COVID-19 Readings and Supports
We have put together this list in the early days of the pandemic to help us think together and support each other during this time. We have not compiled sources on the science of the virus as there are better places to find that information.
The list is divided into sections: Thinking Through It, Viral Surveillance, Supporting Each Other, Places to Donate / Direct Supports / Mutual Aid, and Links to Syllabi and Other Aggregates.
We will be updating it as more information becomes available, and please send us an email at pyriscencemagazine@gmail.com if you come across anything that would be useful.
The only way we will get through this is together.
In love and solidarity,
Sean O’Brien, Beth Capper, and Shama Rangwala
Thinking Through It
These links can help us understand the discourses around Covid-19, and inclusion here is not necessarily endorsement. We believe it is important to know how this moment is being thought through in different ways.
Kim Moody, “How ‘Just-in-Time’ Capitalism Spread COVID-19: Trade Routes, Transmission, and International Solidarity”
“In the era of just-in-time logistics, it took the coronavirus mere days to spread from Wuhan to other Chinese cities hundreds of miles away. It took only two weeks to move beyond China, simultaneously along major supply chains, trade and air travel routes to the industrial and entrepôt enclaves of East Asia, the war-torn, oil-producing Middle East, and industrial Europe, North America, and Brazil. By March 3, it had hit 72 countries. Following major supply chain routes, it initially bypassed most of Africa and much of Latin America although now it has moved into those continents as well, with potentially even greater risk to life.”
Carrie Freshour and Brian Williams, “Abolition in the Time of Covid-19”
“There is no reason to believe that this crisis will lead to the enlightenment of employers and politicians to realize the true value of workers essential to survival. Rather, repression and replacement are the plantation bloc’s tried and true responses to crisis. However, this moment of crisis and heightened vulnerability provides an opportunity for worker-led organizing and a forceful assertion of the truly essential value of workers, and this includes paid and unpaid alike. Can we imagine a world where our dependence on each other mirrors the kinds of caring networks emerging in the form of mutual aid instead of racial capitalist division of the working and comfort classes?”
Ill Will Editions, “Against Pandemic Capitalism. An Interview with Milan’s Emergency Volunteer Brigades”
“An interesting scenario could open up for us. We spent years traveling the world to build networks wherever people tried to confront the government, often getting in trouble with local authorities. Now we are experiencing a worldwide scenario that unites us all, especially in the West. We have the opportunity to create a common model that can apply to many places in the world. Once the emergency is over, that can legitimize us to speak up against those who have created these problems. For the time being, we can’t say what our next steps will be. We know that some activist groups from all over the country are planning to mobilize, inspired by the Volunteer Brigades. In order to create a common trajectory, we will need to connect with this broader viewpoint.”
Darko Suvin, “Thoughts Within the Coronising Siege: A Work in Progress”
“It is perhaps a cosmic sarcasm of Stapledonian (Olaf W.) proportions that the humblest biological being, a virus, then upends this teetering edifice. But I prefer to think of this as a possible world-historical turning point towards the Iron Heel, equivalent in scope to the 1st primitive globalisation of mercantile capitalism, so well described (in triumphal tones we can no longer share) by the Manifesto of the Communist Party in 1848. It is quite remarkable that the two huge world centers of infection I know of so far, Hubei and Lombardy-cum-Veneto, are the meeting points of turbocapitalism (small and middling capitalists frenziedly competing at any cost, on pain of being bankrupt and gobbled up) and frenzied urbanisation with strong remnants of grasping peasant mentality.”
Bue Rübner Hansen, “Pandemic Insolvency: Why This Economic Crisis will be Different”
“A great struggle is about to happen over when and how economies are reopened, and how to exit the likely depression. We’re entering an interegnum, in which political and economic elites are internally split and the mobilization or demobilization of ordinary people can sway the balance or insurrections sweep away the contending fractions. In some cases the interregnum may open for a Green New Deal—and a struggle over its meaning and implementation—in others, we may see revolutionary crises, as the public health crisis, mass unemployment and shortages accelerate preexisting crises of institutional and political legitimacy. If the quarantine makes it hard to imagine the latter, it may be because we still haven’t reckoned with the economic fallout of Covid-19, nor with the fact that already 2019 was a year of global uprisings comparable to 2011 and 1968.”
