Solidarity and Care during the COVID-19 Pandemic is a public platform supported and produced by The Sociological Review that documents and reports on the lived experiences, caring strategies and solidarity initiatives of diverse people and groups across the globe during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Sociological Review has long supported research on social reproduction, which we often discuss in terms of “care”. This includes our blog collections on private troubles/public issues, radical care, and love. As the COVID-19 pandemic makes its way across the globe, questions of care arise at every turn. Drawing across our knowledge, networks and resources we launched this new initiative in order to provide a space where scholars, activists and members of the general public could contribute their insights, concerns and reflections on care and solidarity in these pandemic times. Showcased in our stories of solidarity and care these contributions include standard blogposts, audio and video recordings, letters, and other creative outputs.
We believe that this is important because the pandemic has made visible our need for collective care. Everyday life is characterised by a fear of contagion, public health responses in large parts of the world demanding lockdown and physical distancing. And while these measures are important at slowing the progress of the virus, they are caught up in broader projects of surveillance and control by governments and the introduction of totalitarian measures that will outlast the virus. In the wake of the pandemic, the inadequacies of state care have become all the more apparent. People and communities are finding creative ways to care for others and the self through social connection, the pandemic generative of new social relations and solidarities. Neighbourhoods develop mutual aid systems, as parents, children, friends and strangers draw into sometimes unexpected units.
Our hope is that this dedicated platform will be a freely accessible collective resource that can circulate locally and across continents with the aim of helping us to care better for one another. More than anything, the organic forms of caring emerging in these times offer alternatives to the status quo, and prefigure a future centred on collective care is possible. It is dispositions of cruelty, greed and exploitation that got us into this, it will be care that gets us out.
Read Introducing Solidarity and Care during the COVID-19 Pandemic by project lead, Professor Bev Skeggs to find out more.
