Lunch: the most important meal of the day : exploring the kitchen-table resilience of a mental health collective

Sammanfattning

Communities survive partly because of how members interact with each other at the micro level to maintain daily practices of common pool resource management. This factor contributes to their resilience, to the tendency of the institution to continue and to resist shocks. This thesis is an investigation of a self-managed mental health community in Stockholm, seeking to understand how it maintains its own resilience in the face of the challenges its members face. These include health struggles and a lack of energy for coordinating and carrying out tasks. Using an ethnographic method over several months I observe how members interact with each other to carry out tasks and make decisions in a ‘low-threshold manner’. This is done in a patchwork way that can be analysed using the framework of institutional bricolage, where collective institutions are created from a range of existing practices and resources. This case study examines a community that manages its common pool resources, including cultivated land, and also carries out administrative tasks. The kitchen and the rhythm of activity around daily preparation of lunch is seen as a crucial node which enables this pattern of resilience through institutional bricolage.