Cinzia Arruzza and Felice Mometti, “Governance and Social Conflict in a Time of Pandemic”
“Let us be honest: there is no certainty that it’s going to be fine, and the way we were living before the pandemic was neither fine nor ‘normal’ at all, for the current crisis is a consequence of capitalism as a form of social organization and life. We may yet end up being fine. But that will depend on us, on our ability to prevent a return to business as usual. If the task sounds daunting, and it is, we might remind ourselves that we are not entirely powerless.”
The Marxist Feminist Collective, “On Social Reproduction and the Covid-19 Pandemic: Seven Theses”
“If we stop, the world stops. That insight can be the basis of policies that respect our work, it can also be the basis of political action that builds the infrastructure for a renewed anti-capitalist agenda in which it is not profit-making but life-making that drives our societies.”
Aaron Benanav, “Crisis and Recovery”
“Looking forward, what are likely to be the longer-term effects of rising unemployment today? Utilizing tools developed in the aftermath of the Lehman Brothers collapse in 2007, the Fed may very well prove capable of stabilizing the financial architecture of the US—and the world—although it is too soon to tell whether their efforts will be successful. Even so, the fallout for American workers is likely to be enormous. With no engine of growth besides the ‘wealth effect’ induced by rising asset values, the US economy is likely to grow even more slowly than it did during the last business cycle—especially if businesses and households are left paying down large accumulated debts and delayed payments. Under those conditions, the labor market will take even longer to recover this time than it did last time, and last time it took seven years to recover.”
Arundhati Roy, “The Pandemic is a Portal”
“The virus has moved freely along the pathways of trade and international capital, and the terrible illness it has brought in its wake has locked humans down in their countries, their cities and their homes. But unlike the flow of capital, this virus seeks proliferation, not profit, and has, therefore, inadvertently, to some extent, reversed the direction of the flow.”
Rebecca Gordon, “The Future May Be Female, But the Pandemic Is Patriarchal”
“I hope, instead of returning to normalcy, we recognize that our survival as a species depends on changing almost everything, including how we produce what we need and how we reproduce ourselves as fully human beings.”
Tithi Bhattacharya, “Social Reproduction Theory and Why We Need it to Make Sense of the Corona Virus Crisis”
“Once the pandemic crisis passes, we cannot go back to ‘business as usual.’ We must demand that instead of capitalism putting our lives in crisis, we put its dynamic of profit-making over life making into crisis.”
Sarah Jaffe, “Social Reproduction and the Pandemic, with Tithi Bhattacharya”
“We spoke about what social reproduction theory can teach us about the current moment, the demands that the left should be making right now, and how we can use these lessons to prevent climate catastrophe”
Sophie Lewis, “The Virus and the Home”
“How can a zone defined by the power asymmetries of housework (reproductive labor being so gendered), of renting and mortgage debt, land and deed ownership, of patriarchal parenting and (often) the institution of marriage, benefit health?”
Malcom Harris, “Take Care”
“Even though the economy is largely shut down, it’s not easy to say there’s less labor going on. Where waged industries have collapsed, unwaged domestic work swells. As food service contracts, cooking expands. Daycares close, home childcare explodes.”
prole wave, “Essential Work?”
“Splitting proles into the categories of ‘essential workers’ and ‘non-essential workers’ (if they’re employed at all!) is a reflection of capitalist ideology. ALL wage labor is an imposition whether caring for the infirm or filing papers in some business firm. What is today highlighting the role of so-called ‘essential workers’ is the overwhelming risk that they are compelled to enter, via the wage and/or vocational notions, to keep the capitalist world humming along.”
Rob Wallace, Alex Liebman, Luis Fernando Chaves, and Rodrick Wallace, “COVID-19 and Circuits of Capital”
“[A] successful intervention keeping any one of the many pathogens queuing up across the agroeconomic circuit from killing a billion people must walk through the door of a global clash with capital and its local representatives, however much any individual foot soldier of the bourgeoisie [. . .] attempts to mitigate the damage.”
Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, “The pandemic as political trial: the case for a global commons”
”The pandemic has demonstrated the bankruptcy of national sovereignty — the major threats to humanity are global in character, so mutual aid, cooperation and solidarity must be too.”
