Introduction

The previous chapter was concerned with the competing visions of care that emerged during the processes of closures of Children's Centres, and the campaigns against such closures. As shown, these processes can be thought of as making visible and enabling the articulation of the ethics and practices of care that had been valued within the centres, at the point at which the services were under threat. The question of the value of a space such as a Children's Centre comes under intense scrutiny at the moment at which closure or service reduction is being discussed (Penny, 2020). My account so far has therefore sought to pay detailed attention to the stories and visions of care that emerged.

However, the politics of activism and, more specifically, anti-austerity activism, is clearly not simply a question of articulating an alternative vision to that being proposed by decision-makers. Key is considering how such a vision is articulated, the ‘tactics’, strategies or forms of representation deployed by those resisting change at a moment when quite complex discursive politics is in play (Hitchen, 2021). By what means and under what conditions can the voices and experiences of service users in such contexts be heard? And how far can the specificities of experience that emerge connect to wider political movements, resistance and change?

In this chapter, the modes of activism, or ‘everyday dissensus’ (Penny, 2020) and ‘persistent interventions’ (Kern and McLean, 2017) employed by the Children's Centre campaigners are discussed, to explore what they tell us about how marginalised groups might make demands on the state, within contexts of austerity and beyond. A key mode, as briefly discussed in the previous chapter, is around practices of storytelling, which emerged as a primary form of activism (see Cameron, 2012; Jupp, 2020). As discussed in Chapter 2, of importance is not just how stories were told, but in what contexts and spaces, and how they were listened to or received and evaluated. The chapter begins with a general discussion of the politics of storytelling, and then moves on to tracing the emergence of storytelling within the protests against Children's Centre closures. Different arenas of storytelling are considered, from council meetings to online spaces.