellowship from the Center for Advanced Internet Studies (CAIS) in Bochum, Germany (2023/2024) and an AIAS-AUFF fellowship from the Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies in Aarhus, Denmark (2024/2026). I am grateful to these funders.

Are you an instructor looking for a guest lecturer? Are you part of a group who’s been engaged in mutual aid (or thinking about it)? I’m available to give talks about this work to both academic and activist audiences. Just get in touch with me through the Contact page.

If you are an activist who has been involved in mutual aid and would like to help my research: thank you! Feel free to contact me.