Foodwork during times of crisis: informal care, improvised solidarity and food-aid mutualism in Manchester and Stockholm

Wylie, A. (2026) Foodwork during times of crisis: informal care, improvised solidarity and food-aid mutualism in Manchester and Stockholm. PhD thesis, University of Reading. doi: 10.48683/1926.00129452

Abstract/Summary

This thesis examines how the Covid-19 pandemic forged new forms of informal care, improvised solidarity, and food-aid mutualism that reshaped foodwork and access to food for people living at the margins of neoliberal ci es. Focusing on Manchester, England, and Stockholm, Sweden, it explores the material and emo onal burdens placed on low-income and marginalised groups during the pandemic and the voluntary foodwork which a ended to their needs. Methodologically, the thesis employed a qualita ve case study approach in both ci es. In Manchester, a mul ple method approach was applied combining semi-structured interviews, a focus group, and par cipatory foodwork, and in Stockholm, a patchwork ethnographic approach. Fieldwork was conducted between January 2023 and July 2024. The research findings are presented as three peer-reviewed publica ons. The first paper uses a feminist geography lens to cri cally interrogate the concept of the Anthropause. It challenges the no on of a ‘paused’ pandemic society by analysing the domes c and community foodwork of minority women in Manchester and the improvised solidari es of volunteers who alleviated the burdens of hunger and isola on. Together with my co-author, I propose the no on of the ‘Anthro-No-Pause’ to emphasise the con nuing and/or deepening of physical, material and emo onal ‘vernacular labours’ during lockdowns. The second paper brings mutual aid and care scholarship into dialogue with visceral food geographies to examine community foodwork during Manchester’s Covid-19 emergency food response. I show how by centring dignity, reciprocity, and sensory pleasure, community food carers reintroduced ‘good food’ into the diets of the food insecure. The paper thereby makes two contribu ons. First, it demonstrates that the visceral is poli cal: sensory and embodied food prac ces become sites through which inequality, dignity, and care are re-nego ated. Second, it shows how this foodwork forged reciprocal and affec ve forms of mutuality that I conceptualise as ‘food-aid mutualism’. The third paper applies a feminist ethics of care lens to examine the grassroots food distribu on groups in Stockholm caring ‘with’ socially and spa ally excluded residents. The paper illustrates how informal care infrastructures emerge in contexts of welfare retreat, how they are reshaped in mes of crisis such as Covid-19, and how they expose new forms of rela onality, responsibility, and morality in caring prac ces. Overall, this thesis offers new conceptual and empirical insights into the significance of informal care infrastructures, mutualism, and feminist ethics of care in sustaining marginalised communi es within neoliberal welfare transi ons. Concurrently, it warns that foodwork is susceptible to neoliberal co-optation. Making this tension visible is essential to resist the incorporation of foodwork into austerity infrastructures and to preserve its political potential as a radical practice of solidarity and social change.

Item Type	Thesis (PhD)
URI	https://centaur.reading.ac.uk/id/eprint/129452
Identification Number/DOI	10.48683/1926.00129452
Date on Title Page	December 2025
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