Funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Simpson Center for the Humanities, and The Graduate School. Co-sponsored by The Ellison Center for Russian, East European & Central Asian Studies; The Center for West European Studies; and the Department of History.

This webinar is part of the Spring Quarter theme, “Rethinking the Human.”

Dean Spade, “Mutual Aid: Radical Care in Crisis Conditions”

Humanitarianism, saviorism, and charity have been extensively critiqued as logics that undergird and legitimize war, colonialism, racialized-gendered control, and extraction. How do people organizing immediate survival support for each other in the face of crisis work together to resist these methods and build practices of solidarity and collective self-determination?

Cristian Capotescu, “Echoes of the ‘New Soviet Man’: Humanity and the Ethics of Giving in Late Socialism”

In the late 1980s, for many citizens of the former socialist bloc practicing and living socialism involved helping the less fortunate, the sick, and the poor through acts of giving. Such volunteer work and private assistance often invoked moral claims of a better life based on an ethics of shared suffering, dependency, and radical equality. This talk traces how socialist giving opened the possibility for ordinary people to enact notions of shared humanity in alternative ways that frequently eluded capitalist, Western modernity.


Dean Spade is Associate Professor at Seattle University School of Law and author of Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next) (Verso, 2020).

Cristian Capotescu is the Postdoctoral Scholar for the Mellon Sawyer Seminar on Humanitarianisms at the University of Washington. He completed his Ph.D. in History at the University of Michigan in 2020 and is currently working on his first book, Disasters and Solidarities: The Transnational Remaking of Crisis Socialism.

Lynn Thomas (Professor, History) will join the webinar as discussant. Thomas is a historian of politics and gender in twentieth-century Africa.

More information about the series at www.humanitarianisms.org.

Accommodation requests related to a disability should be made by April 12, 2021 to Caitlin Palo, 206-685-5260, scevents@uw.edu.