Joshua Clover, “The Rise and Fall of Biopolitics: A Response to Bruno Latour”
“This is not to say there is no such thing as biopolitics nor any power to make live and let die. Clearly there is; clearly it is this that is wielded by all the Trumps great and small. Nonetheless it is apparent that the sovereign is not sovereign. Rather he is subordinated entirely to the dictates of political economy, that real unity of the political and economic forged by capital and its compulsions. Make live and let die is simply a tool among others in this social order whose true logic, from Trump’s tweet to Dan Patrick to the Senate bill, is the power employed always as a ratio of make work and let buy.”
Cihan Aksan and Jon Bailes, “One Question: Covid-19 and Capitalism”
“One Question is a regular series in which we ask leading thinkers to give a brief answer to a single question. This time, in the midst of economic and healthcare crises triggered by coronavirus, we ask: How has the COVID-19 pandemic exposed inherent flaws in the capitalist system? With responses from: Cinzia Arruzza; Neel Ahuja; Neil Faulkner; Seiji Yamada; Helen Yaffe; Michael Roberts; Sandro Mezzadra; Lindsey German; Dario Azzellini; Jodi Dean.”
Damon R. Young, “Safe Spaces”
“Coronavirus confronts us with the apocalyptic figure or fantasy of both ends. It reawakens our fears of contagion, reminds us of their differential violence, and reactivates an historical trauma as well as the queer resources we forged to deal with it. And for that reason, the current calamity contains a utopian kernel — the possibility that we might realize that we are not alone, that there is no final safety, and that what we need is not to love ourselves so much as to rebuild, from the ground up, a commons that is truly common and a collectivity worth its name.”
Debs Bruno and Medway Baker, “The End of the End of History: COVID-19 and 21st Century Fascism”
“The crossroads at which we stand must be understood as a unique opportunity to a) expand the class composition of the western socialist left; b) direct its politics in the necessary directions; c) incorporate swathes of working people toward a socialist politics of mutual self-interest; and, d) collectively take over the process of rebuilding (or not) the capital that will be destroyed by this many-sided crisis.”
Anton Jäger, “It might take a while before history starts again”
“The death of face-to-face sociability is unlikely to give a fresh impetus to new organizations (those hoping to kickstart a ‘corona revolution’ with an emergency ban on gatherings over five are in for a rough ride). The ‘hard’ part of the ‘hard but hollow’ neoliberal state might have ended. But the hollowness will probably persist; the void is widening rather than closing, gobbling up ever more space. It might take a while before history starts again.”
Jacques Berlinerblau, “After Coronavirus, the Deluge”
“What will happen to academic freedom when every lecture is ‘capturable’? What administrator will stand in the way of a third-party provider’s desire to data-mine the crud out of every undergraduate eye movement and finger click? Why wouldn’t ‘product placement’ be the norm in digital pedagogy? Oh, and in this Age of Lurk, how will professors not be monitored as they expound on the ideas that neither the college, the board of trustees, nor the third-party provider finds helpful? In short, what delicious deplatforming possibilities exist when the platform itself is not governed by faculty?”
Catherine Malabou, “To Quarantine from Quarantine: Rousseau, Robinson Crusoe, and ‘I’”
“What is best in a time of confinement? Be quarantined with other people? Or be quarantined alone?”
Nicolás Vargas, “Who Dies?”
“A revolutionary situation is a moment in history where systemic change is possible. We may be arriving at one—even the bourgeois media thinks so. In such times, the inherent contradictions of the system reveal themselves. The cracks grow wider. As mass animosity towards the ruling class builds during a crisis like this pandemic, talking heads hope that reform will ameliorate the escalating class tension. We would be best served to look beyond the inevitable band-aids and demand the most expansive measures. We only have ground to gain.”
Pol Bargués , “Containing Coronavirus: Resilience in Times of Catastrophe”
“We love individual gestures of self-control to appear resilient from one crisis to the next.”
David Chandler, “Coronavirus and the End of Resilience”
“Resilience appears to be the key policy buzzword of our times. […]. This short piece argues that global responses to the Coronavirus appear to demonstrate that policy discourses of resilience may be one (so far, unremarked) casualty of the Coronavirus outbreak. ‘Keeping Calm and Carrying On’ is not an option. Acting normally, not panicking, not overreacting, is seen as dangerous and hubristic (Taleb et al, 2020). Being resilient will make the problems worse. Being resilient will make the virus spread.”
