Refusing Legibility: Astate Solutions and the World-building Project of Mutual Aid

Kristina E. Lee, Northwestern University

In recent decades, the sociology of the state has focused on the various ways that non-state actors and organizations have come to take on the responsibilities and powers of the state. The demonstrated centrality of the state in political sociology signifies the complexity of operating not just within, alongside, or against the state, but without it. Understanding mutual aid as an effort to urgently meet unmet needs without depending on the state to do so, this article attends to the rise in mutual aid efforts following the eruption of the Covid-19 pandemic and police violence uprisings in 2020. I recognize mutual aid as promoting localized astate (read: deliberately without the state) solutions to issues of need, asking: How and why have mutual aid actors taken on the responsibilities of the state without the state itself? Put differently: how has refusing state legibility influenced mutual aid actors in efforts to take on responsibilities expected of the state? I argue that refusal of legibility projects and efforts to operate without the state can inform how we understand state power. This paper draws on ninety-minute, semi-structured interviews and three years of participant observation with a mutual aid group in Chicago, Illinois to examine what motivates mutual aid actors to volunteer their time and energy towards these efforts. I analyze how mutual aid actors evade state legibility projects, such as by relying solely on community contributions, creating protocols for conflict de-escalation and nonengagement with police, and avoiding 501(c)(3) status. I also consider challenges facing mutual aid groups in building alternative social and political relations, such as sustaining volunteer capacity and funding. This empirical analysis invites political sociologists to reexamine the reach of state power and the limits of state legibility projects to think differently about the state and what exists beyond it.

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 Presented in Session 142. Class, Colonialism, and Empire in US History