Читать книгу Growing Up and Getting By - Группа авторов - Страница 8
ОглавлениеJohn Horton, Helena Pimlott-Wilson and Sarah Marie Hall
Introduction
We wish this book was not necessary
This collection gives voice to children, young people and families at the sharp end of contemporary processes of neoliberalisations, austerities and economic crises in diverse global contexts. We wish this book was not necessary or timely. However, as three geographers who have worked with many children, young people and families in different settings over the last 15 years, we are writing from a deep sense of sadness and urgency. This book has developed out of our anger and concern that the lives and prospects of so many of our research participants have demonstrably been adversely affected by manifestations of neoliberalisations, austerities and economic crises. The book is also written from heartbreak that our own communities, families and lifecourses have been profoundly affected by the same horrible processes. So as a point of departure, the following three vignettes from our research introduce some key terms, processes and deeply affecting encounters which echo throughout the following chapters.
John’s research: just getting on with austerities, or ‘we’re fucked’?
During the global financial crisis of 2007–08, John was in the middle of several research projects based in spaces of play, youthwork and social care in the English Midlands. These spaces and communities were radically transformed by subsequent public sector funding cuts. Literally all of the youth organisations John worked with back then have now closed; literally all of the youthworkers and practitioners he worked with were made redundant. Within a few years entire, taken-for-granted categories of work/space (‘the public library’, ‘the statutory youth service’) were downsized, decommissioned and – apparently permanently – deemed unviable. John has written about some of these experiences (Horton, 2016; 2020) but, to be honest, finds it a bit too difficult. John holds on to the way many young people from these contexts demonstrated such tenacity, care and solidarity: ‘a kind of modest, resigned, sometimes-determined acceptance’ and capacity to ‘just get on’ with their lives and communities (Horton, 2017: 287). On the other hand, John can still hear a research participant talking about the probable closure of a particular service: they simply said ‘we’re fucked’ and walked away. John was reminded of this when, in a recent project with Brazilian young people, a participant described the impacts of municipal funding cuts on local water supply: ‘we are always waiting for water. Things are fucked’.
Helena’s research: neoliberal subjectivities in play, education and parenting
Through a range of projects about play, education and parenting in economically diverse communities, Helena has traced some of the ways in which ‘the self-reliant, entrepreneurial citizen-worker has become the epitome of the ideal neoliberal subject, as paid work has become the corner-stone by which social inclusion and successful citizenship are measured for those of working age’ (Pimlott-Wilson, 2017: 289). Across diverse UK contexts, Helena’s work reveals how ‘this shift to an aspirational politics which normalises and mainstreams practices associated with a narrow, middle-class conception of aspirations marginalises those who do not, or cannot, conform to … ideals of neoliberal citizenship’ (Pimlott-Wilson, 2017: 289). Helena has been struck by the people she has met who ‘get by’ and ‘grow up’ in ‘hard times’: young people who ‘get in trouble’ at school because they can’t sleep well in their cold, damp homes and thus struggle to concentrate; families who experience food poverty when social welfare benefits are cut with little warning following work capability assessments; children unable to participate in after-school activities because they can’t afford a 50p fee. Nevertheless, her research also shows that the material basis of these ‘hard times’ is often overlooked in political and policy contexts, and those who face the greatest challenges are unjustly blamed, in unguarded and stigmatising terms, for their perceived failure ‘to support their children’s learning … evading their responsibilities and … not putting children’s needs first’ (Holloway and Pimlott-Wilson, 2012: 645–646).
Sarah’s research: everyday austerities and the complicated business of care
In 2013–15, Sarah undertook an in-depth programme of longitudinal ethnographic research with families in Greater Manchester, UK, exploring real, felt, lived experiences of austerity. One key finding from this study was the extent to which austerity in the UK must be understood as ‘a distinctly gendered ideology, process and condition’ (Hall, 2019a: 5) in two senses. On the one hand, ‘women have been disproportionately affected by these cuts as a result of structural inequalities which mean they earn less, own less and have more responsibility for unpaid care and domestic work’ (Hall et al, 2017: 1; see also Greer Murphy, 2017). On the other hand, Sarah also notes that most theorisations of austerity have been done by white, male, metatheoretical ‘big boys’ (after Katz, 1996) working in a very particular, self-assured political-economic tradition. There is an artwork in one of Sarah’s creative outputs from the ethnographic research that gets John every time: entitled ‘caring is a complicated business’, it features a research participant talking about friends, family and different ways they care for one another (Hall, 2017), beautifully evoking relational and reciprocal communities of care in hard times.
With these kinds of encounters very much in mind, this book brings together new work by multidisciplinary researchers who have explored the ongoing consequences of neoliberalisations, austerities and economic crises for children, young people and families. As we explain in the following sections, we use the term ‘hard times’ to connect and think through the multiple, compound, challenging and deeply affecting situations that emerge through the book.
Hard times? Neoliberalisations, austerities and economic crises
The following chapters are all framed by concepts and contexts of economic crisis, austerity and neoliberalism. Here, we begin with a definitional and critical discussion of each of these terms, before offering the idea of ‘hard times’ as a provocative way of opening up new kinds of discussion about these interrelated processes.
Economic crises – and specifically the global financial crisis of 2007–08 – casts a dark shadow over all the chapters in this book. By now, the causes and form of the global financial crisis have been extensively historicised (Sorkin, 2009; Konings and Somers, 2010; Mason, 2010). There are many comprehensive accounts of the crisis as a political-economic event, narrating the toxic and overwhelming coming-together of deregulated banking industries (Crotty, 2009), byzantine financialised commodity markets (Martin, 2011) (that we cannot even claim to understand), callous and shady banking practices (French and Leyshon, 2010), hubristic and inflated housing markets, vastly expanding sub-subprime mortgage and ‘buy-to-let’ sectors, lending defaults, property foreclosures, devalued mortgage bonds, crashing mortgage-backed securities (Aalbers, 2009), ineffective regulatory safeguards, panicked banking and financial institutions, contractions in closely interdependent banking/financial/manufacturing industries (Derudder et al, 2011), declining consumer confidence, runs on banks, multi-scaled economic shocks, shrinking GDPs, rising unemployment, and profound strain on often-risk-exposed public sector finances (Blažek et al, 2020). In many parts of the world, these complexly-intertwined crises and spaces of private and sovereign debt (see Langley, 2008; French et al, 2009) ultimately constituted the most severe economic recession since the Great Recession of the 1930s. This was manifest in, for example, a 4.5% decline in per capita GDP across the EU in 2009, and an increase in EU unemployment levels from 7.1% in 2008 to 10.5% in 2012 (Crescenzi et al, 2016; Eurostat, 2014). In developing this book, our aim has never been to contribute another neat narrative of the political-economic causes and consequences of the global financial crisis. Indeed, we will argue that principally theorising the global financial crisis as a political-economic event has led to personal, everyday, affecting lived experiences of economic crisis being overlooked in a great deal of major research in this area. Against this grain, we foreground the experiences of children, young people and families actually living-with economic crises in practice – and the messy, traumatic, nightmarish scenarios that this still entails, even more than a decade after the supposed end of the global financial crisis. Note, too, that we refer to economic crises in the plural here, to decentre normative Anglo-American accounts of the global financial crisis and acknowledge the existence of multiple, diversely-situated economic crises in the past, present and future (that’s capitalism, sadly) (see also Larner, 2011). By pluralising crises, we also highlight the diversity, and gross inequity, of experiences of the global financial crisis: there is no universal experience of economic crisis – and it would be inaccurate to suggest that now is universally worse than some imaginary past time for all – but this book explores how, for some, the 2007–08 global financial crisis has intensified and compounded inequalities in diverse ways and settings.
