Workers´ Social Cooperatives in the Area of Public Mental Health in Argentina. Support for the wellbeing of stigmatized populations

HERAS, ANA INÉS

Magill

Simposio; Social Enterprise Academic Symposium; 2022

Australian University of Social Enterprise Alliance

In this presentation, I will organize my talk around three aspects. Firstly, I will provide an analytical description of some structures created within these cooperatives, documented by our collaborative work. I will characterize the flexible, always-in-transformation, and thus fluid structuring structures created by participants, showing the relationship between these organizational creations and the processes of direct participation of members (e.g., in monthly assemblies, committees and small working groups) who are situated in different positions because of the role in which they were invited to join when they came into the group.Secondly, I will discuss how these organizational structures created within these cooperatives have been developing a praxis of care for wellbeing, highlighting both the possibilities and challenges presented to participants. I will relate this analysis to the overall concept of autogestion and heterogeneity in participation.Lastly, I will discuss a third aspect, namely how our collaborative research work on these processes and with these organizations has been informing recent changes in public policy. Thus, some of the results of the in-progress analysis was put to work in almost-real-time during 2020-2022 because specific conditions of possibility were at place. I will conceptually ground my talk in the concepts of structuring structures, heterogeneous participation processes of autogestión, and collaborative knowledge generation of collective property. I intend to show that several tools, methods, concepts, and ways of thinking are to be composed together in a framework grounded both in disciplines (such as ethnography, interactional sociolinguistics, political philosophy, community and diverse economies, and psychoanalysis) and in the collective experience of participants who meet to think and act together with an understanding of parity and mutuality (Heras, 2014; 2018).