Doing solidarity: language and race in spaces of otherwise

This paper draws on ongoing ethnographic work, conducted since December 2018, that documents the everyday doing of solidarity work in a London-based homeless charity that aims at organising food handouts and providing free food to people on the streets. The charity was set up and is run by volunteers who are either (ex-)homeless, (ex-)squatters or professionals who call themselves grassroots activists. In a statement against the other charities' embezzlement of donations and cooperation with the Home Office in deporting homeless migrants, this charity aims to show solidarity with homeless people and tries to pull together local communities to maximize resource utilization (e.g. rebuilding local empty buildings into temporary shelters; organizing free street festivals), to activate an act of political solidarity and "give a shift" on homelessness. In relation to Foucault's (1997) understanding of heterotopic spaces and Povinelli's (2011) concepts of "space of otherwise", the charity that tries to demonstrate the possibility of organizing a society differently can be seen as a space of potentiality where people engage with projects of hope and change. In this paper, I produce an ethnographic account of the strategies developed by different individuals in the charity as they try to cultivate and enact projects of change and hope. I examine the challenges that these individuals encounter in their everyday doing of solidarity, and unpack the contradictions between their radical agendas and racializing discourses, dynamics of power and the structures of inequality that both influence how they operate and frame their ability to promote change. I particularly discuss how language both, as ideology and practice, mediates these processes; that is, I examine how language both enables and prevents the practice of solidarity and the pursuit of projects of change and hope.