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