Speakers
Description
The system of settler colonialization in Canada has made Indigenous, racialized, 2SLGBTQ+, and disabled community members increasingly vulnerable to poverty, violence, and policing. The (post-)COVID-19 pandemic and climate crisis context has created an urgent need to support community members who are experiencing the exacerbated effects of inequality that have preceded the pandemic. Although there has been a surge in mutual aid organizing as a response to the pandemic; Black, Indigenous, and other racialized communities have been practicing forms of community care that resist colonial and capitalist systems, preceding the pandemic (de Loggans, 2021). This presentation draws from a participatory project with a Toronto-based non-profit organization (NPO) that facilitates resource deliveries to vulnerable community members, by bicycle. This presentation discusses the ways in which a bicycle-focused NPO facilitated community care within the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Research colleagues in this study embodied three key mutual aid values: 1) reallocating resources; 2) skill-sharing; and 3) ensuring community members thrive (de Loggans, 2021). Drawing from Spade’s (2020) work on mutual aid, this presentation explores the potential for using bicycles to build ‘new social relations centered in solidarity’ (p. 9). Further, the discursive narrative of ‘suffering’ often associated with racialized communities (Tuck & Yang, 2014) was challenged by research colleagues. Indeed, these research colleagues demonstrated how they, themselves, thrived and experienced joy out of engaging in mutual aid activities. This finding echoes decolonial feminist works that prioritize liberation through being in relation with one another (Lugones, 2010).
