Rebecca 'Willow' Anne Hutton (she/her)

Hello! I'm Willow, an anthropolgy PhD candidate at Deakin Uni in (so-called) Australia, exploring a phenomenon close to my heart: mutual aid.

Gazing across geographies, cultures, and contexts, we see the persistent emergence of loose grassroots networks and social movements, whose relations of exchange are based on ‘solidarity not charity’ principles antithetical to those of the 'market'. Most striking--or perhaps most apparent--was their proliferation in the pandemic.

The term itself has roots in anarchist scholarship around prefigurative politics. Whilst some folks are not even familiar with the term ‘mutual aid’, others (thinkers, activists, and organisers on the ground) tout it as an inherently radical and political phenomenon, where it is seen to plant ‘seeds of hope’ for new political and economic imaginaries existing in the here-and-now.

My PhD work:Mutual aid: a factor of revolution? The economic anthropology of ‘everyday anarchism’ in the wake of COVID-19

This project is enmeshed in my everyday life, politics, social relations, and is in part autoethnographic. In a nutshell, it is an attempt to trace these ‘seeds of hope’ across different forms and spaces of mutual aid, through slow and reflexive ethnographic participant observation. Over the next year, I will be talking and engaging with communities involved with mutual aid taking different forms, geographies, scales, and manifestations. Taking a lens from economic anthropology, with insights from feminist political economy, I want to want to explore what this phenomenon can tell us about the nature of crisis, labour, reciprocity, economic relations, and political possibilities.

Background

Before finding myself nestled in the anthropology discipline, I completed a BA Honours from the University of Melbourne with undergrad from QUT majoring in critical criminology. I've also worked as Research Assistant since 2018 at the multidisciplinary Centre for Social Impact at Swinburne Uni, where I've dipped my toes into social policy, social enterprise, and diaspora studies. Read about some of my RA work at Swinburne here.

Otherwise, I'm a foraging, bicycling, and noodle soup enthusiast. I enjoy keeping active in local communities though initiatives from radical organising to small-scale sharing and outreach networks.

I love exchanging stories, anecdotes & ideas, be they about mutual aid or your favourite fruit! Pls reach out at [email protected] / [email protected] or ph/Signal on request :-)