Browsing by Author "Haacke, Matthew W."

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    Feeding the Future: Community, Horizontal Leadership and Direct Action Through Mutual Aid in Food Not Bombs Houston’s Movement for Change
    (2025-05-05) Haacke, Matthew W.; Jalili, Jaleh; Rice University
    Through ethnographic fieldwork and interviews (n=13), this study examines how Food Not Bombs Houston (FNBH) operates as a social movement through mutual aid. I explore how FNBH fosters community, deploys horizontal leadership, and engages in direct action to prefigure a better world. My findings demonstrate how FNBH’s food-sharing practices and mutual aid serve as a repertoire of contention, actively disrupting capitalist structures and resisting state control through spatial occupation. By fostering community resilience through a decentralized, non-hierarchical, consensus-based organizational model, FNBH embodies prefigurative politics—creating alternative systems of care outside of traditional non-profit structures and state control. This analysis challenges traditional social movement scholarship by demonstrating how mutual aid operates not just as a direct service but as a long-term form of resistance through everyday acts of solidarity.