Learning mutual aid: food justice public pedagogy and community fridge organizing online

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay analyzes how participants within the community fridge movement use social media to facilitate informal learning and organize improvisational food justice through mutual aid. I offer a qualitative analysis of 20 community fridge Instagram accounts from the US and Canada over three years, with attention to how they disrupt dominant food charity discourses – scarcity, saviorism, and surveillance – and disclose tensions with sustaining their work such as uneven labor burdens and the limits of online activism alone. As such, these accounts offer entry points into critical reflexivity about neoliberal stigma and learning alternative ways to practice radical care amid compounding crises and conditions of food apartheid. Bringing together research on mutual aid organizing, food justice communication, and public pedagogies online, I offer theoretical and applied insights into the role of mediated public pedagogy in food justice activism and the contingent everyday labor of sustaining decentralized mutual aid.