Making the difference: friendship, geographies of care and food insecurity

There are suggestions that our social world is shrinking
under austerity, as the spaces that support social
interaction (from play groups to libraries) continue to close
(Hitchin and Shaw 2019). Yet intimate social ties may
remain crucial to the ways we 'survive' austerity. Set within
the wider context of austerity, research on food poverty -
currently experienced by an estimated 8.4 million people in
the UK (The Food Foundation 2016) has begun to explore
the role of family and of a range of community support
mechanisms in enabling people to cope with food poverty.
Much less attention has been paid to friendship, though the
support of friends undoubtedly plays a key role in the
'resilience' of people facing food poverty. This research will
focus on friendship as a way to explore how they are able
to keep our social worlds large; allow people to survive in
food poverty and also provide opportunities for resisting
austerity. Through both individual and group semistructured
interviews the research will explore these
issues, and to develop a better understanding of them in an
urban context, a comparative element, in which
participants are from both rural and urban areas, will be
used.