The Hologram: Mutual Aid Research

What is the Care Crisis?

The Hologram as Mutual Aid Research with Emma Dowling and Cassie ThorntonThis interactive workshop will ask participants to engage with the meaning and material of the growing Care Crisis. What is it, and why is it important?

Why don’t we have enough carers? Is it possible to run out of care? The Hologram has shown us that asking for help is difficult for everyone, but especially for people who do care work.

Emma and Cassie are a part of a larger team of researchers around The Hologram mutual aid practice and community who are looking at how we can understand and respond to the growing crisis of care, and if The Hologram is a social medicine can help at a larger systemic level.“Since 2016 a growing group of international collaborators have been formulating and practicing a viral, anti-capitalist, peer to peer mutual aid practice called The Hologram. Now it is a well-worn practice of sustained revolutionary care that is used around the world. Starting in 2020, when we started teaching online courses, many began to practice the protocol of The Hologram in our own lives. We became the first developers and testers of a practice that involves asking for and receiving long term distributed support from people in our communities. We believe that we are now harder to fuck with.The premise of The Hologram is deceptively simple: One person invites three people to support them through regular seasonal meetings. These three people – the ‘Triangle’ – meet altogether, digitally or in person, to focus on asking questions about the physical, mental and social health of the ‘hologram’, who invited them. The hologram, in turn, teaches these listeners how to give and also receive care. When they are ready, the hologram supports them to each set up their own triangle of support by three people, and so the system expands. This social technology is based on “The Integrative Model” which was developed in a Social Solidarity Clinic in Thessaloniki, Greece during the height of the financial and migration crisis. In this model, a patient is seen by a doctor, social worker and therapist in one setting. Our research team would like to learn from Integrative Model practitioners and about what they learned and how they changed after providing nearly a decade of free, non-hierarchical, integrated care.”