Digital Carekit: Developing Activist Communities of Care Online

This carekit resource is aimed at social and environmental justice campaigners and activists who use or want to use digital spaces for all or part of their work. It considers steps to nurture and sustain campaigns and campaigners in digitised conditions. In the carekit, we conceive of care in resolutely collective terms, and centre solidarity, shared practices, and intersectional and environmental considerations.

The carekit is packed with advice and resources on how to make digital campaigning a more collectively caring experience, maintaining and nurturing activist spaces, supporting the success and development of digital activists. It has information on building supportive communities, safety online and celebrating communities as well as successes.

This carekit is a resource particularly needed at a time when states across the world are systematically dismantling democratic freedoms, and Big Tech is complicit in eroding rights to protest and dissent. We are thus also reaching out to all who care: The stakes are high; we must critically reclaim the digital as our common space now, not least through online resistance practices based on mutual care.

The carekit has been written collaboratively by Dr Audrey Verma and Dr Heather McKnight, and illustrated by Griselda Gabriele, drawing on all our research interests and activism. Funding for this project has been provided by Leverhulme Trust and the CHASE Climate Justice Network.