Andrea Gibbons

This research examines the role of food aid providers, including their spatial engagement, in seeking to alleviate urban food poverty. Current levels of urban poverty across the UK have resulted in an unprecedented demand for food aid. Yet, urban poverty responsibility increasingly shifts away from policymakers to the third sector. Building on Castilhos and Dolbec’s notion of segregating space and original qualitative research with food aid organisations, we show how social supermarkets emerge as offering a type of transitional space between the segregating spaces of foodbanks and the market spaces of mainstream food retailers. This research contributes to existing literature by establishing the concept of transitional space, an additional type of space that facilitates movement between types of spaces and particularly transitions from the segregating spaces of emergency food aid to more secure spaces of food access. In so doing, this research extends Castilhos and Dolbec’s typology of spaces, enabling a more nuanced depiction of the spatiality of urban food poverty.

In this chapter, we contribute to debates about how social science research can influence policy and practice. We draw upon our own experiences as social policy researchers whose work focuses on poverty and social security to provide case studies of our varied efforts to influence policy and practice at both local and national levels. We identify three main approaches that we have utilised across our research: working collaboratively with policy and practice stakeholders in the design and delivery of research; engaging with national policy and practice stakeholders during the lifetime of projects; and submitting research evidence to government consultations. Our approaches represent varying degrees of relationship building and ‘closeness’ with policy and practice stakeholders, which, in turn, impact on both the level of influence our work has achieved and our understanding of that influence. In this chapter, we provide some reflections and lessons learnt from across our work.

In this chapter, we reflect on how theoretical perspectives, such as liminality, can be useful for researchers seeking to understand and alleviate lived experiences of poverty. We draw on how we deployed liminality theory in a recently published paper to conceptualise lived experiences of food insecurity as transitional; as fluctuating between phases of everyday food access and food marketplace exclusion. By using liminality as an exemplar theoretical perspective, we discuss a concept that we developed and termed paraliminality, a hybrid of two types of liminality phenomena that is both empowering and generative of a lasting form of indeterminate state. In reflecting upon paraliminality, we argue that it can illuminate the social mechanisms, practices and spaces that co-construct people’s more enduring, but fluid, experiences and phases of food insecurity and food access efforts. We illustrate the main theoretical arguments being made with data from our study of food insecurity, involving interviews with people who were experiencing food insecurity, volunteers who were providing access to food aid and fieldwork photographs of the independent food banks and pantries that took part in the research. The chapter contributes to food insecurity, poverty and marketplace exclusion scholarship by reflecting on the importance of using theoretical lenses in qualitative research work and by reflecting on and deploying an illustrative research project to explain how theory can be used and why it matters.

Local state and third sector actors routinely provide support to help people navigate their right to social security and mediate their chequered relationship to it. COVID‐19 has not only underlined the significance of these actors in the claims‐making process, but also just how vulnerable those working within ‘local ecosystems of support’ are to external shocks and their own internal pressures. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork with organisations providing support to benefit claimants and those financially struggling during COVID‐19, this paper examines the increasingly situated nature of the claims‐making process across four local areas in the United Kingdom. We do so to consider what bearing ‘local ecosystems of support’ have on income adequacy, access and universality across social security systems. Our analysis demonstrates how local state and third sector actors risk amplifying inequalities that at best disadvantage, and at worst altogether exclude, particular social groups from adequate (financial) assistance. Rather than conceiving of social security as a unitary collection of social transfers, we argue that its operation needs to be understood as much more fragmented and contingent. Practitioners exhibit considerable professional autonomy and moral agency in their discretionary practice, arbitrating between competing organisational priorities, local disinvestment, and changing community needs. Our findings offer broader lessons for understanding the contemporary governance of social security across welfare states seeking to responsibilise low‐income households through the modernisation of public services, localism, and welfare reforms.

This article examines lived experiences of food insecurity in the United Kingdom as a liminal phenomenon. Our research is set within the context of austerity measures, welfare reform and the precarity experienced by increasing numbers of individuals. Drawing on original qualitative data, we highlight diverse food insecurity experiences as transitional, oscillating between phases of everyday food access to requiring supplementary food, which are both empowering and reinforcing of food insecurity. We make three original contributions to existing research on food insecurity. First, we expand the scope of empirical research by conceptualising food insecurity as liminal. Second, we illuminate shared social processes and practices that intersect individual agency and structure, co-constructing people’s experiences of food insecurity. Third, we extend liminality theory by conceptualising paraliminality, a hybrid of liminal and liminoid phenomena that co-generates a persistent liminal state. Finally, we highlight policy implications that go beyond short-term emergency food access measures.

We came to this issue before the outbreak of Covid-19, and we release it amidst what feels like an entirely new, and yet also entirely known world-order—a place of multiple and multiplying crises that existed before the pandemic and continue, relentlessly, to render certain people, bodies and homes disposable. It is against this cruelty, but also with a renewed sense of radical hope in justice everywhere, that RHJ first came to be. The majority of contributions to Issue 2.2 emerge from a long process of designing and selecting participants for the event Radical Housing Encounters: translocal conversations on knowledge and praxis. This event was meant to take place in person, in three separate locations simultaneously, at the end of May 2020. Through it, we sought to define and re-define radical housing knowledge and practice, paying particular attention to diverse methodological, theoretical and ethical approaches deployed in both research and militant practice around the globe. While disappointed that the event could not take place as originally planned, its rationale and ethics of care are central to the making of this issue and are reflected in the texts of its contributors as well as the process of organising the issue.