The research arrives at a moment when “caring communities” have become a buzzword in social policy across Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, often invoked as a vision for aging societies in which family, market, and state provision all fall short. Saltiel and Strüver argue that most of this debate focuses on top-down, formally organized local care networks, while overlooking the countless self-organized initiatives — community kitchens, homeless support, refugee hosting, shared childcare — that emerge from below out of sheer necessity. These “shadow care infrastructures,” as other scholars have termed them, respond to the unequal distribution of care resources, yet they are rarely treated as more than stopgaps for failed welfare regimes.

To build their framework, the authors bring two theoretical traditions into dialogue that rarely speak to each other. From Judith Butler they take the distinction between precariousness and precarity: the insight that all humans are fundamentally interdependent and vulnerable — a shared existential condition — while political and economic structures distribute that vulnerability unequally, exposing particular groups to violence, exclusion, and abandonment. From Joan Tronto they draw the ethics of care and the concept of “caring with,” the idea that because everyone begins and ends life dependent on others, the allocation of care responsibilities must be negotiated collectively rather than left to families, markets, or institutions. Situated within a post-structural materialist framework, this synthesis links macro-level inequality to micropolitical practices of everyday life.

The empirical heart of the study comes from six years of qualitative and ethnographic fieldwork in Brussels, conducted by Saltiel between 2016 and 2022. She examined two initiatives coordinated by the Plateforme Citoyenne de Soutien aux Réfugiés, a civil society platform with more than 15,000 volunteers. The first was the informal camp in Maximilian Park, where asylum seekers, undocumented migrants, students, church groups, pensioners, and managers alike built and sustained a temporary settlement. The second was Hébergement, launched via Facebook in autumn 2017, which matched precarious migrants — many of them undocumented and therefore excluded from state reception — with private households willing to host them.

The scale of Hébergement is striking. More than 10,000 households have hosted homeless migrants since 2017, providing roughly 50,000 overnight stays in its first year and nearly 100,000 in the following one. What began as a one-night gesture frequently evolved into longer stays and durable personal relationships. Hosts and guests shopped, cooked, ate, and washed dishes together; they cared for each other during illness, looked after children, and took responsibility for homes, plants, and pets. Participants often described one another in familial terms — hosts addressed as “Mama,” or relationships described as sibling-like — a linguistic move that redefined what “family” and “stranger” could mean.

In the camp, meanwhile, the authors observed how care roles dissolved rather than reinforced the familiar dichotomy between “generous citizens” and “passive, grateful supplicants.” Volunteers were marked by yellow safety vests, and residents of the camp itself — including asylum seekers and undocumented migrants — became volunteers in their own right, running a kitchen and organizing food rescue. One collective of undocumented migrants wrote “Sans-Papiers” on their vests in black marker, a performative assertion of their presence and their role as care providers. Community membership, the authors argue, was produced through the act of caring itself rather than through any criteria of exclusion, forming what they call an “alliance of cohabitation.”

Language itself became a site of political intervention. In the Facebook groups of the Plateforme Citoyenne, volunteers coined the term VNOUS, fusing the French “vous” (you) and “nous” (we) into a single word that blurred the boundary between helper and helped. The neologism spread into the platform’s official communication and even became the title of a 2019 documentary. The authors read this as more than symbolism: naming practices, like the familial terms used in hosted households, are performative acts that rework belonging and challenge racist and nationalist constructions of “us” and “them,” even if such linguistic shifts alone cannot dismantle structural inequality.

The study is careful not to romanticize. The authors note that these communities remain ambivalent and fragile. The high visibility of the camp in a public park generated political pressure on local government, whereas Hébergement moved the problem of unprovided-for people into private homes, rendering it invisible and potentially relieving policymakers of responsibility — a dynamic that echoes critiques of the informalization and deprofessionalization of care work. Paternalistic patterns, in which helpers demand proof of “deservingness” from the helped, can also reappear within volunteer initiatives. The authors insist that such ambivalences are not arguments against these communities, but reminders that they operate within, and against, existing power relations.

What the Brussels cases ultimately demonstrate, Saltiel and Strüver argue, is that community is not a precondition for care but one of its products. These “other caring communities” define themselves not by boundary-drawing or homogenization but by the mutual recognition of shared precariousness and interdependence — what Butler calls a politics of alliance and what the activist collective Precarias a la Deriva termed an affective citizenship bound to care rather than to the nation-state. They are agile and fragile at once, temporary yet transformative, renegotiating social relations and experimenting with forms of togetherness beyond capitalist, familial, and institutional arrangements.