Many of the following chapters also explicitly deal with children, young people and families living in situations of austerity. As Hall (2019a: 2) notes, ‘austerity’ has a twofold meaning being both a popular term denoting frugality or ‘a condition of severe simplicity and self-restraint’ and, latterly, a descriptor for ‘a specific set of actions and policies by the state: the reduction of spending on public expenditure with the precise aim of reducing governmental budget deficit’. In particular, through this book, austerity is widely used to characterise a repertoire of ideological and policy responses to the 2007–08 global financial crisis and the recessions it later prompted. In this context, many state and federal governments in Europe and North America were quick to adopt severe public sector austerity programmes (see Hall et al 2020). This austerity politics was typified by very substantial and rapid cuts to budgets for welfare, local government, social care, civic spaces, public transport, and cultural, community, educational, heritage and leisure services. Although ideologically justified as a ‘necessary’ process of ‘balancing the books’ and reducing government indebtedness by cutting spend on ‘non-essential’ services, there is now considerable evidence that this vast roll-back of public spending has extended and compounded economic crises and constituted new social-political crises in diverse settings. In the UK, for example, the right-wing Conservative-led government’s HM Treasury Spending Review of 2010 instituted an unprecedented programme to cut public spending in England by £81bn by 2015, including a 51% cut in the budget of national government departments, a £7bn cut in national welfare budget, and a 27% cut in the budget for Local Authorities, while devolving responsibility for implementation of these cuts to local agencies and actors (HM Treasury, 2010). The consequences of this round of multimillion spending cuts are still, at this time of writing, emerging. As with the 2007–08 global financial crisis, academic research primarily figured and theorised austerity as a political-economic event via important concepts, like ‘austerity urbanism’ (Peck, 2012), which foreground the impacts of ‘rolling back’ public expenditure for cities, regions, economic systems and governance thereof (Aalbers, 2009; Kitson et al, 2011). It is only relatively recently that sustained scholarly research has begun to evidence the substantial impacts of austerity for lived and local experiences (O’Hara, 2014), charting the increased prevalence of forms of food poverty (Garthwaite, 2016a), child poverty (Ridge, 2013), social isolation (Cross, 2013; Power and Bartlett, 2019), community breakdown (Jones et al, 2015), social care crises (Loopstra et al, 2016), and populist exclusionary ideologies (Vasilopoulou et al, 2014). Against this backdrop, this book collates new evidence about the haunting impacts of austerity for children, young people and families in diverse contexts. It is our hope that the following chapters will help to open up new kinds of research and conversations about austerity, beyond the political-economic, recognising the profound personal, everyday and intersectional harms constituted by recent austerity politics. Note, again, that we pluralise austerities to acknowledge diverse instances of austerity – past, present and future – and to recognise people’s diverse orientations towards, and experiences of, public funding cuts in practice.
Underpinning all of the following chapters is a concern with longer-run processes of neoliberalism. This contested label critiques a series of linked, decades-long processes through which logics of individualism, free marketeering, cost-effectiveness, competitiveness, self-governance, managerialist reform, and rationalisation have come to be normatively embedded in all manner of workplace, organisational and policy contexts (Newman, 2013; Peck and Tickell, 2002). It is argued that, through these shifts, tactics of organisational ‘leanness’, ‘flexibility’, budgetary efficiency, competitiveness, outsourcing, ‘doing more with less’, the erosion of solidarities, and ‘marketisation and privatisation, whether frontally or incrementally introduced’ (Hall 2005: 322; Garrett, 2009; Shaw, 2009) became default operating principles of diverse organisational-institutional spaces in many post-1945 economies and policy contexts. It is thus argued that neoliberal reforms over the last half century created preconditions of vulnerability and risk which were profoundly exposed by the global financial crisis (Crescenzi et al, 2016). Or, somewhat differently, it is argued that recent austerity policies should be understood as intensified moments of neoliberalism, where neoliberal claims for deregulation, state roll-back and efficiency measures advanced dramatically after, or even through, the global financial crisis (Harvey, 2007, 2017). In this book, we do not intend to frame our discussion solely in terms of these political-economic theorisations of neoliberalism: instead, the following chapters focus on children, young people and families who find themselves in diverse neoliberalised settings. Indeed, we share concerns about the totalising, daunting metanarrative of neoliberalism (Barnett, 2005; Peck, 2013; Roy et al, 2012). However, we have found critical work around this concept important in diagnosing multiple forms of individualism, competitiveness and cost-effectiveness (Larner, 2003) which surface in all kinds of ways in the following chapters. We thus write in terms of neoliberalisations to highlight processes which are demonstrably affecting children, young people and families encountered in our research, without necessarily claiming it as a coherent, singular, stable or uncontested -ism. Again, we prefer to think in terms of plural neoliberalisations to recognise the multiple processes and experiences going on within this term.
After much discussion, we settled on hard times as a focal concept for the book. We use ‘hard times’ as a figure of speech – encompassing neoliberalisations, austerities and economic crises – for four reasons. First, we want to emphasise hardness. Through our research, we have witnessed first-hand the hard, hurtful, bruising, crushing, distressing, inequitable and inflexible impacts of neoliberalisations, austerities and economic crises for children, young people and families. The chapters in this book are full of experiences of painful, strain-filled, horrible, stressful situations: truly hard times, although the nature and severity of this hardness varies from context to context, shaped by all manner of structural inequalities, longstanding exclusions and power imbalances. In preparing this book, we therefore wanted to allow space for voices that speak of the sheer hardness of growing up in situations of social injustice and marginality that are being constituted or intensified by neoliberalisations, austerities and economic crises. There are clear resonances between our ‘hard times’ and Cloke et al’s (2016) coining of the mean times to describe austerity-era Britain, or Loach’s (2015) powerful evocation of the conscious cruelty inherent in contemporary neoliberal welfare regimes. Likewise, our ‘hard times’ are closely related to notions of precariousness (‘an ontological condition common to all life’) and precarity (how certain lives and spaces experience markedly and structurally greater exposure to risks, harms and traumas) (Harker, 2012; after Butler, 2009). However, second, in talking of ‘hard times’, we wanted to write and think in a register that children, young people and families might relate to. We wanted this book to centre the actually-existing, personal, everyday, emotive experiences of children, young people and families living with neoliberalisations, austerities and economic crises. Rather than totally impose a grand, inaccessible scholarly language – of neoliberalisations, austerities, economic crises or precarities – onto those experiences, we want to explore the critical potential of more colloquial understandings that come more from children, young people and families themselves: hence ‘hard times’. Third, in particular ‘hard times’ helps us think about how complexly relational and interrelated processes are lived and experienced. We use ‘hard times’ to encompass neoliberalisations, austerities and economic crises and the ways in which these processes are always already materially, experientially, ideologically and affectively intertwined in practice. Thus, while a cool scholarly reading might enforce a nuanced distinction between neoliberalisations, austerities and economic crises, in this book we want to recognise how these processes are lumped together, materially and spatially (Katz, 2004; 2018) and in people’s everyday experiences. Fourth, we like ‘hard times’ precisely because it feels a little colloquial, indefinite and conditional. We want our slightly flip notion of ‘hard times’ to serve as a point of critique of singular metanarratives of neoliberalisation, austerity and economic crisis. We worry about using terms like ‘neoliberalisations’, ‘austerities’ and ‘economic crises’ because (even with our pluralisation and critique) they feel proper and seem to denote quite intractable, permanent, inevitable, implacable situations. They also risk perpetuating crisis-led discourses of childhood and youth, wherein children, young people and families are overwhelmingly defined and shaped in terms of crises and related moral panics (O’Toole, 2015). Constantly writing about neoliberalisations, austerities and economic crises can feel overwhelming and hope-less. Thinking in terms of ‘hard times’ feels a little more hopeful: it contains a sense that hard times might, sometimes, hopefully, be endured, survived, eased and moved-beyond; it allows us to breathe a little easier; it allows the possibility that hard times might pass, and that some sort of tenacity, solidarity, care, reckoning or resistance (see Askins, 2015; Jupp, 2017) might, somewhere, be possible …
Children, young people and families in hard times
In developing this book, we wanted to advance understandings of neoliberalisations, austerities and economic crises in three key ways. First, we wanted to make space to recognise and better understand the distinctive experiences and constitutive presence of children, young people and families within these contexts. We are really troubled by the way that children, young people and families are overwhelmingly absent from chief scholarly accounts of neoliberalism, austerity and the global financial crisis. There are just so many landmark accounts of these processes in which children/childhood, young people/youth and families/family do not appear once (for example, Peck and Tickell, 2002; Crotty, 2009; Martin, 2011; Peck, 2012; Blažek et al, 2020). These kinds of accounts have been critically important in shaping understandings (including our own) of contemporary political-economic processes. But these agenda-setting narratives have consistently declined to acknowledge the everyday experiences of children, young people and families. Their modus operandi – typically starting with slick city-, state-, or corporately-scaled case studies – seems to disallow any encounters with diverse, personal, or more raw lived experiences of those at the sharp end of these processes. Even where these kinds of analyses mobilise data around, for example, child poverty or youth unemployment, we would argue that children and young people themselves are rarely given voice. The authors of the following chapters redress this absence via work which explicitly foregrounds the experiences, lives, fears and hopes of children, young people and families in diverse hard times. The chapters do not just ‘fill a gap’ in extant accounts of neoliberalisations, austerities and economic crises: rather, as we argue later, these accounts require a more radical rethinking of how these hard times matter, how they cause harm and intensify marginality, and how they are lived-with and lived-through (or not).
Second, conversely, the book stands as an argument that more multidisciplinary researchers working with children, young people and families should directly consider neoliberalisations, austerities and economic crises. We are struck by how few scholars from, for example, Children’s Geographies and interdisciplinary Childhood and Youth Studies have directly engaged these political-economic contexts (thus further perpetuating the absence of children, young people and families from normative scholarly accounts of these processes). There are important exceptions to this, and certainly our own work has been inspired by the exceptional, haunting work of scholars like Cindi Katz (2004; 2011), Sue Ruddick (2007a; 2007b) and Karen Wells (2015) on global neoliberalised childhoods, as well as studies by Jupp (2016), France (2016), Wilkinson and Ortega-Alcázar (2018), Stenning (2018) and van Lanen (2017; 2020) who vividly evoke youth and/or family in diverse austerity contexts. However, we suggest that this work has often been situated as a somewhat substantive, specialist concern within Children’s Geographies and interdisciplinary Childhood and Youth Studies, in a way which seems vastly out of proportion to the profound impacts of global neoliberalisations, austerities and economic crises for children and young people’s lives. Certainly, it seems remarkable that searching for ‘austerity’ or ‘economic crisis’ in titles/abstracts/keywords of research published in leading subdisciplinary journals currently only turns up one paper in Childhood (Filho and Neder, 2001), one paper in Children’s Geographies (Cairns, 2017) and seven papers in Journal of Youth Studies (McDowell, 2012; Cairns et al, 2014; Gateley, 2014; Bendit and Miranda, 2015; Allen, 2016; Michail and Christou, 2016; Nikunen, 2017). In this context, the following chapters signpost many ways in which multidisciplinary researchers could do more to address the impacts of neoliberalisations, austerities and economic crises for children and young people’s lives (Pimlott-Wilson and Hall, 2017), particularly inasmuch as they intersect with gendered, classed, ableist, post-colonial, heteronormative, and cis-normative modes of marginality and social exclusion.
Third, more broadly, we worry that too much is lost in normative accounts that figure neoliberalisations, austerities and economic crises in primarily political-economic terms. To us, assured, well-worn, important political-economic narratives of neoliberalism, austerity and economic crisis have a peculiar, distancing effect. City- and state- scaled critiques of these problems can inure us to lived experiences and impacts, as all manner of traumatic effects/affects go unseen and undocumented (Stenning, 2020). In preparing this collection, our central concern was to constitute a space where often-overlooked experiences of hard times as lived, as felt, as endured, as intimately experienced and as personal (Hall 2019a) could be articulated. As a counterpoint to normative political-economic analyses, the following chapters offer multiple instances of hard times ‘lived in, through, and punctuating everyday life … shaping lifecourses, biographies and imaginaries’ and as ‘lived, intimate, and so very personal’ (Hall, 2019b: 480, 490).
Our aim, then, has been to bring together new work which (re)connects scholarly research with everyday spaces and experiences, to address how diverse hard times ‘bleed into the very fabric of everyday geographies – the spaces in which people live, meet, work, play – in different ways and at a range of magnitudes’ (Hall, 2019c: 770). We also wanted contributors to write about/with a wider emotional-affective register than has typically been the case, to acknowledge raw, visceral feelings of trauma occasioned by austerity’s ‘diffusive cruelties’ (Hitchen, 2019) and more ambiguous, quiet or gentle and more hopeful, less lurid, less grandly narratable kinds of stories (Pottinger, 2017; Horton, 2020), and anything inbetween. Moreover, by juxtaposing these globally-located accounts, we hoped to suggest something of the complexly-relational, co-incident, always-multiple social-material processes which have often been hidden in normative political-economic analyses of neoliberalisations, austerities and economic crises (Lee et al, 2009; Hitchen, 2016). In so doing, we want the following chapters to act as a series of challenges to (re)frame understandings of hard times in terms of critical theorisations of everydayness, care, homes, families, intimacies, intersectionalities, injustices and activisms and via encounters with children, young people and families themselves.
Growing up and getting by: new perspectives on neoliberalisation, austerities and economic crises
Through encounters with diverse, globally-situated children, young people and families, the following chapters develop new understandings of ‘hard times’ around three key themes. The sections deliberately juxtapose chapters which are globally located, multi-method and multidisciplinary to bring different kinds of research, participants and hard times into dialogue.
In Part 1, chapters share a concern with transformations. Authors present new qualitative and quantitative evidence of the transformative impacts of hard times for contemporary experiences of childhood, youth and family in diverse international contexts (Horton, 2016; Ribbens et al, 2013). The chapters highlight some of the substantial, but unevenly experienced and locally experienced, transformations constituted by neoliberalisations, austerities and economic crises. Chapters will explore the interconnected, but geographically-differentiated, regionally-distinctive and personally-experienced nature of these transformations, via case studies from different states, regions, localities, cities and communities. Case studies as diverse as Swedish educational settings, Peruvian youth migrations, South Korean cafés, North American college campuses and British-Ghanaian households, evidence emergent new conditions of precarious, neoliberalised, austere, indebted or in-crisis childhood, youth and family lives. These chapters provide compelling evidence of some of the harms, anxieties and uncertainties constituted by these contexts. In particular, chapters note the way in which hard times are transforming everyday communities, ecologies and infrastructures and also the discursive formations of childhood, youth and family per se (France, 2016; Pimlott-Wilson, 2017).
In Chapter 2, for example, Eric Larsson and Anki Bengtsson show how multiple waves of neoliberal educational marketisation are transforming Swedish schools, student experiences and family prerogatives. The chapter explores some of the impacts of educational marketisation becoming normalised within institutional and urban spaces. Larsson and Bengtsson show how successive educational neoliberalisations in Stockholm since the 1990s have radically transformed schools in this region, not least via a major proliferation of schools funded by for-profit venture capitalist investors. The chapter also shows how aspirational discourses and architectures thus constituted are impacting upon young people’s everyday experiences, creating and hardening classed social exclusions. Larsson and Bengtsson thus call for more careful, participatory understandings of actually-existing neoliberalisations in the lives of children, young people and families.
Dena Aufseeser’s chapter (Chapter 3) highlights the complex, intersecting nature of transformations in contemporary children, young people and families’ lives. Through participant observation with young people who migrate from rural Peruvian villages to Lima for work during school vacations, Aufseeser notes how young migrants are caught between a range of differently-paced transformations. On the one hand, the lives of these young people and their families are being profoundly affected by rapid and relentlessly uneven economic change in Peru as well as accelerating anthropocenic environmental degradation. Young people display considerable resourcefulness and tenacity to support their families despite such precarious and changing conditions. On the other hand, however, young migrants’ lives are also being shaped by remarkably static and obdurate Peruvian media/policy discourses which cast them as vulnerable ‘victims’ and call for migration to be ‘prevented’ via criminalisation or education programmes. Aufseeser shows how this combination of rapidly-worsening economic-environmental risks versus only-slowly-evolving social norms is placing young migrants in profoundly challenging situations of isolation and marginality. Aufseeser thus suggests that enduring social norms about idealised childhood and family need to be critiqued and expanded to better understand and support children, young people and families in rapidly transforming political-economic situations.
In Chapter 4, Jonghee Lee-Caldararo shows how the transformational impacts of neoliberalisations, austerities and economic crises are felt at intimate, bodily scales. Through interviews and participant observation with young people at a selection of Seoul’s ‘24-hour cafés’ Lee-Caldararo argues that a highly competitive neoliberalised education system in South Korea, coupled with anxieties about post-recessionary unemployment and job insecurity, have led to ‘laziness’ being stigmatised. In this context, Lee-Caldararo suggests that sleeplessness, chronic fatigue, anxiety and stress have come to be normalised bodily conditions for many young people. This is evidenced by the preponderance of ‘24-hour cafés’ in Seoul, where many young people regularly study, work and doze through the night, in lieu of going to bed. Through this haunting chapter, Lee-Caldararo vividly evokes the way in which neoliberalisations, austerities and economic crises are lived and deeply felt as personal, corporeal conditions, every day and every night.
Denise Goerisch’s chapter (Chapter 5) also shows how processes of neoliberalisations and austerities result in profound forms of strain, tension and anxiety for many young people. Goerisch explores the transformative impacts of educational neoliberalisation and austerian budget cuts within North American Higher Education, particularly emphasising the proliferation of student debt. Through ethnographic research with students at a Wisconsin college the chapter charts some of the troubling, complex ways in which debt has come to be closely entangled with many young people’s lives, at the same time that sources of support for indebted students have been significantly dis-invested. Goerisch suggests that experiences of debt pervade practically every aspect of young people’s experiences, homes, education and family lives. However, Goerisch also argues that media and political discourses about student debt in the USA remain wedded to an idealised, rosy imaginary of student lifestyles, plus aspirational expectations of students as future workers/consumers, overlooking young people’s own, present-day experiences as ‘indebted subjects’. The chapter thus makes a compelling case for taking greater care to understand young people’s own personal, present lived experiences.
In Chapter 6, Michael Boampong explores how neoliberalisations, austerities and economic crises have reshaped families and households in diverse and profoundly uneven ways. Through qualitative research with British-Ghanaian young adults, Boampong considers the ambivalent and unequal impacts of migration and labour market policies in the wake of the global financial crisis and decades of transformative neoliberalisations. Boampong argues that neoliberalised and austerity social welfare systems in Europe and North America have increasingly required families to care for themselves, while removing protections that would previously have supported them. The chapter shows that experiences of British-Ghanaian families differ markedly depending on their economic and social capital, with wealthier families experiencing unprecedented freedoms while other less wealthy British-Ghanaian families increasingly experience profound constraints, barriers and marginality within migration and social care contexts. Boampong argues that these polarised experiences each require young people to ‘do family’ in new ways, setting in motion new kinds of transnational flows of migrants, capital and ideas. The chapter thus suggests that understandings of youth and family in hard times must apprehend the diversity of kin, household and family-like networks through which family is being done in practice.
The chapters in Part 2, deal with what we are calling inequalities/intersections. Through diverse case studies, the chapters explore how hard times intersect with wider social-cultural geographies (for example, notably, here, of age, gender, ethnicity and social class) to produce new or intensified forms of poverty and inequality (see also Donald et al, 2014). A number of chapters explicitly use the term ‘intersectionality’ – which originated in black feminist scholarship (Crenshaw, 1991) – to denote ‘the simultaneous, intersecting, inseparable, coterminous and multiple forces of oppression acting on individuals/groups’ (Chadwick, 2017: 2). In juxtaposing these chapters, we invite reflection on how these forces of oppression are constituted via particular comings-together of social-cultural differences and inequalities, but also via intersecting discourses, norms, materialities and institutions (see Horton and Kraftl, 2018). Thus through international case studies encompassing Indian and Bangladeshi migrations, Ethiopian child labour, UK child poverty policies, corporate financial education, Filipino-Canadian masculinities, and international youth voluntarism, the chapters evidence the multiple forms of harm, vulnerability and precarity that are constituted by these inequalities/intersections. Authors consider how normative concepts of poverty, gender, stigma, parenthood and social class are being rethought or entrenched in and through the everyday lives of children, young people and families in diverse, global contexts. The chapters thus consider how the ‘diffuse and extended events’ of neoliberalisations, austerities and economic crises are materialising in practice (Hitchen and Raynor, 2020) and intersecting with diverse other forms and discourses of marginality (Garthwaite, 2015; 2016b).
For example, in Chapter 7, Heather Piggott explores how experiences of poverty in rural Bangladesh and North India intersect with experiences of motherhood and family caregiving. Piggott notes that previous research on women’s labour market participation in the global South has overwhelmingly taken the form of nationally- or regionally-scaled quantitative economic analysis, overlooking families’ lived experiences of poverty and work. Through rich mixed methods research with families in rural Bangladesh and North India, the chapter explores how experiences of poverty, inequality and marginality are compounded by neoliberal labour market restructurings and traditional patriarchal gender roles. The chapter suggests that subtle shifts in social attitudes may be allowing some hopeful, affirmative futures for women and girls in this context, but these attitudinal shifts remain uneven in terms of religion, class and caste norms. In so doing, Piggott calls for further intersectional work exploring intra-household and intra-familial labour relations and negotiations and their impacts for young people and families.
In Chapter 8 Vicky Johnson and Andy West reflect upon participatory research with street-connected young people in Addis Ababa and Kathmandu. The chapter shows how these young people’s experiences of profound marginality intersect with, and are patterned by, the very uneven provision of institutional support offered by government and non-governmental agencies. Johnson and West’s work with these young people reveals multiple, compound forms of marginalisation that remain hidden from public perceptions and government policymaking in both Ethiopia and Nepal. In particular, Johnson and West highlight how experiences of poverty intersect with young people’s experiences of genderfluidity and disabilities. In so doing, they call for further youth-centred research and ‘living rights’ advocacy to better understand and address children, young people and families’ bodily and relational experiences of poverty intersecting with gender, ethnicity, sexualities, caste, family situations, exploitative work and disabilities.
The chapter by Aura Lehtonen and Jacob Breslow (Chapter 9) considers how the lives of children and families intersect with, and are adversely affected by, contemporary policy and media discourses of ‘childhood’ and ‘family’ per se. Lehtonen and Breslow focus on the UK government’s deployment of normative discourses of childhood in relation to austerity policies. They argue that harsh, neoliberalising policies have been advanced precisely through discursive appeals to normative concepts of ‘childhood’. Specifically they evidence how key policy programmes have simultaneously ‘infantilised’ poor parents and ‘adultified’ poor children to justify austerity policies which – with dark irony – have the most severe impact on poorer families with children. Lehtonen and Breslow thus show how intersecting policy and media discourses should be folded into relational understandings of children, young people and families’ lives in the current political-economic moment.
In Chapter 10, Carl Walker, Peter Squires and Carlie Goldsmith offer a further example of the discursive positioning of children, young people and families in the contexts of economic crises, austerities and neoliberalisations. They consider how the everyday lives of young people intersect with the instrumentalised, commercial imperatives of for-profit financial institutions. Walker, Squires and Goldsmith provide an analysis of recent UK financial education tools produced by financial institutions for young people. In so doing, they explore how ‘financialisation’ has become a taken-for-granted, everyday part of many young people’s lives. They argue that neoliberalised financial institutions seek to craft financiailed subjectivities through increasingly sophisticated pedagogic practices and interventions in educational policies and school curricula. The chapter thus suggests a need for more careful and critical understandings of the interfaces between young people’s everyday lives and financial services, institutions, money, credit and debt.
The chapter by Philip Kelly (Chapter 11) explores how Filipino-Canadian families’ experiences of precarity intersect with gendered, and particularly masculinist, norms and inequalities. Reporting new findings from a major study of Filipino youth transitions in Canada, Kelly explores how Filipino-Canadian young people’s lives are framed by gendered disparities in intergenerational social (im)mobility. Kelly notes that normative trends in social reproduction (whereby university-educated parents typically support degree-gaining children) do not seem to apply for many Filipino-Canadian families. Instead, the chapter shows how Filipino-Canadian families are distinctively shaped by gendered impacts of foreign worker programmes in Canada. Through this analysis, Kelly draws attention to the often-overlooked intersectional impacts of masculinities for migrant families’ lives and experiences.
In Chapter 12, Ruth Cheung Judge considers how politics of charity in the global South intersect with politics of austerity in young people’s lives in the global North. Through rich qualitative research with young people from low-income UK backgrounds undertaking volunteering trips to sub-Saharan Africa, the chapter examines the different imaginaries of poverty circulating between these contexts. In particular, the chapter highlights the prevalence of imaginaries of the supposed ‘grateful, happy poor’ of the global South vis-à-vis the supposed ‘undeserving poor’ of UK urban neighbourhoods. The chapter insists that contemporary pressures on young people to adopt aspirational, responsible subjectivities under neoliberal austerity often constitutes a stigmatisation of lived poverty in diverse settings. The chapter thus calls for further research which adopts a multi-site, multi-scalar approach transcending either nation-state- or locally-scaled analyses.
The third Part of the book brings together chapters focusing upon futures. Here, authors explore how children, young people and families are negotiating the transformations and inequalities discussed in the preceding sections, constituting new orientations towards their futures. Chapters consider how aspirations, fears, imagined futures and hoped-for communities from these case studies may suggest affecting, hopeful or critical ways on/in/through/beyond hard times (see Brown 2011). In some senses, at least, authors signal how children, young people and families may offer more hopeful ways of thinking, caring and living which contest, or offer alternatives to neoliberalisations, austerities and economic crises. A wide range of ambiguous and ambivalent orientations to the future are evident in these chapters, but there is ample evidence here that children, young people and families live with hard times in diverse, sometimes hopeful ways (Horton 2016; 2017), that moral and crisis-led panics about contemporary childhood and youth need not always apply (McDowell, 2012), and that affirmative socio-political futures may yet be possible in the middle of profoundly troubling hard times.
For example, in Chapter 13, Sonja Marzi considers the ambivalent, complex aspirations of young, urban Colombians in Cartagena. On the one hand, Marzi shows how young people’s aspirations are profoundly constrained by intersecting inequalities relating to class, race, gender and neo-colonial structural inequalities. However, despite these inequalities and exclusions, Marzi finds that young people show creative ways of sustaining hopes and constituting opportunities for social mobility. The chapter tracks these ambivalences through evocative accounts of independence day celebrations and beauty pageants. Marzi ultimately argues that care is needed to critique commonplace assumptions that many young people ‘lack aspirations’ and that their social immobility is a consequence of this lack. Instead, Marzi shows how young people manage to carve out aspirational opportunities for aspirational social mobility despite countervailing structural barriers. Nevertheless, the chapter shows how young people’s everyday lives and hopes are profoundly affected by pervasive inequalities and discrimination on bases of race, class, gender and neo-colonial inequalities.
In Chapter 14, Catherine Wilkinson critiques the prevalence of individualised notions of aspiration in austerity UK. Through participant observation and qualitative research at a community youth radio station, the chapter considers the nature and content of young people’s imagined futures. The chapter provides a close engagement with the variously witty, moving and hopeful aspirations of young people in this setting, witnessing the fabulous richness of young people’s own ‘storied selves’ and futures. However, Wilkinson is critical of the emphasis on individualisation within neoliberal and austerity contexts, arguing that the fulfilment of ‘possible selves’ is relational and contingent on social and community bonds rather than solely the actions and desires of individuals. In particular, Wilkinson writes movingly of the direct impacts of austerity cutbacks of community support mechanisms for young people’s aspirations and orientations to the future.
The chapter by Hao-Che Pei and Chiung-wen Chang (Chapter 15) offers a case study of young people working collaboratively to provide an innovative, affirmative support network to sustain hopeful futures in hard times. Pei and Chang contextualise this project by evidencing severe experiences of precarity for many Taiwanese Higher Education students. They show how increasing graduate unemployment rates, rising living costs, and growing inequalities have required many students to take on precarious, exploitative work and finance. In this context, Pei and Chang report on a collaborative, youth-led action research project to ‘reinvigorate economic imaginations’ and ‘enact alternative economies’. They note the considerable regulatory and institutional barriers to enacting affirmative alternative futures, but also show how the project has been successful in constituting organisational change and new, more hopeful personal and collective orientations to the future. They note, however, the considerable work involved in making this kind of alternative space and future possible: all this was only possible because of significant collective actions.
In Chapter 16, Caroline Day considers the role of aspiration among caregiving and non-caregiving young people in Zambia. Day notes that youth-centred policymaking is relatively new and under-developed in Zambia, as in many other contexts. Day argues that better understanding of young people’s aspirations and senses of the future is crucial in formulating policies and programmes that support, or impact upon, young people. Drawing on a significant programme of qualitative research, the chapter explores the nature of the future aspirations of diverse, and often extremely marginalised Zambian young people. We draw considerable hope from Day’s key conclusion that, even in profoundly hard times, these young people’s aspirations were rarely selfish and individualised: instead, Day’s research participants overwhelmingly talked about aspirations in terms of caring relationships and responsibilities. These aspirations are full of care and love: for family members, friends, communities and older and young people. This sense of aspiring to care provides a hopeful and deeply affecting end point for the book.
In our concluding chapter we offer a series of reflections on the chapters and prompts for future research, reflection and practice. We hope, too, that the multiple, interrelated hard times witnessed through this collection will prompt readers to develop their own reflections, responses and ways forward with/in hard times.
Postscript: childhood and youth in COVID-19 times
We submitted this book manuscript in late February 2020. We were unaware that, within days, our lives, families, communities and workplaces would be radically transformed by the spread of the global COVID-19 (‘Coronavirus’) pandemic. This book is therefore an accidental record of time-spaces just before the impacts of COVID-19. All of the children, young people and families in this book are encountered in moments just before the pandemic. We cannot help but wonder how they are doing. We worry, profoundly, about how their lives, experiences and life-chances are being affected by COVID-19. Here and now, as we review the typescript in August 2020, this worry crystallises around five questions about childhood and youth in the context and aftermath of COVID-19.
1) How has COVID-19 affected children and young people’s everyday lives?
Here and now, it is too early to attempt a comprehensive overview of the impacts of COVID-19 for children and young people in diverse global contexts. (And, to be frank, our experiences of living and working through the COVID-19 pandemic are just too raw and too close right now for that kind of thinking; it feels important to record that we are not in particularly great places – emotionally, personally, professionally – as we write this, trying to make academic writing happen in spite of the familial, educational, workplace and emotional impacts of COVID-19.) But evidence is just starting to emerge of the complex, compound, poignant and wide-ranging ways in which COVID-19 has touched – and often profoundly impacted – children and young people’s everyday experiences (see the repository collated by RCPCH, 2020). We hope that future research and policy will notice, and empathise with, the many ways that COVID-19 has transformed children and young people’s everyday relationships, disrupted their routines, institutions and support networks, constituted new anxieties, precarities and caring responsibilities, and radically refigured families, friendships, work, education, technologies and everyday spaces in so many ways and in so many contexts.
2) How are impacts of COVID-19 intersecting with multiple inequalities and exclusions?
It is important to state explicitly that there has been no universal experience of childhood and youth in COVID-19 (maybe we should think about COVID-19s to signal the many lived experiences of this virus). Rather, children and young people have been differentially affected by COVID-19, in ways which map onto existing inequalities in ways that are only just becoming clear. In England, for example, deeply affecting statistics showing that COVID-19 mortality rates have been twice as high in deprived communities compared to affluent areas (Pidd et al, 2020), and disproportionately high among black, Asian and minority ethnic communities (BBC, 2020a), reveal a stark ‘hierarchy of precarity’ during the pandemic (Langford, 2020). Similarly, controversies over the UK government’s initial calculation of English school leavers’ attainment in lieu of exams, using an algorithm which manifestly advantaged smaller class sizes and schools’ previous exam results, have galvanised discussion about the extent to which experiences of COVID-19 have been patterned by structural inequalities (BBC, 2020b). Evidently, young people who were already diversely marginalised, precarious and at risk have been disproportionately exposed to COVID-19 risks and personal-political-economic fallout. It will be important for future research and policy to consider how multiple inequalities and exclusions have been compounded and hardened through COVID-19. We wonder, and worry profoundly, about how impacts of COVID-19 are intersecting with the kinds of gendered, classed, ableist, post-colonial, heteronormative, cis-normative and globally uneven modes of marginality and social exclusion evidenced through this book (see WBG, 2020; Brewer and Handscomb, 2020; European Commission, 2020). We fear that the complexly intersectional ‘hard times’ discussed through this book just got a lot harder, in all kinds of ways.
3) How are children and young people represented in media and policy discourses of COVID-19?
From our English perspective, we worry about the ways in which young people have repeatedly been represented in very particular, prominent ways in media and policy discourses of COVID-19. It seems to us that many media, political and social media discourses have fallen back on a default assumption that young people – particularly teenagers, perhaps particularly young men – are feckless, feral, amoral, irresponsible and anti-social. These kinds of discourses have been widely perpetuated via representations of, for example, young people defying ‘social distancing’ and ‘lockdown’ restrictions in pursuit of lairy, boozy, promiscuous, lawless, care-less lifestyles. (At this point, we had lined up some illustrative examples from outlets including The Sun, MailOnline, Daily Telegraph and Twitter. But we find that, right now, we are not really minded to give the oxygen of publicity to this sort of grim, divisive, exclusionary, trolling, culture war clickbait). These kinds of representations seem weirdly callous and toxic, and efface the precisely contemporaneous prominence of young people in community volunteering, familial and neighbourhood care work, and campaigning in support of social and environmental justice, LGBTQ+ rights and the Black Lives Matter movement. So we wonder, what can be learnt from representations of children and young people and COVID-19 in diverse contexts, beyond our UK media bubble, and what other, more hopeful cultural discourses and norms about contemporary childhood and youth might be possible?
4) How have neoliberalisations, austerities and economic crises been compounded by COVID-19?
It is with considerable anxiety that we try to anticipate the impacts of COVID-19 for the processes of economic crises, austerities and neoliberalisations that have framed this book. The outlook is not good. Economically, global and national forecasts suggest that COVID-19 will have significant and enduring consequences which will haunt every one of the contexts described in this book (European Commission, 2020). At time of writing, the World Bank baseline forecast predicts a 5.2% contraction in global gross domestic product (GDP) for 2020: ‘the deepest global recession in decades … the deep recessions triggered by the pandemic are expected to leave lasting scars through lower investment, an erosion of human capital through lost work and schooling, and fragmentation of global trade and supply linkages’ (World Bank, 2020, unpaginated). In the UK for example, the Office for National Statistics GPD figures report a state of ‘significant shock … the economy is in a technical recession, falling by 20.4% during Quarter 2 (Apr to June) 2020, compared with Quarter 1 (Jan to Mar) 2020 … the largest decline since quarterly records began’ (ONS, 2020: unpaginated). The consequences of these economic shocks for communities already experiencing economic crises and austerities are unfathomable and deeply anxiety-inducing. In England, for example, emergent evidence suggests the extent to which COVID-19 has intersected with resented geographies of austerities. On the one hand, COVID-19 has resulted in a significant acceleration of cuts to local government budgets for many cultural, community, educational, heritage and leisure services; on the other hand, there is evidence that impacts of COVID-19 have been most profound in communities which previously experienced the deepest cuts to health, social care and community facilities (Gillespie and Hardy, 2020; Flesher Fominaya, 2020). In this context, it remains to be seen how unprecedented government spending on furlough schemes, subsidies for leisure and hospitality sectors, public health messaging, and emergency healthcare facilities will be balanced through future multi-sectoral spending cuts. A parallel strand of critical debate has begun to consider the intersection of COVID-19 with processes of neoliberalisations. It is argued that decades of neoliberalisation effectively depleted the capacities of states, institutions and systems to act with resilience and compassion in the face of a challenge like COVID-19; moreover, it is argued that COVID-19 is precisely the kind of systemic shock through which neoliberal claims for yet more deregulation and efficiency measures can be expected to advance dramatically (Saad-Filho, 2020).
5) Do any aspects of childhood and youth in COVID-19 times offer hope for more progressive and equitable futures?
Against these backdrops of entrenched economic crises, austerities and neoliberalisms it will be necessary for many of us to commit to renewed forms of community-mindedness, collegiality, care, support, activisms and progressive politics to safeguard the kinds of communities, spaces and precarious lives witnessed in the following chapters. And we want to conclude this chapter on a hopeful, affirmative note by asking: wherever and whenever you read this, can children and young people’s everyday hopes, solidarities and care offer hopeful ways forward in contexts of economic crises–austerities–neoliberalisms–COVID-19s? We want to recognise that, sometimes, children and young people can role-model hopeful and progressive ways of being in spite of the ‘hard times’ of COVID-19. In our own communities and lives, we have been struck by children and young people’s creativity, humour and play during this time, their community-minded actions, their intimate attunement to local spaces and natures, their gestures of inter- and intra- generational care, and their moral-political leadership in calling out issues of social and environmental injustice locally and globally. Maybe all of us could remember and learn from that …
As we prepare to submit this postscript, the COVID-19 situation continues to change daily, and will almost certainly have shifted further as the book goes to print, constituting new inequalities, new anxieties and new ‘hard times’…
References
Aalbers, M. (2009) ‘Geographies of the financial crisis’, Area, 41(1): 34–42.
Allen, K. (2016) ‘Top girls navigating austere times: Interrogating youth transitions since the “crisis”’, Journal of Youth Studies, 19(6): 805–820.
Askins, K. (2015) ‘Being together: Everyday geographies and the quiet politics of belonging’, ACME, 14(2): 461–469.
Barnett, C. (2005) ‘The consolations of “neoliberalism”’, Geoforum, 36(1), 7–12.
BBC (2020a) ‘Why are more people from BAME backgrounds dying from coronavirus?’, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-52219070
BBC (2020b) ‘A-levels and GCSEs: How did the exam algorithm work?’, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/explainers-53807730
Bendit, R. and Miranda, A. (2015) ‘Transitions to adulthood in contexts of economic crisis and post-recession: The case of Argentina’, Journal of Youth Studies, 18(2): 183–196.
Blažek, J., Hejnová, T. and Rada, H. (2020) ‘The impacts of the global economic crisis and its aftermath on the banking centres of Europe’, European Urban and Regional Studies, 27(1): 35–49.
Brewer, M. and Handscomb, K. (2020) All together now? The impacts of the government’s coronavirus income support schemes across the age distribution, London: Resolution Foundation.
Brown, G. (2011) ‘Emotional geographies of young people’s aspirations for adult life’, Children’s Geographies, 9(1): 7–22.
Butler, J. (2009) Frames of war: When is life grievable?, London: Verso.
Cairns, D. (2017) ‘Migration and tertiary educated youth: A reflexive view of mobility decision-making in an economic crisis context’, Children’s Geographies, 15(4): 413–425.
Cairns, D., Growiec, K. and de Almeida Alves, N. (2014) ‘Another missing middle? The marginalised majority of tertiary educated youth in Portugal during the economic crisis’, Journal of Youth Studies, 17(8): 1046–1060.
Chadwick, R. (2017) ‘Thinking intersectionally with/through narrative methodologies’, Agenda, 31(1): 5–16.
Cloke, P., May, J. and Williams, A. (2017) ‘The geographies of food banks in the meantime’, Progress in Human Geography, 41(6): 703–726.
Crenshaw, K. (1991) ‘Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color’, Stanford Law Review, 43(6): 1241–1299.
Crescenzi, R., Luca, D. and Milio, S. (2016) ‘The geography of the economic crisis in Europe’, Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, 9(1): 13–32.
Cross, M. (2013) ‘Demonised, impoverished and now forced into isolation: The fate of disabled people under austerity’, Disability & Society, 28(5): 719–723.
Crotty, J. (2009) ‘Structural causes of the global financial crisis: A critical assessment of the “new financial architecture”’, Cambridge Journal of Economics, 33(4): 563–580.
Derudder, B., Hoyler, M. and Taylor, P. (2011) ‘Goodbye Reykjavik: International banking centres and the global financial crisis’, Area, 43(2): 173–182.
Donald, B., Glasmeier, A., Gray, M. and Loboa L. (2014) ‘Austerity in the city: Economic crisis and urban service decline?’, Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, 7(1): 3–15.
European Commission (2020) 2020 European semester: Country-specific recommendations, Brussels: European Commission.
Eurostat (2014) National GDP and unemployment accounts, http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/data/database
Filho, G. and Neder, G. (2001) ‘Social and historical approaches regarding street children in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) in the context of the transition to democracy’, Childhood, 8(1): 11–29.
Flesher Fominaya, C. (2020) ‘How austerity measures hurt the Covid-19 response’, OUPblog, https://blog.oup.com/2020/04/how-austerity-measures-hurt-the-covid-19-response/
France, A. (2016) Understanding youth in the global economic crisis, Bristol: Policy Press.
French, S. and Leyshon, A. (2010) ‘“These f@#king guys”: The terrible waste of a good crisis’, Environment and Planning A, 42(11): 2549–2559.
French, S., Leyshon, A. and Thrift, N. (2009) ‘A very geographical crisis’, Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, 2(2): 287–302.
Garrett, P. (2009) ‘Transforming’ children’s services: Social work, neoliberalism and the ‘modern’ world, Maidenhead: McGraw-Hill.
Garthwaite, K. (2015) ‘“Keeping meself to meself”: How social networks can influence narratives of stigma and identity for long-term sickness benefits recipients’, Social Policy & Administration, 49(2): 199–212.
Garthwaite, K. (2016a) Hunger pains: Life inside foodbank Britain, Bristol: Policy Press.
Garthwaite, K. (2016b) ‘Stigma, shame and “people like us”: An ethnographic study of foodbank use in the UK’, Journal of Poverty and Social Justice, 24(3): 277–289.
Gateley, D. (2014) ‘What alternatives post-austerity? Importance of targeted employment advice for refugee young people in London’, Journal of Youth Studies, 17(9): 1260–1276.
Gillespie, T. and Hardy, K. (2020) ‘All in this together? How a decade of austerity cleared the way for Covid-19 in deprived urban areas’, Global Development Institute Blog, http://blog.gdi.manchester.ac.uk/decade-of-austerity-cleared-the-way-for-covid-19-in-deprived-urban-areas/
Greer Murphy, A. (2017) ‘Austerity in the United Kingdom: The intersections of spatial and gendered inequalities’, Area, 49(1): 122–124.
Hall, S. (2005) ‘New Labour’s double-shuffle’, Education, Pedagogy and Cultural Studies, 27(4): 319–335.
Hall, S. (2017) Everyday austerity, https://e.issuu.com/anonymous-embed.html?u=everydayausterity&d=everyday_austerity_full_zine
Hall, S. (2019a) Everyday life in austerity: Family, friends and intimate relations, London: Palgrave.
Hall, S. (2019b) ‘A very personal crisis: Family fragilities and everyday conjunctures within lived experiences of austerity’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 44(3): 479–492.
Hall, S. (2019c) ‘Everyday austerity: Towards relational geographies of family, friendship and intimacy’, Progress in Human Geography, 3(5): 769–789.
Hall, S., McIntosh, K., Neitzert, E., Pottinger, L., Sandhu, K., Stephenson, M-A., Reed, H. and Taylor, L. (2017) Intersecting inequalities: The impact of austerity on black and minority ethnic women in the UK, London: Women’s Budget Group.
Hall, S., Pimlott-Wilson, H. and Horton, J. (eds) (2020) Austerity across Europe: Lived experiences of economic crises, London: Routledge.
Harker, C. (2012) ‘Precariousness, precarity, and family: Notes from Palestine’, Environment and Planning A, 44(4): 849–865.
Harvey, D. (2007) A brief history of neoliberalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Harvey, D. (2017) Marx, capital, and the madness of economic reason, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hitchen, E. (2016) ‘Living and feeling the austere’, New Formations, 87: 102–118.
Hitchen, E. (2019) ‘The affective life of austerity: Uncanny atmospheres and paranoid temporalities’, Social & Cultural Geography online early.
Hitchen, E. and Raynor, R. (2020) ‘Encountering austerity in everyday life: Intensities, localities, materialities’, Geoforum, 110: 186–190.
HM Treasury (2010) Public Spending Review, London: HMSO.
Holloway, S.L. and Pimlott-Wilson, H. (2012) ‘Neoliberalism, policy localisation and idealised subjects: A case study of educational restructuring’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 37(4): 639–654.
Horton, J. (2016) ‘Anticipating service withdrawal: Young people in spaces of neoliberalisation, austerity and economic crisis’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 41(4): 349–596.
Horton, J. (2017) ‘Young people and debt: Getting on with austerities’, Area 49(3): 280–287.
Horton, J. (2020) ‘For diffident geographies and modest activisms: Questioning the ANYTHING-BUT-GENTLE academy’, Area online early.
Horton, J. and Kraftl, P. (2018) ‘Rats, assorted shit and “racist groundwater”: Towards extra-sectional understandings of childhoods and social-material processes’, Environment and Planning D, 36(5): 926–948.
Jones, G., Meegan, R., Kennett, P. and Croft, J. (2015) ‘The uneven impact of austerity on the voluntary and community sector: A tale of two cities’, Urban Studies, 53(10): 2064–2080.
Jupp, E. (2016) ‘Families, policy and place in times of austerity’, Area, 49(3): 266–272.
Jupp, E. (2017) ‘Home space, gender and activism: The visible and the invisible in austere times’, Critical Social Policy, 37(3): 348–366.
Katz, C. (1996) ‘Towards minor theory’, Environment and Planning D, 14(4): 487–499.
Katz, C. (2004) Growing up global: Economic restructuring and children’s everyday lives, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Katz, C. (2011) ‘Accumulation, excess, childhood: Toward a countertopography of risk and waste’, Documents d’Anàlisi Geogràfica, 57(1): 47–60.
Katz, C. (2018) ‘The angel of geography: Superman, Tiger Mother, aspiration management, and the child as waste’, Progress in Human Geography, 42(5): 723–740.
Kitson, M., Martin, R. and Tyler, P. (2011) ‘The geographies of austerity’, Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, 4(3): 289–302.
Konings, M. and Somers, J. (eds) (2010) The great credit crash, London: Verso.
Langford, N. (2020) ‘Governing through insecurity: what COVID 19 tells us about precarity under (neo)liberalism’, http://speri.dept.shef.ac.uk/2020/05/05/governing-through-insecurity-what-covid-19-tells-us-about-precarity-under-neoliberalism/
Langley, P. (2008) The everyday life of global finance: Saving and borrowing in America, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Larner, W. (2003) ‘Neoliberalism?’, Environment and Planning D, 21(5): 309–12.
Larner, W. (2011) ‘C-change? Geographies of crisis’, Dialogues in Human Geography, 1(3): 319–35.
Lee, R., Clark, G., Pollard, J. and Leyshon, A. (2009) ‘The remit of financial geography – before and after the crisis’, Journal of Economic Geography, 9(5): 723–747.
Loach, K. (2015) ‘“Conscious cruelty”: Ken Loach’s shock at benefit sanctions and food banks’, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/nov/23/ken-loach-benefit-sanctions-jeremy-corbyn-food-banks
Loopstra, R., McKee, M., Katikireddi, S.V., Taylor-Robinson, D., Barr, B. and Stuckler, D. (2016) ‘Austerity and old-age mortality in England: A longitudinal cross-local area analysis, 2007–2013’, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 109(3): 109–116.
Martin, R. (2011) ‘The local geographies of the financial crisis: From the housing bubble to economic recession and beyond’, Journal of Economic Geography, 11(4): 587–618.
Mason, P. (2010) Meltdown: The end of the age of greed, London: Verso.
McDowell, L. (2012) ‘Post-crisis, post-Ford and post-gender? Youth identities in an era of austerity’, Journal of Youth Studies, 15(5): 573–590.
Michail, D. and Christou, A. (2016) ‘Diasporic youth identities of uncertainty and hope: Second generation Albanian experiences of transnational mobility in an era of economic crisis in Greece’, Journal of Youth Studies, 19(7): 957–972.
Newman, J. (2013) ‘Landscapes of antagonism: Local governance, neoliberalism and austerity’, Urban Studies, 51(15): 3290–3305.
Nikunen, M. (2017) ‘Young people, future hopes and concerns in Finland and the European Union: Classed and gendered expectations in policy documents’, Journal of Youth Studies, 20(6): 661–676.
O’Hara, M. (2014) Austerity Bites, Bristol: Policy Press.
ONS (Office for National Statistics) (2020) ‘Coronavirus and the impact on output in the UK economy: June 2020’, https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/grossdomesticproductgdp/articles/coronavirusandtheimpactonoutputintheukeconomy/june2020
O’Toole, T. (2015) ‘Beyond crisis narratives: Changing modes and repertoires of political participation among young people’, in: K. Kallio, S. Mills and T. Skelton (eds) Politics, Citizenship and Rights, Singapore: Springer, pp.225–242.
Peck, J. (2012) ‘Austerity urbanism: American cities under extreme economy’, City, 16(6): 626–55.
Peck, J. (2013) ‘Explaining (with) neoliberalism’, Territory, Politics, Governance, 1(2): 132–57.
Peck, J. and Tickell, A. (2002) ‘Neoliberalising space’, Antipode, 34(3): 380–404.
Pidd, H., Barr, C. and Mohdin, A. (2020) ‘Calls for health funding to be prioritised as poor bear brunt of Covid-19’, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/01/covid-19-deaths-twice-as-high-in-poorest-areas-in-england-and-wales
Pimlott-Wilson, H. (2017) ‘Individualising the future: The emotional geographies of neoliberal governance in young peoples’ aspirations’, Area, 49(3): 288–295.
Pimlott-Wilson, H. and Hall, S.M. (2017) ‘Everyday experiences of economic change: repositioning geographies of children, youth and families’, Editorial introduction, Area, 49(3): 258–265.
Pottinger, L. (2017) ‘Planting the seeds of a quiet activism’, Area, 49(2): 215–222.
Power, A. and Bartlett, R. (2019) ‘Ageing with a learning disability: Care and support in the context of austerity’, Social Science & Medicine, 231: 55–61.
RCPCH (Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health) (2020) COVID-19 – research studies on children and young people’s views, https://www.rcpch.ac.uk/resources/covid-19-research-studies-children-young-peoples-views
Ribbens, J., Hooper, C. and Gillies, V. (eds) (2013) Family Troubles? Exploring changes and challenges in the family lives of children and young people, Bristol: Policy Press.
Ridge, T. (2013) ‘“We are all in this together”? The hidden costs of poverty, recession and austerity policies on Britain’s poorest children’, Children & Society, 27(5): 406–417.
Roy, A., Larner, W. and Peck, J. (2012) ‘Book review symposium: Jamie Peck (2010) Constructions of neoliberal reason’, Progress in Human Geography, 36(2): 273–281.
Ruddick, S. (2007a) ‘At the horizons of the subject: Neoliberalism, neo-conservatism and the rights of the child. Part one: From “knowing” fetus to “confused” child’, Gender, Place and Culture, 14(5): 513–526.
Ruddick, S. (2007b) ‘At the horizons of the subject: Neo-liberalism, neo-conservatism and the rights of the child. Part two: Parent, caregiver, state’, Gender, Place and Culture, 14(6): 627–640.
Saad-Filho, A. (2020) ‘From COVID-19 to the end of neoliberalism’, Critical Sociology, 46(4–5): 477–485.
Shaw, E. (2009) ‘The meaning of modernisation: New Labour and public sector reform’, in: J. Callaghan, N. Fishman, B. Jackson and M. McIvor (eds) In search of social democracy, Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp.147–67.
Sorkin, A. (2009) Too big to fail: Inside the battle to save Wall Street, London: Penguin.
Stenning, A. (2020) ‘Feeling the squeeze: Towards a psychosocial geography of austerity in low-to-middle income families’, Geoforum, 110(10): 200–210.
van Lanen, S. (2017) ‘Living austerity urbanism: Space-time expansion and deepening socio-spatial inequalities for disadvantaged urban youth in Ireland’, Urban Geography, 38(10): 1603–1613.
van Lanen, S. (2018) ‘Encountering austerity in deprived urban neighbourhoods: Local geographies and the emergence of austerity in the lifeworld of urban youth’, Geoforum, 110: 220–231.
Vasilopoulou, S., Halikiopoulou, D. and Exadaktylos, T. (2014) ‘Greece in crisis: Austerity, populism and the politics of blame’, Journal of Common Market Studies, 52(2): 388–402.
WBG (Women’s Budget Group) (2020) ‘Crises collide: Women and COVID-19’, https://wbg.org.uk/analysis/reports/crises-collide-women-and-covid-19/
Wells, K. (2015) Childhood in a global perspective, Cambridge: Polity.
Wilkinson, E. and Ortega-Alcázar, I. (2018) ‘The right to be weary? Endurance and exhaustion in austere times’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 44(1), https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12266
World Bank (2020) ‘The global economic outlook during the COVID-19 pandemic: A changed world’, https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2020/06/08/the-global-economic-outlook-during-the-covid-19-pandemic-a-changed-world
