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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Social work > Aid & relief programmes
'Commendable - a book that prepares us to think about and react to
system failures' - Peter Gelderloos Anarchists have been central in
helping communities ravaged by disasters, stepping in when
governments wash their hands of the victims. Looking at Hurricane
Sandy, Covid-19, and the social movements that mobilised relief in
their wake, Disaster Anarchy is an inspiring and alarming book
about collective solidarity in an increasingly dangerous world. As
climate change and neoliberalism converge, mutual aid networks,
grassroots direct action, occupations and brigades have sprung up
in response to this crisis with considerable success. Occupy Sandy
was widely acknowledged to have organised relief more effectively
than federal agencies or NGOs, and following Covid-19 the term
'mutual aid' entered common parlance. However, anarchist-inspired
relief has not gone unnoticed by government agencies. Their
responses include surveillance, co-option, extending at times to
violent repression involving police brutality. Arguing that
disaster anarchy is one of the most important political phenomena
to emerge in the twenty-first century, Rhiannon Firth shows through
her research on and within these movements that anarchist theory
and practice is needed to protect ourselves from the disasters of
our unequal and destructive economic system.
Spanning six decades from the formation of the Save the Children
Fund in 1919 to humanitarian interventions during the Vietnam War,
The Humanitarians maps the national and international humanitarian
efforts undertaken by Australians on behalf of child refugees. In
this longitudinal study, Joy Damousi explores the shifting forms of
humanitarian activity related to war refugee children over the
twentieth century, from child sponsorship, the establishment of
orphanages, fundraising, to aid and development schemes and
campaigns for inter-country adoption. Framed by conceptualisations
of the history of emotions, and the limits and possibilities
afforded by empathy and compassion, she considers the vital role of
women and includes studies of unknown, but significant, women
humanitarian workers and their often-traumatic experience of
international humanitarian work. Through an examination of the
intersection between racial politics and war refugees, Damousi
advances our understanding of humanitarianism over the twentieth
century as a deeply racialised and multi-layered practice.
Afghan women were at the forefront of global agendas in late 2001,
fueled by a mix of media coverage, humanitarian intervention and
military operations. Calls for "liberating" Afghan women were
widespread. Women's roles in Afghanistan have long been politically
divisive, marked by struggles between modernization and tradition.
Women, politics, and the state have always been intertwined in
Afghanistan, and conflicts have been fueled by attempts to
challenge or change women's status. It may appear that we have come
full circle twenty years later, in late 2021, when Afghanistan fell
to the Taliban once more. Women's rights in Afghanistan have been
stripped away, and any gains-however tenuous-now appear lost.
Today, the country navigates both a humanitarian and a human rights
crisis. This book measures the rhetoric of liberation and the
physical and ideological occupations of Afghanistan over the
twenty-year period from 2001 through 2021 through the voices,
perspectives, and experiences of those who are implicated in this
reality-Afghan women.
Many communities in the United States have been abandoned by the
state. What happens when natural disasters add to their misery?
This book looks at the broken relationship between the federal
government and civil society in times of crises. Mutual aid has
gained renewed importance in providing relief when hurricanes,
floods and pandemics hit, as cuts to state spending put significant
strain on communities struggling to survive. Harking back to the
self-organised welfare programmes of the Black Panther Party,
radical social movements from Occupy to Black Lives Matter are
building autonomous aid networks within and against the state.
However, as the federal responsibility for relief is lifted, mutual
aid faces a profound dilemma: do ordinary people become complicit
in their own exploitation? Reframing disaster relief through the
lens of social reproduction, Peer Illner tracks the shifts in
American emergency aid, from the economic crises of the 1970s to
the Covid-19 pandemic, raising difficult questions about mutual
aid's double-edged role in cuts to social spending. As sea levels
rise, climate change worsens and new pandemics sweep the globe,
Illner's analysis of the interrelations between the state, the
market and grassroots initiatives will prove indispensable.
Horrified, saddened, and angered: That was the American people's
reaction to the 9/11 attacks, Hurricane Katrina, the Virginia Tech
shootings, and the 2008 financial crisis. In Consuming Catastrophe,
Timothy Recuber presents a unique and provocative look at how these
four very different disasters took a similar path through public
consciousness. He explores the myriad ways we engage with and
negotiate our feelings about disasters and tragedies-from
omnipresent media broadcasts to relief fund efforts and promises to
"Never Forget." Recuber explains how a specific and "real" kind of
emotional connection to the victims becomes a crucial element in
the creation, use, and consumption of mass mediation of disasters.
He links this to the concept of "empathetic hedonism," or the
desire to understand or feel the suffering of others. The
ineffability of disasters makes them a spectacular and emotional
force in contemporary American culture. Consuming Catastrophe
provides a lively analysis of the themes and meanings of tragedy
and the emotions it engenders in the representation, mediation and
consumption of disasters.
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