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