The True Cost of Living

From food banks to disability support, the state’s responsibility toward the population has been hollowed out.

What happens when the state fails to provide even the most basic care? And what of care’s opposite - harm enacted in the name of charity or welfare?

We welcome Tanisha Spratt, author of Ungrievable Lives, China Mills, author of No More Deaths by Welfare, and Kayleigh Garthwaite, whose book Hunger Inc explores the food-charity sector, as they come together to discuss what it really takes to live in the UK today - and the kinds of structures people create as means of survival.

Our speakers:

China Mills is the author of No More Deaths by Welfare (Pluto, 2026). After being an academic for many years, China joined Healing Justice Ldn, and created the Deaths by Welfare project. China has been part of disabled people's movement organising for over a decade - documenting welfare state violence by centring the resistance of people with lived experience of the welfare system in fighting for justice. China now leads the research team at Healing Justice Ldn - growing capacity for community-led health and healing, and building towards life affirming infrastructures. Kayleigh Garthwaite is Professor of Social Policy and Inequalities at the University of Birmingham. She is the author of Hunger Pains: Life Inside Foodbank Britain (2016) and of Hunger Inc.: Building Solidarity Beyond the Food Bank (2025). In 2018 Kayleigh co-founded the Global Solidarity Alliance for Food, Health, and Social Justice (GSA), an international collaboration between academics, NGOs, and grassroots campaigners. She is also a long-serving trustee of the Independent Food Aid Network (IFAN).

Dr Tanisha Spratt is a Senior Lecturer in Racism and Health in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, King’s College London. Building on her sociology background and working across literary and cultural studies, Tanisha’s research centres on racial health inequalities in the UK and the US. Specifically, her research focuses on the role of neoliberalism in promoting and sustaining understandings of personal responsibility, deservedness and grievability when it comes to health, illness, death and dying. Tanisha is currently leading a Wellcome-funded project exploring the uses of Black joy in promoting Black British health.

Our chair

Ellie Muniandy is an anti-oppression queer POC therapist, trainer and facilitator. They work at Tripod training, a workers collective which supports social and ecological justice movements in Scotland.