Buffett Q&A: Mutual Aid in India with Anusha Kumar, International Senior Thesis Research Grantee
For this installment of our Buffett Q&A series profiling faculty and students in the Roberta Buffett Institute community, we spoke with Anusha Kumar, a recent graduate of the School of Education & Social Policy and Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences. Kumar received an International Senior Thesis Research Grant from the Roberta Buffett Institute to complete her thesis "From Scarcity to Solidarity: Mutual Aid as a Pathway to Food Justice and Urban Resilience in Chennai, India." For this research, she won the top overall poster award and placed first in the social justice division at the Chicago Area Undergraduate Research Symposium.
What did you research for your senior thesis?
My project looks at how urban communities in Chennai, India, are using mutual aid to create pathways to food sovereignty and urban resilience. Additionally, I examined how mutual aid networks are interacting with caste and gender as well as if and how they are resisting some of the hierarchical logics that guide charity forms of giving.
What led you to focus on mutual aid?
This project is very much informed by my own experiences doing community organizing and supporting mutual aid. So, it was very cool to see how the things I'm learning in the classroom align with the things that I have done outside of school, as well as reflections I've had about my own background growing up in the South Asian diaspora.
Since 2020, at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, mutual aid has really become this buzzword term in the United States, even though it has its roots in Black and Indigenous communities as well as communities across the Global South.
I really wanted to highlight one of those communities, Chennai, which is where I've spent some time as a child. They have some of the most expansive welfare programs in the entire country of India. Yet still so many people are growing food insecure and undernourished every year. I was really interested researching how communities have been organizing to fill those gaps, not just today, but also for decades and centuries.
Tell us about your research trip to Chennai.
I did 15 semi-structured interviews with members of different community organizations. I think this was important because I really wanted to ground trust and understanding in all the relationships that I built with my interview participants. A big part of that for me was being able to meet participants where they're at: being there in person, spending time understanding their organization and the environment in which they work, and forming relationships that are rooted in care and trust. All the participants I interacted with were very sweet and welcoming. Sometimes it was the first time I was meeting somebody, and they were treating me like I was their daughter.
What was your biggest takeaway from your research?
One of the biggest takeaways was the idea of empowerment, specifically through women's self-help groups. These are groups of lower income women who come together and pool their resources so they have things to fall back on in a time of emergency. I've learned that the idea of self-help groups actually exist in a lot of countries across the Global South, and that they are an important form of mutual support.
How has this project informed your future aspirations?
This project has definitely helped me to understand how policies can leave a lot of gaps and disparities, and how if we create policies that are modeled off of how communities are organizing, we can potentially help to fill some of those gaps.
After graduation, I will be going to Austria for a US Student Fulbright Award. It is a combined grant, so I would be teaching English for half the time, and then the other half the time I will be doing a service project with a community organization. The organization that I will be working with supports integration for migrant and refugee women.