Caring Democracy Now: Neighborhood Support Networks in the Wake of the 15-M

ABSTRACT

In 2011 the Indignados traced a line of flight from austerity policies. They invented unprecedented spaces for participation, re-imagined Spanish democracy and turned their attention to forms of life as spaces for political transformation. Their practices enacted a collective sensitivity that challenged the regime of impotence blocking their lives. The global financial crisis was denying them a future, and their ability to think and act together. Ten years later, while the COVID-19 pandemic interrupted the world’s normal course, self-organizing neighbours updated the Indignados’ sensibility and methods. This article analyses the neighborhood support networks created by the Mutual Aid Groups (GAM) in A Coruña, Spain, during the lockdown in March 2020. As the government urged people to stay at home and obey the public health directives, the GAM took care of vulnerable life and democracy, threatened today by new authoritarian drives. From the standpoint of the ethics of care and an interest in experimental social movements, we discuss the power of a caring democracy, which sustains life and renews the democratic turn of the 15-M.

KEYWORDS:

• Mutual Aid Groups
• 15-M
• caring democracy
• COVID-19
• affective politics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Carlos Diz

Carlos Diz is a social anthropologist and Lecturer at the Department of Sociology and Communication Sciences at the University of A Coruña (Spain). Researcher at the Societies in Motion Research Team (ESOMI), his ethnographic fieldwork has mainly been developed in the domain of social movements, anthropology of the body and urban studies. His most recent work focuses on the intersectional analysis of collective action, precarity, mobilities and migration studies.

Brais Estévez

Brais Estévez is an urban geographer who currently works as an independent researcher. He has done research in Barcelona, where he studied on urban controversies and the politics of public spaces in the context of a strong crisis of representation. Between 2017 and 2020 he worked in Salvador, Bahia (Brazil), as a Postdoc researcher in the Geography department of UFBA. His recent work has appeared in the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research and Radical Housing Journal.

Raquel Martínez-Buján

Raquel Martínez-Buján is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Sociology and Communication Sciences at the University of A Coruña (Spain). Her research has been oriented to the study of international migration, sociology of care, sociology of family and social policies. Nowadays, her work has focused on the social organization of care and the analysis of the community sphere and the interpersonal networks of care providers.