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 growing inequalities have required many students to take on precarious, exploitative work and finance. In this context, Pei and Chang report on a collaborative, youth-led action research project to ‘reinvigorate economic imaginations’ and ‘enact alternative economies’. They note the considerable regulatory and institutional barriers to enacting affirmative alternative futures, but also show how the project has been successful in constituting organisational change and new, more hopeful personal and collective orientations to the future. They note, however, the considerable work involved in making this kind of alternative space and future possible: all this was only possible because of significant collective actions.
In Chapter 16, Caroline Day considers the role of aspiration among caregiving and non-caregiving young people in Zambia. Day notes that youth-centred policymaking is relatively new and under-developed in Zambia, as in many other contexts. Day argues that better understanding of young people’s aspirations and senses of the future is crucial in formulating policies and programmes that support, or impact upon, young people. Drawing on a significant programme of qualitative research, the chapter explores the nature of the future aspirations of diverse, and often extremely marginalised Zambian young people. We draw considerable hope from Day’s key conclusion that, even in profoundly hard times, these young people’s aspirations were rarely selfish and individualised: instead, Day’s research participants overwhelmingly talked about aspirations in terms of caring relationships and responsibilities. These aspirations are full of care and love: for family members, friends, communities and older and young people. This sense of aspiring to care provides a hopeful and deeply affecting end point for the book.
In our concluding chapter we offer a series of reflections on the chapters and prompts for future research, reflection and practice. We hope, too, that the multiple, interrelated hard times witnessed through this collection will prompt readers to develop their own reflections, responses and ways forward with/in hard times.
Postscript: childhood and youth in COVID-19 times
We submitted this book manuscript in late February 2020. We were unaware that, within days, our lives, families, communities and workplaces would be radically transformed by the spread of the global COVID-19 (‘Coronavirus’) pandemic. This book is therefore an accidental record of time-spaces just before the impacts of COVID-19. All of the children, young people and families in this book are encountered in moments just before the pandemic. We cannot help but wonder how they are doing. We worry, profoundly, about how their lives, experiences and life-chances are being affected by COVID-19. Here and now, as we review the typescript in August 2020, this worry crystallises around five questions about childhood and youth in the context and aftermath of COVID-19.
1) How has COVID-19 affected children and young people’s everyday lives?
Here and now, it is too early to attempt a comprehensive overview of the impacts of COVID-19 for children and young people in diverse global contexts. (And, to be frank, our experiences of living and working through the COVID-19 pandemic are just too raw and too close right now for that kind of thinking; it feels important to record that we are not in particularly great places – emotionally, personally, professionally – as we write this, trying to make academic writing happen in spite of the familial, educational, workplace and emotional impacts of COVID-19.) But evidence is just starting to emerge of the complex, compound, poignant and wide-ranging ways in which COVID-19 has touched – and often profoundly impacted – children and young people’s everyday experiences (see the repository collated by RCPCH, 2020). We hope that future research and policy will notice, and empathise with, the many ways that COVID-19 has transformed children and young people’s everyday relationships, disrupted their routines, institutions and support networks, constituted new anxieties, precarities and caring responsibilities, and radically refigured families, friendships, work, education, technologies and everyday spaces in so many ways and in so many contexts.
2) How are impacts of COVID-19 intersecting with multiple inequalities and exclusions?
It is important to state explicitly that there has been no universal experience of childhood and youth in COVID-19 (maybe we should think about COVID-19s to signal the many lived experiences of this virus). Rather, children and young people have been differentially affected by COVID-19, in ways which map onto existing inequalities in ways that are only just becoming clear. In England, for example, deeply affecting statistics showing that COVID-19 mortality rates have been twice as high in deprived communities compared to affluent areas (Pidd et al, 2020), and disproportionately high among black, Asian and minority ethnic communities (BBC, 2020a), reveal a stark ‘hierarchy of precarity’ during the pandemic (Langford, 2020).
