In this vignette, I am centering the gaze of our group, whose labor and ethics of distribution encapsulated the definition of mutual aid as the “collective coordination to meet each other’s needs, usually from the awareness that the systems we have in place are not going to meet them” (Spade 2020, 7). I especially engage with mutual aid groups coming out of the Covid-19 crisis and the values that shape their work. These values lie in the acts of solidarity of supporting protests through the distribution of supplies. They also manifest through non-hierarchical acts of distribution, that is, the refusal of means testing, policing needs or paperwork. Finally, there is a politicization of abundance, mobilized by mutual aid organizations as a response to municipal policies of austerity in the wake of the pandemic.

Sarah Robert and Kate Haq examine the afterlives of crisis in Buffalo, their civic home and research field. In the aftermath of the white supremacist shooting of Black Buffalonians at the only grocery store in a Black neighborhood, they ask about another form of white supremacy: the inertia of white liberal ideologies and the enclosure of white supremacist violence within white liberal apathy. Considering their own participation in white civic subjectivities, the photos here document the authors’ beginning with a sense of understanding whiteness within antiracist contexts, and an attempt to move toward a more active stage of autonomously confronting and addressing white supremacy’s many ideological expressions.

In this piece, Mikey Elster compares “the experiences of trans people and their relatives to the media coverage of trans healthcare to demonstrate the complicity of national media in stoking a moral panic that empowers reactionary political forces. This coverage amounts to promoting what Antonio Gramsci called ‘common sense’ by disseminating numerous anecdotal, non-systematic concerns, questions, and narrative frameworks that taken together imply a need for dramatic restrictions on healthcare.”

In this piece I consider how far right agitators use so-called “culture war” issues to build an insurgent politics, particularly around the institutions of the family and the public school. While popular renderings of the far right often frame “culture wars” as flashpoints of ideological contestation, I argue that far right political mobilization relies on culture wars to create a collective feeling of crisis around the social reproduction of the white heteronormative settler family.

In this article, Alice Chen explores how the relationship between technology development and the climate crisis is transformed into a discourse over the political economy of quick research, debating the “speed” of US government funding versus the “speed” of private industry on funding breakthroughs.