Digital Activism

Abstract

Austerity blogs emerged in the context of radical reform of welfare benefits and constrained household budgets. The blogs, written by those forced to live hand-to-mouth, are a hybrid form of digital culture that merge narratives of lived experience, food practices, and political commentary in ways that challenge the dominant views on poverty and hunger. A Girl Called Jack disrupted existing hegemonies by breaking the silence that the stigma of poverty imposes on the impoverished, drew attention to the corporeal vulnerability of hunger, and invited the pity of the reader. In the process, Jack refuted individual-failure accounts of the causes of and challenged notions of welfare dependency by detailing practices to survive and eat healthily on a £10-a-week food budget. This combination of narrative and survival practices resonated powerfully, yet also polarized opinion, drawing attention to social uneasiness over growing levels of poverty and deep divisions over who is responsible for addressing these, and more fundamentally, who the modern poor are and what modern poverty is.