Stay Home, Sustain Lives: Pandemic Support Networks and Social Reproduction

During the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020–2021, voluntary and community networks in the UK mobilised to provide practical help in neighbourhoods and communities. This article locates these networks within longer-term historical trajectories of social care policy and provision. Drawing on data from a qualitative study from southern England, this article explores how pandemic community responses fulfilled and scaled up the pre-pandemic policy objective of expanding volunteer and unwaged community labour in social care provision. Feminist theories of social reproduction are applied to explore how this occurred in ways that were bound up with, and reproductive of, neoliberal capitalist social relations. Community and volunteer support networks sustained many lives through the pandemic, but they also shielded capital and the state from bearing the full costs of looking after people made vulnerable by the virus.