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Paper short abstract:

During the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020-21, the care and support provided by voluntary mutual aid groups intensified in many local communities. This article develops a feminist social reproduction approach to assessing care and redistribution of mutual aid initiatives in southern England.

Paper long abstract:

Mutual aid groups provided essential support to many people during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020-2021 in the UK. This article explores the social and political contexts in which pandemic mutual aid initiatives operated. Although mutual aid initiatives are often associated with leftist and anarchist forms of political activism, I argue for critical attention to how they can be made to serve neoliberal agendas. Drawing on a qualitative study of care and support networks in southern England, carried out during the pandemic crisis of 2020-2021, I show how local government responses to protecting vulnerable citizens during the pandemic crisis relied, to a significant extent, on harnessing the capacities of mutual aid groups and offloading the costs of providing support onto unwaged volunteers. In this talk, I discuss three distinct mutual aid groups, embodying respectively radical leftist, egalitarian and liberal-conservative political commitments, as evident in their members’ views on social rights, civic obligations and appropriate forms of economic (re)distribution. I analyse how local government authorities encompassed, co-opted and selectively took advantage of the help mutual aid groups provided, variously shaping and depoliticizing them. In this way, mutual aid groups of all political persuasions were, to varying extent, drawn into a neoliberal agenda of absorbing the costs of caring for people made vulnerable by the pandemic. My analysis develops a feminist social reproduction approach to the critical understanding of pandemic community activism and mutual aid.