Gabriel Winant, “Coronavirus and Chronopolitics”
“What matters now is the balance of authority in everyday life—between young and old, worker and boss.”
Ashley Smith, “The Virus, Capitalism, and the Long Depression: Interview With Michael Roberts”
“Spectre’s Ashley Smith interviews Marxist economist Michael Roberts about the roots of this calamity in the capitalist system and its likely impact on politics, consciousness, and struggle in the coming years.”
Sarah Jaffe, “We Can Build a Better World After COVID-19”
“We can neither work nor consume the way we used to: What does a world without such processes look like?”
Steven W. Thrasher, “I Study Prisons and AIDS History. Here’s Why Self-Isolation Scares Me.”
“My study of prisons warns about the increasing isolation and the mandatory substitution of screen-based technology for human contact that incarcerated and legally enslaved people are already subjected to. My study of AIDS history tells me how activists have fought another virus for decades but reminds me that a major tool in that fight, gathering physical bodies in public space, is becoming nearly impossible. Temporary isolation as a means to ending or curbing this plague is one thing, but what if what it takes for the people of Earth to fight this plague leaves us in a place of increased alienation in the long term?”
Angry Workers, “Supermarkets: The Food Supply-Chain From a Workers’ Perspective”
“Under a profit-oriented system the concentration process of food production and distribution means that there are hardly any margins for error. But it also means that workers have a potentially unified and concentrated power. Instead of wishing us back into a situation of artisan producers and petty shop-owners we should organise for workers’ takeover and control.”
Craig Gent, “When Logistics Run Out of Time”
“A common refrain has emerged across social media: take only what you need and there will be enough for everyone. This may be true in an abstract sense, but there are material reasons why it is misguided in a literal sense. In this particular truism, the phrase ‘there will be’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting.”
Woodbine, “From Mutual Aid to Dual Power”
“The COVID-19 public health crisis is rapidly devolving into a vast, multi-faceted crisis of social reproduction with no end in sight. How can we seize this moment to build dual power?”
David Harvey, “Anti-Capitalist Politics in the Time of COVID-19”
“Workforces in most parts of the world have long been socialized to behave as good neoliberal subjects (which means blaming themselves or God if anything goes wrong but never daring to suggest capitalism might be the problem). But even good neoliberal subjects can see that there is something wrong with the way this pandemic is being responded to.”
Andrew Liu, “‘Chinese Virus’, World Market”
“Containing the spread of the coronavirus, then, is about more than practicing good hygiene. On trial is a whole global system of profiteering and its structural laws and incentives. What the pandemic has revealed is not just that companies are out to get rich—a story as old as time—but specifically our unprecedented degree of global interdependence in the year 2020.”
Anna Kornbluh, “Academe’s Coronavirus Shock Doctrine”
“Faculty members are already stretched thin, and now they are being asked to do more. They should hesitate before doing so.”
Doug Henwood, “A Few Ambitious Points on Fighting the Crisis”
“We are facing two crises at once, health and economic, that are related in very important ways. The covid-19 epidemic has done major damage around the world, but it’s highlighting some serious structural problems with the US social model that better-run countries are not so afflicted by.”
Felice Cimatti, “The Metaphysics of Patient Zero”
“The unstated assumption of the expression ‘patient zero’ is precisely that before this poor individual fell ill, there was no trace of the infection. In essence: before, everything was fine.”
Jennifer Cooke, “Letter on a Plague Year”
“I know an awful lot about contagious times and how people behave in them. It’s true that I never thought I’d live through it, but now I am beginning to, I find I know these feelings and I am expecting them, have them somewhere in my researcher muscle memories.”
Mike Davis, “Socialism as Counter Pandemic”
“Corona walks through the front door as a familiar monster.”
The Red Nation, “The COVID-19 Pandemic: Capitalism in Crisis”
“The crisis has exposed the capitalist system for what it is: anti-life. In this time of great danger, we need human solidarity — the politics of love, not the politics of hate. We must respond with our hearts and all of our humanity, not just to stop the most catastrophic effects of COVID-19, but to end this inhumane and criminal capitalist system once and for all.”