The authors close with a call to treat other caring communities not merely as a social policy concern but as an epistemic perspective — a lens that connects micro-practices of everyday care to macro-structural conditions and expands debates on welfare, provision, and socio-spatial justice. Key open questions remain: whether such improvised arrangements will harden into lasting care infrastructures or remain temporary responses to acute crises, and how gendered, racialized, and classed power relations are reproduced or disrupted within them. In a world of deepening care crises, the everyday practice of strangers caring with one another may be less a utopia than a live experiment in how societies could be organized differently.

Subject of Research: The formation of self-organized caring communities among refugees and volunteers in Brussels

Article Title: Sorgende Gemeinschaften: Performative Praxis des Miteinander-Sorgens

Article References: Saltiel, R., & Strüver, A. (2026). Sorgende Gemeinschaften: Performative Praxis des Miteinander-Sorgens. Geographica Helvetica, 81(3), 481-496. https://doi.org/10.5194/gh-81-481-2026

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.5194/gh-81-481-2026

Keywords: caring communities, ethics of care, precarity, refugee support, Brussels, volunteering, social reproduction, care crisis, performativity, feminist geography, mutual aid, informal care

The research team, led by Selma Durmuş Sarıkahya of Artvin Çoruh University together with colleagues from Artvin Çoruh University and Trabzon University, set out to answer a deceptively simple question: can individuals prevail against disasters, and if so, what personal characteristics tip the odds in their favor? Turkey provides a sobering backdrop for such an inquiry. The country sits atop active fault lines and endured the devastating Kahramanmaraş earthquakes of February 2023, events that killed tens of thousands and exposed gaps in both institutional response and household readiness. Against that backdrop, understanding the psychology of preparedness is not an academic luxury but a matter of survival.

Methodologically, the study employed a relational screening model with a cross-sectional design. Between February and April 2025, the researchers recruited 434 individuals aged 18 and over who visited a Family Health Center in central Kayseri. Participants completed a personal information form along with two validated psychometric instruments: the Disaster Preparedness Scale, which measures concrete readiness behaviors such as emergency planning and supply stocking, and the Individual Disaster Resilience Scale, which captures a person’s perceived capacity to withstand, adapt to, and recover from catastrophic events. Ethical approval was obtained from the Scientific Research and Publication Ethics Committee of Artvin Çoruh University, and the study was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki, with informed consent from all participants.

The statistical analysis, performed in SPSS version 24.0, was thorough and multi-layered. The team ran descriptive statistics, Pearson correlation analysis, independent samples t-tests, one-way analysis of variance, and hierarchical multiple linear regression. The headline result is hard to overstate: disaster preparedness and individual disaster resilience showed a high-level, positive, and statistically significant correlation, with a Pearson coefficient of r = .857 at p < .001. In psychological research, where correlations above .50 are often considered strong, a coefficient approaching .86 is exceptional. It suggests that preparedness and resilience are not merely related constructs but may function as two faces of the same underlying capacity to anticipate and absorb catastrophic disruption.

Correlation alone, however, does not tell the whole story, and the researchers were careful to probe which demographic and experiential factors shaped the relationship. Three variables stood out. Individuals who had direct previous earthquake experience demonstrated significantly higher levels of disaster resilience than those who had never lived through one. Those who volunteered in disaster-related organizations also scored markedly higher, as did participants who reported regular access to disaster-related information. Each of these factors, the findings suggest, builds a kind of psychological infrastructure: lived experience teaches people what disasters actually feel like, volunteering embeds them in networks of mutual aid, and steady information flow keeps risk salient rather than abstract.

These results align closely with established theory in disaster psychology. Protection Motivation Theory, first articulated by Ronald Rogers in 1975, holds that people take protective action when they perceive a threat as severe and probable and believe they can effectively respond to it. Albert Bandura’s work on self-efficacy, and its later application to posttraumatic recovery by Charles Benight and Bandura, similarly argues that confidence in one’s own coping abilities is a central engine of resilience. The Kayseri data provide field evidence for these frameworks: preparedness behaviors appear to function as repeated acts of self-efficacy, each emergency kit assembled and each family evacuation plan rehearsed reinforcing the belief that one can survive and recover.

The study also resonates with a broader international literature on disaster vulnerability and adaptation. Previous research has linked educational attainment to resilience after natural hazards in the Caribbean, documented long-term effects of earthquake exposure on healthcare workers’ resilience in China following the Wenchuan earthquake, and shown that community resilience and household preparedness travel together in flood-prone regions of the United States. Related work by some of the same Turkish authors found that disaster preparedness literacy boosts individual disaster resilience, and that the personality traits of prospective disaster risk managers shape their capacity to cope. The new study extends this evidence base by quantifying the preparedness-resilience link in a general adult population using validated scales rather than proxies.

