Networks of Care: Digitally mediated mutual aid during the Covid-19 Pandemic

Throughout the first years of the Covid-19 pandemic, mutual aid, especially digitally mediated mutual aid, proliferated as communities responded the challenges of the pandemic and its social, political and economic consequences. This thesis explores how social media platforms shaped the practice of mutual aid throughout the Covid-19 Pandemic in Toronto, and how those engaged in mutual aid navigated the challenges created by those platforms. The thesis combines a review of the online content of three digitally mediated mutual aid projects (the Facebook group CareMongering-TO, and the Instagram accounts OpenYrPurse and Climate Justice Toronto (CJTO)), with two interviews with account administrators. Drawing on both platform studies and feminist media studies, it argues that while social media enables new forms of care to emerge, it can also create profound challenges for people, particularly marginalized people, as they try to care for each other.