Vijay Prashad, “The Mutilated World Is Moved by the Nurses and Doctors”
“In this mutilated world, those who hold us together by the bonds of love and fellowship are our heroes, marvellous people who are willing to put themselves in harm’s way to protect their fellow humans.”
Natasha Lennard, “After the Quarantine, the Flood”
“A pandemic will highlight the ways we are or are not already bound, and for whom those binds and boundaries are chains and chokeholds.”
Chuang, “Social Contagion: Microbiological Class War in China”
“Within China itself, the ultimate trajectory of this event is difficult to predict, but the moment has already brought about a rare, collective process of questioning and learning about society.”
Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Jean-Luc Nancy, Roberto Esposito, Sergio Benvenuto, Divya Dwivedi, Shaj Mohan, and Rocco Ronchi, “Coronavirus and Philosophers”
Panagiotis Sotiris, “Against Agamben: Is a Democratic Biopolitics Possible?”
Slavoj Žižek, “Monitor and Punish? Yes, Please!”
Giorgio Agamen, “Clarifications”
Rob Wallace, “Capitalist Agriculture and Covid-19: A Deadly Combination”
“The increased occurrence of viruses is closely linked to food production and the profitability of multinational corporations. Anyone who aims to understand why viruses are becoming more dangerous must investigate the industrial model of agriculture and, more specifically, livestock production.”
Stephanie Bastek, “How Global Agriculture Grew a Pandemic”
“The COVID-19 crisis was preventable—if only we’d listened to the epidemiologists sounding the alarm.”
Angela Mitropoulos, “Against Quarantine”
“In the case of the corona virus, the quarantine reinforces ethnic stereotypes and provides business opportunities to pharmaceutical companies.”
Read Mitropoulos’ book, Contract and Contagion: From Biopolitics to Oikonomia
Slavoj Žižek, “Is Barbarism with a Human Face our Fate?”
“More than open barbarism, I fear barbarism with a human face—ruthless survivalist measures enforced with regret and even sympathy but legitimized by expert opinions.”
Anne Boyer, “This Virus”
“I want the good in us to break through the layers of hateful nonsense we've been drowning in. I think we can be good, but we also must prepare for an amplification of evil’s evil. The time when the invisible becomes visible is at hand.”
Naomi Klein, “Coronavirus Capitalism”
“During moments of cataclysmic change, the previously unthinkable suddenly becomes reality. In recent decades, that change has mainly been for the worst — but this has not always been the case. And it need not continue to be in the future.”
Rampant Editorial Collective, “A Light at the End of the World”
“Covid-19 inaugurates a new era. The future will be shuttered by repression or it will be built upon solidarity.”
Joshua Grans, “Flattening the Coronavirus Curve Is Not Enough”
“If we can’t flatten the curve enough, we must dramatically increase health care capacity.”
Beneath the Surface interview with Robert Brenner, “Economic Meltdown and Corona Pandemic: Monster at the Door” [audio]
David Harvey, “Anti-Capitalist Politics in the Time of Covid-19” [audio]
Bram Ieven and Jan Overwijk, “Corona, Not an Intruder: This is the Normal Order”
“The measures against corona are often identical to the measures that climate activists have been asking for for decades: less displacement, less work, less exploitation of the planet. Suddenly it is possible.”
Eric Holthaus, “No, the Coronavirus is Not Good for the Climate”
”Cheering on the coronavirus because of climate change isn’t progress, it’s eco-fascism. It’s the same logic that eugenicists use to argue for population control, or racists use to preach ethnic nationalism and anti-immigration policies in an era of climate emergency.”
Franco “Bifo” Berardi, “Diary of the Psycho-Deflation”
“The virus is paving the way to a subject-less revolution, a purely implosive revolution based on passivity and surrender. Let’s surrender. All of a sudden this slogan takes a subversive sound: stop excitement, stop the useless anxiety that is a worsening quality of life.”
Judith Butler, “Capitalism Has its Limits”
“It seems likely that we will come to see in the next year a painful scenario in which some human creatures assert their rights to live at the expense of others, re-inscribing the spurious distinction between grievable and ungrievable lives, that is, those who should be protected against death at all costs and those whose lives are considered not worth safeguarding against illness and death.”