What makes the findings actionable is the demographic texture behind them. Because individuals without prior disaster experience showed lower resilience, the authors argue that awareness campaigns should be targeted specifically at people who have never faced a catastrophe, rather than assuming that fear of future events will motivate everyone equally. Experience, in other words, is a powerful but unequal teacher: those who have it are psychologically fortified, while those who lack it may underestimate both the likelihood and the consequences of disaster. The researchers recommend developing person-centered disaster preparedness programs, tailored to individual circumstances, and disseminating strategies that raise disaster awareness broadly, particularly among the disaster-inexperienced.

Volunteering emerges from the data as an especially intriguing lever. People who gave their time to disaster-related organizations scored higher on resilience, consistent with studies showing that volunteerism strengthens community resilience in disaster management and that volunteers themselves derive psychological benefits, including a sense of purpose, competence, and social connection. This suggests a practical policy pathway: recruiting ordinary citizens into disaster volunteer corps could simultaneously expand response capacity and cultivate a more resilient population. Similarly, ensuring regular public access to reliable disaster information, whether through official channels, media, or social platforms, appears to keep preparedness behaviors active rather than allowing them to decay between crises.

The study’s limitations are worth noting, as the authors themselves acknowledge in framing the work. The cross-sectional design captures a single moment in time, so it cannot definitively establish that preparedness causes resilience rather than the reverse, and the sample was drawn from visitors to a single Family Health Center in one Turkish city, which may limit generalizability. Still, the sheer strength of the correlation, combined with the consistency of the experiential predictors, gives the findings considerable weight. As climate change intensifies floods, wildfires, and storms worldwide, and as seismic risk persists in tectonically active nations, the message from Kayseri is clear: resilience is not a fixed trait bestowed by luck or temperament. It is built, behavior by behavior, by people who prepare, and societies that make preparation easy, informed, and communal may find that their citizens can indeed prevail against disasters.

Subject of Research: The relationship between individual disaster preparedness and personal disaster resilience among adults in Turkey

Article Title: Can we prevail against disasters? A relational assessment of preparedness and disaster

Article References: Durmuş Sarıkahya, S., Torpuş, K., Sarıoğlu Kemer, A., & Çınar Özbay, S. (2026). Can we prevail against disasters? A relational assessment of preparedness and disaster. Current Psychology, 45(19), Article 1550. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-10099-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-10099-4

Keywords: disaster preparedness, disaster resilience, earthquake experience, volunteering, protection motivation theory, self-efficacy, public health, risk reduction, Turkey, psychology, cross-sectional study, disaster awareness

At the heart of the study are epigenetic clocks, statistical tools that read chemical tags called methyl groups attached to DNA and convert those patterns into estimates of biological age. The researchers used five clocks spanning three generations of development. First-generation clocks, Horvath and Hannum, were trained simply to predict chronological age, using 353 and 71 methylation sites respectively. Second-generation clocks, PhenoAge and GrimAge, were trained on phenotypic markers of immune functioning and on mortality predictors, making them more sensitive to health-relevant decline. The third-generation measure, DunedinPACE, estimates the pace of aging itself, derived from changes in 18 biomarkers of organ system integrity tracked over 12 years in a New Zealand birth cohort. The team used principal component versions of these clocks, a computational refinement shown to improve reliability across populations, and adjusted for blood cell composition, since methylation patterns differ across leukocyte subtypes and could otherwise confound the results.

The analytical design also attempted to address a stubborn problem in volunteering research: healthy people are more likely to volunteer in the first place. To mitigate this self-selection, the researchers applied inverse probability of treatment weighting using data from the 2014 HRS wave, balancing volunteers and non-volunteers on age, gender, race, education, health, depressive symptoms, marital status, wealth, income, work status, and informal helping. This method, which mimics some features of a randomized controlled trial, was combined with HRS sample weights to produce a weighted analysis of 3,919 Americans with valid DNA methylation data. The NICOLA analysis, constrained to cross-sectional data, included 1,830 participants aged 51 and older.

