How has austerity and rising inequality changed the support systems that go under the name of care? What can new informal practices of care teach us about activism, solidarity, and hope in times of crisis? And what has the Covid-19 pandemic revealed about care and politics?
In her important book, Care, Crisis and Activism: The Politics of Everyday Life, ISRF Fellow Dr Eleanor Jupp shows how individuals and communities have responded to weakened institutions by creating their own networks of care.
Drawing together practices which might normally be seen as either activism or community action, the book presents research from diverse case studies involving a politics of care, including protests to austerity cuts, support for migrant women, and mutual aid during pandemic lockdowns. The book reveals the everyday determination and creativity of new structures of support motivated by the hollowing-out of the public sector. Such structures also pose a challenge to states and governments as they offer new ideas for how formal care systems can function.
Dr Jupp vividly sketches the landscapes of solidarity that arose in Britain under austerity. As the 2020s frames new crises including the Covid-19 pandemic, climate crisis, the ‘cost-of-living’ crisis and ongoing austerity, her compelling account of new care practices offers possible routes to collectively navigating them.
Eleanor offers an overview of her book with responses from two experts on the topic: Dr Sarah Hughes, Vice Chancellor’s Research Fellow in Human Geography at Northumbria University, whose work focuses on working on asylum politics, resistance, citizenship and the politics of epistemology within the academy; and Dr Andrew Williams, Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at Cardiff University and co-author (with Paul Cloke, Christopher Baker & Callum Sutherland) of ‘Geographies of postsecularity: Re-envisioning politics, subjectivity and ethics’ (Routledge, 2019). Questions and a discussion follow, moderated by Professor Christopher Newfield, ISRF Director of Research.
This is the seventeenth in the ISRF’s series of Book Launches.