Gender and Covid-19 Working Group, “Covid-19: the Gendered Impacts of the Outbreak”
“If the response to disease outbreaks such as COVID-19 is to be effective and not reproduce or perpetuate gender and health inequities, it is important that gender norms, roles, and relations that influence women's and men's differential vulnerability to infection, exposure to pathogens, and treatment received, as well as how these may differ among different groups of women and men, are considered and addressed.”
Mike Finn, “Universities and the Coronavirus: Questions of Leadership”
“There are real, and immediate, challenges for institutions that often have tens of thousands of students from a wide range of locations in residential accommodation, many of whom will have underlying conditions, not to mention thousands of HE workers, again with many in at-risk groups (including this author).”
Indigenous Action, “Rethinking the Apocalypse: An Indigenous Anti-Futurist Manifesto”
“…This is a transmission from a future that will not happen. From a people who do not exist…”
Politico, “Coronavirus Will Change the World Permanently. Here’s How.”
“A crisis on this scale can reorder society in dramatic ways, for better or worse. Here are 34 big thinkers’ predictions for what’s to come.”
Viral Surveillance
Jeremy Cliff, “The Rise of the Bio-Surveillance State”
“The 21st century is still young. Coronavirus will probably not be its last global pandemic. And catastrophic climate change will ensure that it certainly is not the last global crisis requiring governments to assume emergency powers. As the demand for bio-surveillance grows, so will the supply of it, as new technologies hoover up ever more precise insights about citizens’ lives for capture by firms and states.”
Gideon Lichfield, “We’re Not Going Back to Normal”
“Ultimately, however, I predict that we’ll restore the ability to socialize safely by developing more sophisticated ways to identify who is a disease risk and who isn’t, and discriminating—legally—against those who are.”
Khari Johnson, “AI Weekly: Coronavirus, Facial Recognition, and the Future of Privacy”
“Mass surveillance is often presented as a solution in a crisis, and much like the passage of the Patriot Act after 9/11, people can respond to crises by surrendering freedoms.”
Supporting Each Other
Paige Murphy and Tayler Hackett, “Sex work, Covid-19 and the UK lockdown”
“Whilst the media is often titillated by the supposed sensationalism of sex worker struggles, they are in many ways emblematic of the mundane difficulties faced by the millions of precarious workers in Britain’s gig-economy. In simple terms: they have been forced to choose between health and homelessness.”
Asian American Feminist Antibodies {care in the time of coronavirus}
A zine curated by Salonee Bhaman, Rachel Kuo, Matilda Sabal, Vivian Shaw, and Tiffany Diane Tso.
Commune, “It’s Time to Build the Brigades”
“The most important thing, he tells us, is to act with ethics, to meet the situation, and to show that autonomous groups are better providers than the government, better carers than the employers, better able to meet the needs that exist.”
Alliance for Justice and Accountability, “Can India Pivot from Genocide to Stopping a Pandemic?”
“It is caste apartheid and inequities that exacerbate infectious disease outbreaks and it is caste apartheid we must overcome in order to save our society.”
Desmond Cole, “Fight COVID-19 with universal protection, not selective punishment”
“People could more easily follow direction if their governments, past and present, had done more to prepare for emergencies and build a society based on education rather than fear. In any case we are collectively vulnerable to this virus now, and we should spend our energy on universal protection rather than selective punishment.”
Jonathan Neale, “Coronavirus and Community Activism”
“We have start defending each other in ways that will change us, and make it possible for us to change the world.”
Gary Kinsman, “Some Notes on Learning from AIDS Activism for our Responses to the Coronavirus (COVID-19) Pandemic”
“I was actively involved in AIDS organizing and activism in the 1980s and 1990s and have also been involved in documenting some of these histories. In this initial sketch I try to draw out some of what can be learned from the history of AIDS organizing and activism for the current pandemic.”
Red Braid Alliance, “Isolate how? COVID-19 means unite and fight!”
“In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Red Braid is distributing information, offering resources, and organizing poor and homeless communities across the Lower Mainland.”
It’s Going Down, “Autonomous Groups Are Mobilizing Mutual Aid Initiatives To Combat The Coronavirus”
Article with links on various mutual-aid groups.
Kitty Styker, “Collective Care is Our Best Weapon Against Covid-19”
Links to collective care projects.
Sherry Hamby, “If You Are Locked Down with Someone Who May Become Violent”
Steps that may keep you and your loved ones safe in your own household.
