Organized communities as pre-existing infrastructures of care during the COVID-19 pandemic: A transnational dialogue

This article draws from a community-engaged study of how ordinary people's social justice mobilization during the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil, Canada, Germany, and Peru placed demands on local and national governments for equitable social policies. It challenges celebratory narratives of resilience that assume that made-marginalized peoples and communities can repeatedly and indefinitely absorb negative shocks while continuing to thrive/survive. Instead, we emphasize the value of understanding these communities as producers of care infrastructures, while recognizing that this care work is often done through their volunteer labor under difficult circumstances. These practices reveal the long-standing normalization of structural abandonment under neoliberal governance and, from an Urban Political Ecology (UPE) perspective, the uneven socio-ecological conditions through which the impacts of crisis are produced and lived. Across diverse contexts, pandemic care infrastructures emerged precisely where public health systems, housing policies, labor protections, and social safety nets failed to protect made-marginalized populations. We argue that infrastructures of care do not/should not replace claims on the state for just and equitable access to comprehensive social protections and rights, but rather indicate community recognition and creation of what could and should exist as an integrated (state-community) infrastructure of care that is a truly community-informed and -engaged approach to social well-being.