Fall 2025 Theme: Crisis

Race; imperialism; disaster capitalism; temporality of disaster; repair not recovery; hurricane; Puerto Rico

Anthropology

Yarimar Bonilla sheds light on the everyday experience of life in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico; the conditions of ‘racio-colonial governance’ on the island that preceded the hurricane and exacerbated its effects; and the self-organizing efforts of residents given limited government recovery assistance. Writing about the ‘temporality of disaster’ or how residents experienced time in the storm’s wake, Bonilla highlights how an initial sense of urgency and expectation for governmental action and recovery turned into stalled waiting in the face of neglect. This is contextualized within the broader geography of US racialized neglect that includes Flint, Detroit, and New Orleans and Puerto Rico’s US colony status, where waiting is a form of political subjugation. Hurricane Maria’s impacts are shown to be exacerbated by a preceding debt crisis that was intensified by federally-imposed regulations, some of which date to Puerto Rico’s establishment as a US territory. These regulations restricted the local government’s financial options and prioritized debt repayment, leading to austerity measures that shrunk state services, and weakened infrastructures and disaster response capabilities.In the absence of state assistance, self-reliance and community care initiatives proliferated; these initiatives came to the fore under the debt crisis but have also been strained by its effects. Although cooptable by neoliberal visions of Puerto Rico’s future, which frame the island’s resilience as rendering it good for investment, self-reliance and community care also entail the workings for a new and different future that centers sovereignty and repair. Significantly, Bonilla adds to disaster capitalism theories an emphasis on the enabling role played by racial and colonial structures in post-disaster dispossession, arguing for the term racio-colonial capitalism instead. She underscores how crises like climate change are cut through with the ‘coloniality of power’ rather than being socio-economic levelers as some suggest, questioning what impacts understanding disasters as colonially rooted might have for the shape of post-disaster response. Bonilla challenges the value placed on making communities resilient, suggesting that the demand for communities to be resilient is a demand for them to endure in the face of structural violence.

Mutual aid; community care; abolition; solidarity; social movements; pandemic; global crisis

Political science, law

Dean Spade's work examines mutual aid as a critical response to 21st-century crises. He defines mutual aid as collective coordination to meet each other's needs, recognizing that existing hostile systems will not meet them; instead, the systems in place exacerbate crises. The book provides both theory and practical application. Part I explores mutual aid's role in crisis response, offering definitions and showcasing successful global examples. Part II equips readers with tools to implement mutual aid, including frameworks for communal leadership and collaborative decision-making. Dean Spade identifies three core elements of mutual aid. The first key element is meeting survival needs while building a shared understanding of systemic failures. He illustrates this through the Black Panthers' free breakfast program, which provided food without stigma—addressing what the government failed to deliver. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover considered this program "potentially the greatest threat to efforts by authorities to neutralize the BPP." Mutual aid threatens the dependency crisis that government and hostile systems rely upon for control. In response, the government destroyed the Panthers' program and co-opted it by establishing free lunch programs in public schools. This stripped mutual aid of its revolutionary power as a crisis response, demonstrating how systems destroy grassroots alternatives that challenge their authority. Spade's second key element of mutual aid is mobilizing people, expanding solidarity, and building movements. He carefully differentiates mutual aid from nonprofit work, stressing the importance of building solidarity with all people—not just those deemed "deserving." His example critiques nonprofits; for instance, nonprofits that help only prisoners with nonviolent offenses neglect the vulnerable population charged with violent crimes who may have been unable to voice their innocence or were up-charged by police. The third element of mutual aid is its participatory nature and reliance on collective action rather than saviors. Spade illustrates this with Mutual Aid Disaster Relief's work in Puerto Rico in 2018 after Hurricane Maria. Volunteers accessed a warehouse full of undistributed supplies by persistently and falsely claiming they were there for scheduled pickups until guards allowed them to distribute resources to the community. Spade emphasizes that disasters expose and intensify existing inequalities, revealing ongoing crises, and how to use mutual aid to combat these crises.