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

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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.