The descriptive picture differed markedly between the two countries. In the American sample, about 35 percent of participants reported some volunteering in the past year, with 6.3 percent contributing 200 or more hours annually. In Northern Ireland, where helping hours were reported per week, roughly a quarter volunteered at least occasionally, but only 0.7 percent reached 20 or more hours weekly. Informal helping, defined as unpaid assistance to friends, neighbors, or relatives outside the household, was common in both countries: nearly half of American participants reported some informal help, while about 31 percent of Northern Irish participants did so.

The results from the United States were striking. Low-level engagement, between 1 and 49 hours per year, was consistently associated with slower epigenetic aging across all five clocks, for both volunteering and informal helping. The associations were strongest and most consistent for the second- and third-generation clocks, which are more closely tied to morbidity, mortality, and physiological functioning. On GrimAge, the mortality-linked measure, volunteering at 1 to 49 hours was associated with decelerated aging, and remarkably, so was volunteering at 200 or more hours per year. Informal helping told a different story at the high end: 200 or more hours of helping per year was associated with accelerated epigenetic age on the first-generation clocks and on GrimAge, with the GrimAge coefficient of 0.49 indicating meaningful acceleration even after extensive covariate adjustment.

The Northern Irish findings were directionally similar but statistically weaker. Lower levels of informal helping, 1 to 9 hours per week, were associated with less epigenetic age acceleration across all clocks, reaching significance only for GrimAge. Higher levels, 10 or more hours per week, trended toward accelerated aging on most clocks, though the estimates did not reach statistical significance. Formal volunteering in NICOLA showed only one significant association, between 1 to 4 hours of weekly volunteering and decelerated GrimAge. The authors attribute the muted results partly to the smaller sample size, which was less than half that of the HRS, and partly to differences in how the questions were worded.

That measurement difference matters. The HRS asks broadly about unpaid help to friends, neighbors, or relatives who do not live with the respondent, capturing everything from errands to home repairs. The NICOLA question asks whether respondents look after others because of long-term physical or mental ill-health, disability, or problems related to old age, a formulation that leans toward caregiving-like support. The authors also note a striking scale mismatch: 200 hours per year in the American data, the level at which informal helping turned harmful, is roughly equivalent to the upper end of the lowest weekly category in the Northern Irish data. The two countries’ highest-intensity helpers are therefore not directly comparable, a limitation the researchers flag for future work as additional NICOLA waves become available.

The divergent pattern at high intensity fits two classic theoretical frameworks. Self-determination theory holds that helping is most health-supportive when it is autonomous and freely chosen, conditions that structured volunteering, where people select causes aligned with their values, tend to satisfy. Role strain theory, by contrast, predicts that helping becomes burdensome when it is frequent, obligatory, or emotionally demanding, as intensive informal helping of family and close friends often is. At 200 or more hours per year, informal helping may begin to resemble caregiving, with its documented physical strain, time pressure, and emotional burden, offsetting the social and psychological benefits that lighter helping provides. Consistent with this, the authors point to prior evidence that high-intensity caregiving is associated with worse mental and physical health outcomes.

The study’s broader lesson may be about how we measure aging itself. The associations between helping behaviors and epigenetic aging were most evident for GrimAge, the mortality-linked clock, and weaker or absent for the chronological-age clocks, underscoring that DNA methylation measures are not interchangeable indicators of a single biological aging construct but distinct windows onto different aging processes. The authors are careful to note that the study is largely associational: inverse probability weighting improves balance on observed covariates but cannot eliminate unmeasured confounding, and the NICOLA analysis lacked a longitudinal weighted design. Still, the findings, supported by funding from the US-Ireland R&D Partnership Programme and the National Institute on Aging, suggest that prosocial engagement may modestly mitigate biological aging across cultures, with the strongest molecular rewards accruing to those who help in structured, chosen, and moderate doses, and a molecular warning for those whose kindness tips into obligation.

Subject of Research: Associations between formal volunteering, informal helping, and epigenetic age acceleration in older adults in the United States and Northern Ireland

Article Title: Association between Helping Behaviors and Epigenetic Aging: Findings from the United States and Northern Ireland

Article References: Kim, S., Potter, C., Halvorsen, C., Hill, C., Smyth, L., Scott, A., McKay, G., Kee, F., McGuinness, B., McKnight, A.-J., Crimmins, E., & Faul, J. (2026). Association between Helping Behaviors and Epigenetic Aging: Findings from the United States and Northern Ireland. SSM – Population Health, Article 101977. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssmph.2026.101977

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1016/j.ssmph.2026.101977

Keywords: epigenetic clocks, DNA methylation, volunteering, informal helping, biological aging, Health and Retirement Study, NICOLA, GrimAge, DunedinPACE, prosocial behavior, older adults, caregiving