interested in approaches taking account of local social and cultural settings, and concerned with the engagement with practice issues, dilemmas and ethics.
Catherine Wilkinson is Programme Leader for Education Studies at Liverpool John Moores University, UK. Catherine is a senior lecturer, teaching across at Education Studies and Early Childhood Studies degree programmes. Prior to this, Catherine worked as a lecturer in Children, Young People and Families in the Faculty of Health and Social Care, Edge Hill University. Catherine also previously worked as a postdoctoral research associate at Durham University in the School of Education. Catherine completed her PhD in Environmental Sciences at the University of Liverpool, funded by an ESRC CASE award. Catherine works at the intersection of a range of research approaches, including: mixed methods, ethnographic and participatory research. Catherine’s primary research interests are: children, young people and identity; young people and community radio; and children and young people-friendly research methods. Catherine uses this research to inspire the teaching which she delivers.
John 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