Erin Bradford Simmons

ERIN SIMMONS, then a graduate student at New School University, New York, New York, was approved funding in September 2023 to aid research on “Slow Activism: Moving beyond Urgency in British Anti-poverty Work,” supervised by Dr. Hugh Raffles. This research explores practices of slow activism: long-term, relational work decoupled from “temporalities of success” and definitions of progress that require goals, impact statements, and quantifiable results. Taking poverty truth commissions, anti-poverty commissions in Britain, and an ecosystem of grassroots organizations in Northwest England, as ethnographic sites, this project seeks to understand how privileging the often-uncomfortable attentiveness of slowness challenges the capitalist logic of most anti-poverty work. This network of activists works to create lasting social change through building durational relationships and pushing against traditional economic models — offering alternative evidences and negating transactionality. As the movement grows, these forms of evidence have become more visible in charity, policy, and government spaces. After a decade of brutal austerity politics, the UK is at an inflection point, and Britain has emerged as a pivotal site to explore the politics of poverty and the necessary materialization of radical new anti-poverty strategies within mainstream discourse. This project asks how slow activism can contribute to an equitable future in an environment of increasing instability.