Collective Resources of Social Reproduction and Care? Potentialities and Limitations of Urban Initiatives of Commensality

Abstract

Urban initiatives of commensality (UICs) form micro‐public spaces where people meet, cook together, and share a meal. UICs thereby address both social needs for encounter, care, and community as well as material needs for (free) food. As lived examples of caring‐with, UICs resist neoliberal individualisation, privatisation, and marketisation and experiment with alternative ways of being and relating in common. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in a neighbourhood centre in the city of Graz, Austria, this article explores the practices and social relations of a weekly communal lunch and asks about the potentialities and limitations of UICs as collective resources of social reproduction and care in the city. The analysis is guided by feminist care ethics and social reproduction theory and emphasises, first, the organisational structure and the central role of the employees as curators of this commensal context, second, the caring‐with relations that are established by being and doing in common, and, third, the ambiguous socio‐spatial divisions of labour, both within the UIC and beyond. This contribution extends existing debates of commensality with a feminist analysis of micro‐public curated commensal contexts.