Marina Sitrin - Pandemic Solidarity

Dear Reader,

This is a story without an end.

For many, this Covid-19 pandemic is just the most recent disaster in a longer history of crisis, struggle and self-organization. We acknowledge and express our gratitude for those who came before us and to all those who continue with these transformative projects.

If you are reading this, you yourself have likely done something to care for others, perhaps simply by wearing a mask or shopping for a neighbor. In our many different ways, we are already participating in a tapestry of care and mutual aid that spans across the globe.

So, we end this book with an invitation to reflect on, amplify and join together in this work.

Above all, we close these pages with love.

In solidarity/solidaridad/bi pitgir/solidariet/ / solidariedade/Dayanmayla/ / dlthphirtocht ngokubumbana/

Colectiva Sembrar

Author photo collage by Ferit Ozdemir

Flower image/drawing by Ariella Patchen

Khabat Abbas is an independent journalist and video producer based in Rojava. She has extensively covered developments in Syria; from the creation of womens organizations to running alongside frontline fighters in battles against ISIS and witnessing the devastating moments of the more recent Turkish occupation. She has published in local media outlets and produced for influential foreign media. Khabat also has experience in the humanitarian field serving at MSF and currently UNHCR in projects aiming to assist internally displaced persons and refugees. Her personal interests include womens empowerment, culture and mythology, as well as Kurdish music and folklore.

carla bergman is a mom, an independent scholar, filmmaker, and budding poet. She is the co-author of Joyful Militancy, and edited Radiant Voices: 21 Feminist Essays for Rising Up. The threads that run through all her work are: radical social change, and amplifying voices and acts of solidarity and autonomy at the edges. carla spends much of her time capturing beauty with a camera, and walking with her partner, kids, and friends on Tsleil-Waututh, Squamish, and Musqueam Lands (Vancouver, BC).

Chia-Hsu Jessica Chang is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature at Binghamton University. Her recent interests are the politics of de-naming and re-naming, the technologized body and Asia as method.

Lais Duarte is a Ph.D candidate at the Anthropology department of CUNY. She studies solidarity networks, immigrant integration policy and decolonisation praxis. Lais is also a proud pet mama and spends her days dreaming of and fighting for a socially equitable and loving world.

Eleanor Finley is an activist-anthropologist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, an editor at ROAR Magazine, and a former board member for the Institute for Social Ecology. She has been writing political ethnography since Occupy Wall Street and conducted activist-research about climate activism, social ecology and the Kurdish freedom movement. Her dissertation explores the practice of direct democracy within the European Kurdish diaspora. She lives in Friuli Venezia-Giulia, Italy.

Neil Howard is an academic (and) activist based at the University of Bath, in the UK. His research looks at exploitation, marginalization and how/whether unconditional basic income and non-violent community organizing can help overcome both. He is engaged with a variety of social movements, co-parents two children, and desperately longs for a world where the meeting of needs takes priority over the making of money.

Han Gil Jang is a writer, visual artist and translator currently based in Seoul. His current interests range from Asian diaspora art and the East Asian postwar experimental avant-garde to memory and representation of war.

Midya Khuduhur is a Fulbright Scholar with a masters degree in Comparative Literature from the State University of New York-Binghamton. Since 2014 she has been involved with humanitarian organizations and UN agencies and has four years experience dealing with Syrian refugees and Iraqi displaced people who were affected by the ISIS attacks. In 2018 she returned to academia to do her masters, and subsequently gained a keen interest in Kurdish Studies especially Kurdish literature and cinema.

Raquel Lima is a poet, art-educator and Ph.D candidate in Post-colonialisms and Global Citizenship from the Centre for Social Studies at Coimbra University, where she works on orature, slavery and afrodiasporic movements. She is also an anti-racist activist and loves crossroads.

Liz Mason-Deese is a translator, researcher, cartographer and feminist activist living in Buenos Aires. She is a member of the Viewpoint Magazine editorial collective and the Counter-Cartographies Collective.

Boaventura Monjane is a Mozambican postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS, UWC) and fellow at the International Research Group on Authoritarianism and Counter-strategies of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation.

Nancy Pieiro Moreno is an Argentine militant translator and interpreter, grateful that her engagement in counter-hegemonic translation for social and political change is continuously keeping her from finishing her Latin American Studies MA thesis.

Seyma zdemir is a Ph.D student at SUNY Binghamton. Her research interests are international migration, political economy, cultural studies and feminist theories. Nowadays, she is talking about capitalism with her children, drawing pictures, making laboratories, trailers, puzzles out of cardboard, imagining better futures and creating new spaces with them in quarantine.

EP & TP are involved in anti-authoritarian assemblies in Greece.

Ariella Patchen is a student, artist, activist and dreamer located in Binghamton, New York. She aspires to write about and participate in social movements across the world, as she imagines what it means to build a revolutionary new world.

magal rabasa lives in Portland, Oregon with her partner and two kids. She is the author of The Book in Movement: Autonomous Politics and the Lettered City Underground, as well as numerous articles about independent media networks and autonomous movements. Over the past two decades she has participated in various alternative media, popular education, and radical publishing projects across the Americas. She is currently an assistant professor of Latin American cultural studies at Lewis & Clark College, where she encourages and incites critical conversations and actions related to the settler-colonial identity of the institution.