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

有迹象表明，随着支持社交互动的空间（从游戏小组到图书馆）不断关闭，我们的社交世界正在紧缩之下萎缩（Hitchin and Shaw 2019）。然而，亲密的社会关系可能对我们“生存”紧缩的方式仍然至关重要。在更广泛的紧缩背景下，对食物贫困的研究——目前英国估计有840万人经历着食物贫困（食品基金会2016年）——已经开始探索家庭和一系列社区支持机制在帮助人们应对食物贫困方面的作用。尽管朋友的支持无疑在面对食物匮乏的人们的“恢复力”中起着关键作用，但人们对友谊的关注却少得多。这项研究将把重点放在友谊上，以此来探索友谊是如何让我们的社交世界变得更大的；让人们在食物匮乏中生存，也为抵制紧缩提供机会。通过个人和团体半结构化访谈，研究将探讨这些问题，并在城市背景下更好地理解这些问题，将使用比较元素，其中参与者来自农村和城市地区。

There are suggestions that our social world is shrinkingunder austerity, as the spaces that support socialinteraction (from play groups to libraries) continue to close(Hitchin and Shaw 2019). Yet intimate social ties mayremain crucial to the ways we 'survive' austerity. Set withinthe wider context of austerity, research on food poverty -currently experienced by an estimated 8.4 million people inthe UK (The Food Foundation 2016) has begun to explorethe role of family and of a range of community supportmechanisms in enabling people to cope with food poverty.Much less attention has been paid to friendship, though thesupport of friends undoubtedly plays a key role in the'resilience' of people facing food poverty. This research willfocus on friendship as a way to explore how they are ableto keep our social worlds large; allow people to survive infood poverty and also provide opportunities for resistingausterity. Through both individual and group semistructuredinterviews the research will explore theseissues, and to develop a better understanding of them in anurban context, a comparative element, in whichparticipants are from both rural and urban areas, will beused.