Mutuality as Emergent Grounded Research

Abstract This chapter reflects on several years of collaboration between students and faculty at The New School and organizations in New York and Mexico City committed to practices of mutual aid. This collaboration yielded an inductive process of building theory about mutuality on the basis of its local and translocal practice. Unlike charity-based models, mutual aid is premised upon reciprocal forms of care in which distinctions between host and guest, citizen and migrant, researcher and researched, helper and helpee, are resisted and critically scrutinized in order to foster systemic forms of change. This chapter reflects on this process and attempts to demystify the challenge of doing research in ways that align with given normative values. It asks, what does it mean to practice mutuality in and through research and education? What does reciprocity look like across the kinds of social, material, and epistemic inequalities that constitute a research collaboration aspiring to knowledge co-production?