Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: sticking plasters and cotton wool
- 1 Care, austerity and the politics of everyday lives
- 2 Citizenship and community in times of crisis
- 3 Journeys into and through local activism under austerity
- 4 Austerity politics and infrastructures of care: Children’s Centre closures and activism
- 5 Small stories and political change: local activism across time and space
- 6 Provisioning in times of crisis
- Conclusions: a politics of everyday life?
- Appendix: overview of research projects
- References
- Index
Introduction: sticking plasters and cotton wool
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 September 2022
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: sticking plasters and cotton wool
- 1 Care, austerity and the politics of everyday lives
- 2 Citizenship and community in times of crisis
- 3 Journeys into and through local activism under austerity
- 4 Austerity politics and infrastructures of care: Children’s Centre closures and activism
- 5 Small stories and political change: local activism across time and space
- 6 Provisioning in times of crisis
- Conclusions: a politics of everyday life?
- Appendix: overview of research projects
- References
- Index
Summary
Approaching a politics of everyday life
This book is concerned with matters of community, local action and practices of care, and their relationship to matters of austerity, crisis and transformations of the welfare state. I begin with two quotes from Sandra, a community activist running a residents’ group in a deprived neighbourhood in Stoke-on-Trent, a case study discussed further in Chapter 3. I had known Sandra since 2005, when I had first undertaken research in her neighbourhood. She spoke to me during a second round of research in 2013, about the impacts of austerity cuts on the projects they ran in her community. Much of their energy was now spent on a food redistribution project, collecting surplus food from supermarkets and making it available at very low cost to residents. Yet she told me:
‘It's a sticking plaster [my emphasis] and it's never going to achieve the outcomes of making somebody self-sufficient. You’re not going to get to the stage where they don't need that service. Until they get a job, until the benefits are paid properly, until they’re not ill anymore, until the families are grown up, there are so many things that impact on why people can't feed their families that we’re never going to solve that.’ (Sandra, Community activist, Stoke-on-Trent)
In the same interview, Sandra also mentioned that they were no longer able to run a youth club because of loss of spaces at the local school. However, she said that they had now found different ways to run sessions with young people:
‘So we lost all those facilities. We didn't let that stop, we delivered projects in open space, whether it be overgrown doesn't matter, you know if the grass is four foot high you can go bug hunting. If it's cut down nicely you can play cricket and ball games, it doesn't matter, there's going to be some sort of green space somewhere that can be used, which is what we did.’
Sandra's words here demonstrate some of the issues at the centre of this book, of the immense pressures on communities and community action under austerity, but also the creativity and persistence demonstrated by local activists.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Care, Crisis and ActivismThe Politics of Everyday Life, pp. 1 - 10Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2022