‘Contagious’ solidarity: reconfiguring care and citizenship in Greece's social clinics

Abstract

In response to growing numbers of people unable to access national healthcare, networks of ‘social solidarity’ clinics/pharmacies have emerged throughout Greece. These clinics/pharmacies redistribute donated medicines, and they provide care through networks of volunteers. They thus seek to respond to the growing ‘contagion’ of austerity in Greece with what some describe as ‘contagious’ solidarity. Discourses regarding social health also permeate the clinics. Solidarity is often described as the ‘other face’ of the crisis, which has brought group participation into the centre of Greek citizenship. Research participants, however, also reflect ambivalently on their work, exposing solidarity's entanglement in austerity politics and neoliberal subjectivity.

Borders of Wealth and Poverty: Ideas Stimulated by Comparing the Mediterranean and U.S.-Mexico Borders

“…Moreover, she focuses on the construction of relationships with activists and volunteers, and the (explicit and tacit) processes of negotiation that refugees conducted with police authorities and other stakeholders. Related work on resistance in border and near-border settings includes Cabot (2016) and Rozakou (2017Rozakou ( , 2018. Without at all criticizing this important work, again we note the predominance of the migration enforcement/resistance focus in the Mediterranean.…”

Emotional Labor On and Off Water

“…Many passengers may also be their neighbors or relatives. Their efforts to maintain collaborative relations with regular users are not that distinct from much‐documented expressions of solidarity among people who live in the same communities and relate on multi‐faceted levels, including in collectively contending with under‐funded public services (e.g., Bates et al ; Cabot ; Stack ; Zambeta et al ). It is also not that distinct from crew members' efforts to maintain good relationships with each other.…”

‘Exotic no more’: Tuberculosis, public debt and global health in Berlin

“…More recently they have also begun to be investigated in Europe (Brand, Rosenkotter, Clemens, & Michelsen, 2013;Karanikolos et al, 2013;Stuckler & Basu, 2014). Studies working towards theorisations of impoverished locations and decaying medical infrastructures in the global North as an 'other global South' (Meyers & Hunt, 2014), and very recent studies on the relationship between austerity policies and the precarisation of health care in Southern Europe (Cabot, 2016;Kehr, 2014), have shown how processes of austerity and the privatisation of health care undermine North-South divisions, as similar stakes regarding infrastructural decline are at play, even if the scale and consequences of such processes are highly dependent on the location and the population. With this article I intend to participate in this nascent research field of austerity studies by showing how health professionals in the field of TB control in Berlin made sense of global economic phenomena such as public debt and structural adjustment as they slowly unfolded before their eyes at the end of the 2000s.…”