Single Parent Action Network : a legacy of intersectional solidarity and collective action atlocal, national and EU levels
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This paper considers how motherhood and motherwork can empower the politics of the heart and inform the politics of the head; how agency develops when personal injustices are shared with others and given common cause; the potential for change when knowledge and passion experienced by mothers from diverse cultures 32 and backgrounds are channelled into collective leadership and intersectional solidarity. We take the Single Parent Action Network (SPAN) UK (1990 – 2016) as our case study, an organisation that grew from single parents living in poverty meeting in a bedroom in Bristol to share their housing problems, into a network supporting thousands of one-parent families, and taking collective action against poverty, racism and patriarchy at local, national and EU levels. The analysis is informed by our long history of working together in this multi-ethnic organisation, and the knowledge developed over many years through dialogue and praxis in the Freiran tradition,together with members of SPAN, grassroots groups, EU networks and activist-scholars.We consider how political solidarity, empowerment and change can develop organically from the bottom up within and among grassroots groups that negotiate, cocreate, network and build intersectional coalitions, informed by a pragmatic approach to the challenges of single motherhood. An abiding legacy of SPAN is the lasting dialogue, and learning taken into other contexts and settings by SPAN members,intellectual thinking taking place outside of academia, and in collaboration with scholars, most recently through a participatory archiving project. Although the history of SPAN is complex and context specific, we suggest that as part of a broader feminist knowledge project, its legacy can play an important role in continuing to provoke us,and others, to think afresh and inform community activism as well as academic theorizing