Towards a politics of everyday life

This book has presented the voices and experiences of local activists and community actors of different kinds, working in diverse settings, and with different orientations towards their local action and activism. The case studies have sought to evaluate the potentials and problematics of such sites and practices of activism. Such evaluations include the lives of activists and those they work with, but also in relation to wider spheres of politics, representation and governance. In this way I have traced the outlines of a politics of everyday life, always ‘in the middle of things’ (Tronto, 2015: 4) and enmeshed in other dynamics. As previously discussed, some of the practices here would not normally be included within studies of social movements or activism (see Martin et al, 2007; Jupp, 2012). By bringing them together I have aimed to demonstrate the slippery boundaries between what might normally be seen as ‘volunteering’, community action and political activism. All the projects can be seen as interventions into matters of politics, involving citizenship and empowerment, and questions of care and collective infrastructures. In particular I have considered together the case study of anti-austerity activism around Children's Centres in Chapters 4 and 5, involving practices likely to be understood as activism, alongside case studies of different forms of local action, provisioning and material support (in Chapters 3 and 6) more likely to be understood as ‘volunteering’ or ‘community action’.

In this final chapter I draw together some wider conceptual conclusions about such political significance or politics of everyday life. I do this through considering this politics as operating across three different registers of experience: firstly, personal experiences of political subjectivity and citizenship; secondly, the sphere of the local or community as a site of action and intervention; and lastly, experiences of and encounters with the state, on a local or national level. Matters of care cut across the different registers or spheres, as well as experiences of crises, be it crisis on a personal, local or wider national (or global) level (Jupp et al, 2019). While I thus focus on the projects as productive of citizenship practices and a politics of everyday life, this of course does not detract from a critique of the conditions of crisis that frame them.