‘Being there for our neighbours’. Volunteering during the pandemic and the depoliticization of volunteer support networks in England.

The Covid-19 pandemic of 2020-2021 was a time of intensified voluntary and community activity in the UK. A large number of voluntary initiatives mobilised to provide practical help in neighbourhoods and communities. Unwaged volunteers coordinated efforts to help people struggling to access food, medicine and other essential supplies. Based on a study of home and community-based care provision during the pandemic in a coastal region of southern England, in this talk Rosie Read examines a range of volunteer networks active during the pandemic, focusing on two themes.

First, most volunteers had positive, even joyful experiences of volunteering at this time of emergency. In different ways, they valued the opportunity to meet and show collective solidarity with other people in their local communities. Second, Read will argue that pandemic volunteer networks must, even so, be understood in the context of a longer-term shift towards the instrumentalization and depoliticization of neighbourly cooperation and mutual support that are expressed in and through many volunteer programmes. This has been pursued as a way of stemming demand on the state’s long term care budgets. The talk explores how the pandemic generated social conditions in which this policy to depoliticize volunteering could be accelerated. 

Bio Rosie Read

Dr Rosie Read is a Principal Lecturer in social sciences in the School of Law and Society at Bournemouth University, UK. She is a social anthropologist with research interests and publications on waged and unwaged caring work, social care, volunteering, gender, class, community development, and welfare state transformation. Her ethnographic and qualitative research is based in the Czech Republic and the UK.  

What        

Rosie Read, ‘Being there for our neighbours’. Volunteering during the pandemic and the depoliticization of volunteer support networks in England. 

When     

 11 December, 15.30-17.00, followed by drinks (location TBD).

Where      

REC B3.01 (Roeterseiland, B-building, 3rd floor). 

If you are not able to join in person, you can also follow the talk and discussion via the live stream (with the option to pose a question in the chat). 

Welfare Futures Seminar Upcoming Events 

10 February 2026 – Tessa Bonduelle

10 March 2026 – Dimitris Soudias