“When Someone Gets Sick, We Run to Them, Not From Them”: Holding Space for Solidarity Otherwise and the City in Times of Covid‐19

Abstract

How can we think about solidarity in ways that are attentive to the diversity of stories, spaces, practices, bodies, and temporalities shaping a city? In this article, we argue that “holding space” is at the heart of such endeavour. In the project that informs this article, we examined different practices and dynamics of solidarity in The Hague, The Netherlands. The project took place during the Covid‐19 pandemic and aimed at exploring the multiple forms of solidarity that occur between city dwellers, the places they occupy in the city, and their daily practices that support urban life. Departing from our own practices of solidarity as researchers with different migratory backgrounds and belongings, as well as a basic understanding of solidarity as an embodied and enfleshed set of relations of care, we interrogate how solidarity practices unfold across different locations in the city of The Hague. Embarking upon this exploration, we as researchers became part of the communities and locations where these communities exist. We learned about solidarity firsthand as our stories became interwoven with those of other residents and the places they inhabit. These stories are the ones we describe in this work. The article is not just about what we learned, but also about how we learned in the process of doing this research. Thereby, we highlight the need to reconceptualize solidarity in a way that allows for differences to come forward; to be creative with those differences (Lorde, 1979/2018) to be able to grapple with the plurality of life stories of solidarity that shape the city of The Hague.