“Social Distancing and Crip Survival: A Disability Centered Response to Covid-19”
Roundtable with links to resources.
Jade Begay (NDN Collective), “Decolonizing Community Care in Response to Covid-19”
“This is all decolonial work: getting back to community and even matriarchy, honoring the interdependence of all beings, and valuing the collective over our own ego.”
Mark Engler and Andrew Elrod, “The Case for a Social Distancing Wage”
“The solution is emergency stay-at-home pay. Elected officials must insist that no business be bailed out unless there are guarantees in place to maintain the income of the people who are being temporarily thrown out of work.”
Josh Gilbert-Doyon, “Paranoia and the Coronavirus: How Eve Sedgwick's Affect Theory Persists Through Quarantine and Self-Isolation”
“Reparative reading requires a healthy degree of paranoia, but also non-paranoid methods: it offers a political strategy and productive way forward for our moment of paranoia fixation.”
Amy Kapczynski and Gregg Gonsalves, “Alone Against the Virus”
“Decades of neoliberal austerity will make it harder to fight the Covid-19 pandemic. Now, more than ever, we must rebuild our social safety net and forge a New Deal for public health.”
Amy Kapczynski, “Coronavirus and the Politics of Care”
“Responding to Covid-19 means more than stocking up on hand sanitizer. It means organizing with and for the elderly, prisoners, migrants, people with chronic diseases, and the care workers who are most in harm’s way, and whose voice and power are central to any vision of a deepened democracy.”
Twitter thread by am kanngieser (@geotransversals) on Covid-19 and chest binding
The Calm meditation app has free resources and a YouTube channel.
Places to Donate / Direct Supports / Mutual Aid
Covid-19 Community Response Networks across Canada.
Donations in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada:
Old Strathcona Youth Society, providing food to youth.
Bissell Centre, supporting unsheltered people and those experiencing poverty.
The CHEW Project, supporting LGBTQ2S+ youth.
WIN House, supporting those experiencing domestic abuse (especially important when home is not always the safest place to isolate).
Donate via Interac email or PayPal for care packages with hygiene products, groceries, and kids’ supplies for sex workers.
Mutual Aid Hub (US)
Call to Action: In Solidarity with Migrants Detained by Canada: Immediate Release, No New Detentions!
Covid-19 Mutual Aid & Advocacy Resources
Includes information and a mutual-aid starter pack.
Podmapping Info and Worksheet
How to build local networks with your neighbours.
Freedom News, “Covid-19 UK Mutual Aid Groups: A List”
“Service Workers Mutual Aid Fund,” organized by Alexandra Madaras (US)
Covid-19 Resources for Sex Workers
Organized by SWARM: Sex Worker Advocacy and Resistance Movement (UK)
Prisonculture’s Redistribution Fund, organized by Mariame Kaba
“This is a pool where people with means who don’t want to figure out where to direct funds deposit their money so that I can redistribute them across multiple mutual support projects.”
Nationwide (US) Resources for Undocumented Communities
Continually updated spreadsheet.
National (US) Domestic Workers Alliance
“The money you donate to the Coronavirus Care Fund will provide immediate financial support for domestic workers, and enable them to stay home and healthy—protecting themselves, their families and their communities while slowing the spread of the Coronavirus.”
Covid-19 Financial Solidarity
Spreadsheet to organize financial supports
Links to Syllabi and Other Aggregates
The Red Critique, CoronaCRITIQUE: An Open Issue on the Pandemic
The Politics of Covid-19 Syllabus, Part 1 and Part 2
Includes multiple languages.
Pirate.Care Syllabus
“This is a collective note-taking effort to document and learn from the organising of solidarity in response to the urgency of care precipitated by the pandemic of Coronavirus (SARS-Cov-2).”
Kinase Weekly Covid-19 Newsletter
Weekly essays curated by Public Seminar
Nana Yea, “Rent Strike 2020: A Resource List”
Quarantine Times
“Starting this Monday, March 23rd 2020, our team, which includes a board of editors working in different disciplines, will commission and share creative responses from Chicago community members getting through this crisis as best they can. We’ll share their news daily across all our platforms. Finally, together with our friends and family, we aim to provide direct financial support to one featured artist per day, for the duration of the coronavirus pandemic of 2020.”