The moral economy of severe scarcity: how considerations of deservingness shape cloth mask distribution practices in the midst of a global health crisis

Ya-Ching Huang & Alya Guseva (2024) Journal of Cultural Economy, Online first, open access Abstract. The COVID-19 pandemic led to unprecedented scarcity of face masks and spurred massive home-based cloth mask-making across the U.S. In the context of severe shortages, mask-makers had to consider the idea of deservingness when deciding who should get their masks, and who should bear their cost. Based on the data from a private Facebook group dedicated to sewing and thirty-one in-depth intervie...