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�Community action in times of crisis: new infrastructures of solidarity and care?�

Dr Eleanor Jupp

University of Kent

e.f.jupp@kent.ac.uk

Introduce myself and background

My talk will draw on my work on the politics of care that have emerged as the UK faces the ongoing contraction of the state due to austerity, but also overlapping crises of Covid-19, the housing crisis and the current ‘cost of living’ and energy costs crisis. As well as the climate crisis. Drawing on my recent monograph, ‘Care, Crisis and Activism’ (Bristol University Press, 2022) I will local projects to meet care needs in communities, for example around food, housing and social support.

To what extent do experiments in local activism build solidarity and care across divisions in communities? What are the limitations and potentials of this emergent politics of care.

Setting the scene:
Case studies of care and everyday activisms
Political horizons and possibilities

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Setting the scene: shifting state affects?

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Setting the scene: From austerity to ‘permacrisis’?

Setting the scene: From austerity to ‘permacrisis’? In the UK we have moved from processes of austerity associated with the post-Labour and post-crisis government of 2010-2016 to, since 2016, what can be thought of as an atmosphere of ‘permacrisis’ – unstable government and governance involving overlapping crisis

Overlapping political, economic, environmental and health crises: we have moved into an era of politics and economics which has a confusing and incoherent quality. We have experienced at times the intense presence of the state – telling us what to do during covid for example, in ‘command and control’ mode – but also an absence of state, especially in terms of an entity which might be relied on to provide care.

The disappearing and slippery state…(Kiely, 2022, Hitchen, 2016, 2019). This has led to what has been characterized as the ‘camouflaging’ of austerity – services are renamed or restructured and it is hard for citizens to grasp what is at stake and what is being lost.

Examples in slides

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Everyday activism in contexts of crisis

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Town Mutual Aid scheme

Pandemic lockdowns saw upsurge of practices of ‘mutual aid’ and community support
Language of ‘solidarity’ as opposed to charity, although also kindness and neighbouring
Enabled by forms of digital technology (eg Facebook, WhatsApp) as well as face-to-face and material practices,

Pandemic lockdowns saw upsurge of practices of ‘mutual aid’ and community support – in many ways ‘turbo-charging’ existing forms of community support and aid. Especially around providing food to people classified as ‘vulnerable’
Sustainability and practices of projects shaped by resources and social geographies of particular localities. So this links to what I was just saying about class – that mutual aid groups more likely to spring up and crucially be sustained in areas with a middle class presence – eg one town in SE England that I studied - As elsewhere, dominated by women, especially middle class women
Mutual aid was a relatively new term in the UK, it comes from the US and partly traditions of black organising there, as well as a history of anarchist thought and practice. Language of ‘solidarity’ as opposed to charity, although also kindness and neighbouring and I’m not sure that all volunteers saw themselves as taking part in an anarchist or radical set of practices.
Again enabled by forms of digital technology (eg Facebook, WhatsApp) as well as face-to-face and material practices, and involving ‘stranger intimacies’ (Koch and Miles 2021) that online connections can enable. So bringing together people in quite personal ways around the provision of food and access to medication, providing social support etc.

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Town Mutual Aid Scheme

At the beginning, as well as being scary, there was an enormous amount of possibility opening up, what had been considered immoveable… rules of how society worked, what government can and can’t intervene in – were – absolutely blown apart- and it was very exciting….

I don’t feel that the reshifting of possibilities is finished yet.. it’s still there to be shaped

(Dave, Town Mutual Aid co-Ordinator)

However, project ran out of steam with the shifting of lockdowns - conditions of ‘crisis ordinary’ coming to dominate mutual aid

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Baby bank in London�

Shop space in South London, started by a mother ‘at her kitchen table’ to share baby goods and clothes
Highly unequal (and gentrified) area in terms of class and race
Baby bank works through a system of referrals and rationing, ‘to reach those most in need’

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Baby bank in London�

Discourses of solidarity and care in the face of austerity and rising child poverty: ‘I just can’t bear the thought of it… of families struggling’ (donor)– and caring practices of volunteers
But – rationalities shaped by referral process and awkward interactions between donors, volunteers and recipients – distance in terms of class and race - ‘violence of the gift’ in a divided society?

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Tracing new care-based forms of activism: political horizons and possibilities

Creativity and improvisation in projects -drawing together different material, digital and discursive resources –new forms of solidarity and connection between strangers apparent

But – a fragmented sphere and increasing disengagement with spaces of local democracy – instead operating at ‘edges’ of the austere welfare state

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Tracing new care-based forms of activism: political horizons and possibilities

Hard to maintain promises of ‘solidarity not charity’ in a context of increasing need for material aid
Need for critical frameworks such as- ‘solidarity economics’ offering a more radical approach to collective resources and shared power – rooted in an understanding of intersectional difference

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Towards infrastructures of solidarity and care?