Re-thinking solidarity movements as infrastructure during the COVID-19 pandemic crisis: insights from Athens

Abstract

ABSTRACT COVID-19 has provoked what seems to be an unprecedented rupture of life as we knew it. This article draws out key insights into the ways solidarity infrastructures were organized in Athens, Greece, during the general lockdown imposed in the country between March and May 2020. Immediately upon the imposition of the restrictions, people devised ways to provide support to those vulnerable, through a combination of local, decentralized and online solidarity movements. In order to make sense of collective action during a period when collective coexistence was banned, we read solidarity movements through the lens of social reproduction as infrastructure, aiming to unearth the visible and invisible materials, ideas, people and technologies that make up for what sustains social movements more broadly. The article draws on ethnographic research in Athens – including participant observation of solidarity movements, along with 82 questionnaire responses. Our findings suggest that emergent solidarity infrastructures build upon and expand solidarity movements forged during previous crises periods, while further contributing new ways of understanding collective action. Accordingly, solidarity movements of the current period adopted prior and novel forms of organizing, which involved groups and individuals already assuming vulnerable positions, as well as those whose vulnerability emerged during the pandemic. While aligning with health emergency measures, this solidarity infrastructure encompassed care, affect and interdependence and challenged the government’s crisis-management agendas. Eventually, thinking solidarity movements as infrastructure unsettles the divisions often encountered in relevant studies between solidarity and protest.