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