College of Social Sciences

Dr Elisabetta Ferrari is a Sociologist (Digital Media) based in the School of Social and Political Sciences. Elisabetta has been awarded a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant and is currently undertaking international research to examine ‘mutual aid’ as a particular form of activism during the recent Covid-19 global pandemic. Here, Elisabetta shares her research focus and motivation, and reflects on why a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant has been a good fit for her.

Could you tell us a bit about your research programme and its focus?

This research project looks at a particular type of activism – mutual aid. The particularity of mutual aid is that it is directed at supporting people in accessing basic necessities, such as food, groceries or medicines, while creating bonds of solidarity and a shared political understanding. In other words, mutual aid aims to support people facing emergencies and injustices and to get them involved in a collective political struggle against the root causes of such emergencies and injustices. Mutual aid has a very long history in different countries, with roots in anarchist thought, in workers’ mobilizations and, particularly in the United States, in Indigenous communities and communities of color; a great book by Dean Spade, published in 2020, retraces some of these roots. Mutual aid projects can often emerge in the aftermath of disasters; for instance, after Hurricane Sandy hit New York City in October 2012, flooding areas of the city and disrupting electricity provision, a group of activists who had been involved in the anticapitalist grassroots movement Occupy Wall Street got together under the name “Occupy Sandy” to provide emergency relief to affected areas.

Why do you think we witnessed an extraordinary mobilisation of citizens to help one another during the pandemic? In what ways were these efforts facilitated by digital technologies?

While mutual aid has long been important for social movements, during the Covid-19 pandemic we’ve seen a truly remarkable and unprecedented wave of mutual aid activism across the world. From the very first scary months of the pandemic, when so many countries were under lockdown, groups of activists, neighbours, organizers, volunteers, came together to help each other. These mutual aid efforts took different shapes in different places and in different countries: activists delivered groceries, picked up medicines, made masks, offered Covid testing, prepared food and redistributed funds to those who needed them. While, at its core, mutual aid remains a form of activism that is offline and low tech – it is about cooking, packing, delivering – digital technologies played a crucial role in helping activists work together despite distancing restrictions, as well as spread the word about the different projects, raise funds and recruit volunteers. Google spreadsheets, Facebook groups, Whatsapp chats: Covid-19 mutual aid has been mediated by mainstream digital technologies. In addition to helping activists organize each project, social network sites like Facebook and Instagram also allowed activists to learn about the history and principles of mutual aid and educate people about the meaning of this form of activism, but also learn from each other, for instance by circulating best practices across different projects (and even across borders!).

Why are you undertaking a comparative analysis for this project? How will this approach advance our understandings of mutual aid across these specific contemporary societies – the UK, Italy and the US?

This project looks at the different shapes taken on by Covid-19 mutual aid activism in different countries, choosing the United Kingdom, Italy and the United States as cases for comparison. I selected these countries because they were strongly affected by the pandemic, particularly in its early months, and because they saw extraordinary mobilizations for mutual aid. It is estimated that over 4300 mutual aid groups operated in the UK alone during the height of the pandemic; while it is a bit more difficult to estimate the exact number of mutual aid projects in Italy and in the US, this wave of activism is likely to have been among the biggest in the recent political history of these countries. I am therefore interested in examining similarities and differences across the three countries. In particular, I want to analyse how the political meaning of mutual aid might have varied across borders and how digital technologies might have played different roles in the organization of these groups.

The project is based on qualitative empirical research. First, I’ve been working on creating a database of the different mutual aid projects across the three countries, through an extensive digital data collection based on activist websites, media coverage, and social media platforms. The aim of this database is to map these projects and assess their characteristics, including the type of aid they offer(ed), how they defined or described mutual aid, and which digital technologies they employ(ed) in their public-facing communication (e.g. Facebook groups, Instagram accounts, Telegram channels). Second, I am conducting in-depth interviews with activists, discussing with them their experience with mutual aid (and activism in general), how the different mutual aid groups have operated, and what role digital technologies have played in them.

Finally, what motivated you to apply for a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Grant and why is this scheme a good fit for your project?

I started working on this project in 2021, when I was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Digital Studies Institute at the University of Michigan; at that point, I focused my efforts on studying mutual aid activists in the United States. While interviewing activists from all over the US, I also examined mutual aid activists in the city of Philadelphia, through a digital ethnography of their Instagram use, which resulted in an article in Qualitative Sociology. When I started to seek funding to expand this research comparatively, the British Academy/Leverhulme Small Grant was an excellent fit for me, as I sought funding and begin conducting interviews with mutual aid activists in Italy and the UK. Through this scheme I was able to hire a research assistant to help me with mapping different experiences of mutual aid in the different countries, conduct interviews, and attend an international academic conference to present preliminary findings about this research and receive peer feedback.

At the moment, I am conducting interviews with mutual aid activists across Italy, trying to account for how these projects developed in the biggest urban areas in the country, but also examining other interesting experiences in smaller cities. I look forward to start interviewing UK-based activists towards the end of the summer. I am very grateful that activists seem interested in this project and are willing to talk to me about themselves and their activities. They are also showing great curiosity about experiences of mutual aid in different countries; I’ve often encountered this in my previous research about activism, too – activists are eager to learn more about what is going on in other countries. This always gives me such motivation to keep going with my work! As I gear up towards writing up my research in academic peer-reviewed formats, I will also be looking for opportunities for creative dissemination, with the aim of engaging activists and circulating the findings of this project.

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This project is funded by British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grants.

First published: 24 August 2023