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

有人建议，我们的社交世界在紧缩下正在缩小，因为支持社交互动的空间(从游戏小组到图书馆)继续关闭(希钦和肖2019)。然而，亲密的社会关系对我们“挺过”紧缩的方式可能仍然至关重要。在更广泛的紧缩背景下，关于食物贫困的研究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。人们对友谊的关注较少，尽管朋友的支持无疑在人们面对食物贫困时发挥了关键作用。目前，英国约有840万人经历了食物贫困(2016年)。这项研究将把重点放在友谊上，以此来探索友谊如何能够保持我们的社交世界的规模，让人们在食物贫困中生存，并为抵制紧缩提供机会。通过个人和群体的半结构访谈，本研究将探索这些问题，并在城市背景下更好地理解这些问题，将使用来自农村和城市地区的参与者的比较因素。

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.