05.24.2021 - BITS-Research/MutualAid GitHub Wiki

Timeline:

  • Two weeks until end of Quarter
  • Can pick up again in Fall Quarter

Where do we go from here (Main discussion for Monday)?

Option I: Review of 26 empirical articles, along with their works cited would likely provide a grounded list of case studies of mutual aid networks engaging with formal/informal practices. That could serve as a conceptual link to information science literature? (But where we link it would be quite broad). Next steps: classify current list of papers after reading through for how they discuss formalizing tensions, noting where linked to technology use and tensions if extant. This can be a good stopping point as it helps link to broader information science theory. We can also in future go through the 26 empirical article works cited to expand this list.

**Notes: ** The conceptual link to information science doesn't need to be explicit - it can be an evaluation of mutual aid over the last twenty years with a a particular emphasis on how the term has come to be used in the contemporary moment. This could unfold as follows:

  • Mutual aid is a term used to refer to many different aspects of informal organizing - with direct and indirect links to previous definitions related to self-help, non-hierarcical or anarchist traditions, etc.
  • Understanding how mutual aid is being currently defined and studied is important - it helps clarify convergence of attention from diverse scholarship that explicitly identifies mutual aid as a unit of analysis, and provides a point in time snapshot that can be valuable to tracking mutual aid scholarship over time
  • To do so - we adopt a definition of mutual aid as X
  • We perform a systematic literature review - focusing on surfacing papers related to mutual aid organizing through ICTs
  • Our findings demonstrate: 1. Broad and diverse uses of mutual aid(not that interesting); 2. Acknowledgement of importance for material aspects of organizing, but little attention paid to how specific ICTs are used; 3. Recognition that broadly accessible ICTs may be at odds with non-hierarcial forms of organizing, but little attention paid to the ways that mutual aid groups overcome, deflect, or reject these ICT limitations.
  • The implications of this work are: A research agenda on mutual aid and sociomaterial forms of organizing; need to better document contemporary moment of organizing with and through ICTs etc

This isn't going to change the world- but justifies future work. Recommended outlet: https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorSubmission?show=instructions&journalCode=utis20

Option II: Our work ‘filtering’ mutual aid from its various definitions and incarnations also something I feel is a contribution. Spade and modern incarnations redefine a term in the broader Kropotkin tradition, but so do others which has made searching somewhat confusing. Re-linking the current popular incarnation to alternative definitions ‘self-help’ medical tradition, ‘mutual aid’ practices in broader sociology, ‘mutual aid’ in the fraternal/financial assistance tradition, feels like it would have been helpful. Could we make this a publication or a part of one?

**Comments: ** Yes, this to me is a relevant to conclusions that might be drawn in publication I describe above, as well as a position piece that describes the problem in depth - could be published in JDoc - "...Speculation in Documentation' category. These are short (no more than 5,000 words) contributions, presenting an original concept or perspective."

Corpus: