1st Edition
Austerity Across Europe Lived Experiences of Economic Crises
Drawing together multidisciplinary research exploring everyday life in Europe during times of economic crisis, this book explores the ways in which austerity policies are lived and experienced - often alongside other significant social, political and personal change. With attention to the inequalities produced by these processes and the measures used by individuals, families and communities to help them ‘get by’, it also envisages hopeful, affirmative socio-political futures. Arranged around the themes of intergenerational relations and exchanges, ways of coping through crises, and community, civic and state infrastructures, Austerity Across Europe will appeal to social scientists with interests in everyday life, family practices, neoliberal state policy, poverty and socio-economic inequalities.
1. Introduction: austerity across Europe: lived experiences of economic crises
Sarah Marie Hall, Helena Pimlott-Wilson and John Horton
Part I: Intergenerational relations and exchanges
2. Eating out, sharing food and social exclusion: young people in low-income families in the UK and Norway
Rebecca O’Connell, Abigail Knight, Julia Brannen and Silje Skuland
3. 'I feel like it's just going to get worse": young people, marginality and neoliberal personhoods in austere times
Daniela Sime and Rebecca Reynolds
4. Austerity, youth and the city: experiences of austerity and place by disadvantaged urban youth in Ireland
Sander Van Lanen
5. Children and families coping with austerity in Catalonia
Maria Prats Ferret, Mireia Baylina and Anna Ortiz Guitart
Part II: Ways of coping through crises
6. An informal welfare? Urban resilience and spontaneous solidarity in Naples, Italy, after the Great Recession
Serena Romano
7. Austerity and men’s hidden family participation in low-income families in the UK
Anna Tarrant
8. Austerity, economic crisis and children: the case of Cyprus
Christos Koutsampelas, Sofia N. Andreou, Evangelia Papaloi, and Kostas Dimopoulos
9. Beyond coping: families and young people’s journeys through austerity, relational poverty and stigma
Sally Lloyd-Evans and The Whitley Researchers
10. Escaping from capitalism: the enactment of alternative lifeworlds in France’s mountain regions
Kirsten Koop
Part III: Community, civic and state infrastructures
11. E-government and digital by default: normalising austerity as the new norm
Irene Hardill and Roger O'Sullivan
12. Requesting labour activation without addressing inequalities: a move towards racialised workfare in Slovakia
Daniel Škobla and Richard Filčák
13. How to keep control? Everyday practices of governing urban marginality in a time of massive outmigration in Hungary
Cecília Kovai and Tünde Virág
14. Care, austerity and citizenship: story-telling as protest in anti-austerity activism in the UK
Eleanor Jupp
Biography
Sarah Marie Hall is based in the Department of Geography at the University of Manchester, UK. Her research sits in the broad field of feminist political economy: understanding how socio-economic processes are shaped by gender relations, lived experience and social difference. Recent research projects focus on everyday life and economic change, including empirical work in the context of austerity, Brexit and devolution. She is currently Co-Editor of the international academic journal Area.
Helena Pimlott-Wilson is based in Geography and Environment at Loughborough University, UK. Her research focuses on the shifting importance of education and employment in the reproduction of classed power. Recent work investigates the aspirations of young people from socio-economically diverse areas in the UK, international mobility of students for higher education and work placements, and the alternative and supplementary education industries.
John Horton is based in the Faculty of Education and Humanities at the University of Northampton, UK. His research explores the spaces, cultures, politics, playful practices and social-material exclusions of contemporary childhood and youth in diverse international contexts. He is currently Editor of the international academic journals Social & Cultural Geography and Children’s Geographies.
