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technical paper
Ordinary lives and everyday actions: Reframing the political within community projects
keywords:
everyday life
activism
community
“It’s about the everyday and just supporting people to live ordinary lives, which should be everybody's right.” Jenny, the coordinator of St Hilda’s East Food Co-op told me as we discussed the politics of the East London project. While she recognized that this was political, she also saw it as very local, questioning the role of acts such as helping people with their grocery shopping in a wider “transformation of power”. But what constitutes political action? Where is it situated and at what scale? While the bold politics of mass social movements, social justice campaigning work and overt forms of direct action are often easily legible as political, the comparatively mundane actions taking place within the context of community projects can be seen in more ambivalent terms as Jenny’s words attest. Due to their everydayness, many forms of community organizing are under-recognized as urban activism, even among their participants • who often include larger numbers of women and minoritized communities (Jupp 2012). This limits the truths that come to be told about the nature of political action, and the kinds of people who are involved. Drawing on feminist and anarchist perceptions of the political, which are attentive to the practices of care (Tronto 1993) and collective responsibility (Kropotkin 1902) often fostered within community projects, this paper seeks to reframe understandings of the political by exploring the mundane and everyday forms of political action apparent within two London-based, grassroots, retail food co-ops • St Hilda’s East and Fareshares.