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 of 2007–08 – casts a dark shadow over all the chapters in this book. By now, the causes and form of the global financial crisis have been extensively historicised (Sorkin, 2009; Konings and Somers, 2010; Mason, 2010). There are many comprehensive accounts of the crisis as a political-economic event, narrating the toxic and overwhelming coming-together of deregulated banking industries (Crotty, 2009), byzantine financialised commodity markets (Martin, 2011) (that we cannot even claim to understand), callous and shady banking practices (French and Leyshon, 2010), hubristic and inflated housing markets, vastly expanding sub-subprime mortgage and ‘buy-to-let’ sectors, lending defaults, property foreclosures, devalued mortgage bonds, crashing mortgage-backed securities (Aalbers, 2009), ineffective regulatory safeguards, panicked banking and financial institutions, contractions in closely interdependent banking/financial/manufacturing industries (Derudder et al, 2011), declining consumer confidence, runs on banks, multi-scaled economic shocks, shrinking GDPs, rising unemployment, and profound strain on often-risk-exposed public sector finances (Blažek et al, 2020). In many parts of the world, these complexly-intertwined crises and spaces of private and sovereign debt (see Langley, 2008; French et al, 2009) ultimately constituted the most severe economic recession since the Great Recession of the 1930s. This was manifest in, for example, a 4.5% decline in per capita GDP across the EU in 2009, and an increase in EU unemployment levels from 7.1% in 2008 to 10.5% in 2012 (Crescenzi et al, 2016; Eurostat, 2014). In developing this book, our aim has never been to contribute another neat narrative of the political-economic causes and consequences of the global financial crisis. Indeed, we will argue that principally theorising the global financial crisis as a political-economic event has led to personal, everyday, affecting lived experiences of economic crisis being overlooked in a great deal of major research in this area. Against this grain, we foreground the experiences of children, young people and families actually living-with economic crises in practice – and the messy, traumatic, nightmarish scenarios that this still entails, even more than a decade after the supposed end of the global financial crisis. Note, too, that we refer to economic crises in the plural here, to decentre normative Anglo-American accounts of the global financial crisis and acknowledge the existence of multiple, diversely-situated economic crises in the past, present and future (that’s capitalism, sadly) (see also Larner, 2011). By pluralising crises, we also highlight the diversity, and gross inequity, of experiences of the global financial crisis: there is no universal experience of economic crisis – and it would be inaccurate to suggest that now is universally worse than some imaginary past time for all – but this book explores how, for some, the 2007–08 global financial crisis has intensified and compounded inequalities in diverse ways and settings.
Many of the following chapters also explicitly deal with children, young people and families living in situations of austerity. As Hall (2019a: 2) notes, ‘austerity’ has a twofold meaning being both a popular term denoting frugality or ‘a condition of severe simplicity and self-restraint’ and, latterly, a descriptor for ‘a specific set of actions and policies by the state: the reduction of spending on public expenditure with the precise aim of reducing governmental budget deficit’. In particular, through this book, austerity is widely used to characterise a repertoire of ideological and policy responses to the 2007–08 global financial crisis and the recessions it later prompted. In this context, many state and federal governments in Europe and North America were quick to adopt severe public sector austerity programmes (see Hall et al 2020). This austerity politics was typified by very substantial and rapid cuts to budgets for welfare, local government, social care, civic spaces, public transport, and cultural, community, educational, heritage and leisure services. Although ideologically justified as a ‘necessary’ process of ‘balancing the books’ and reducing government indebtedness by cutting spend on ‘non-essential’ services, there is now considerable evidence that this vast roll-back of public spending has extended and compounded economic crises and constituted new social-political crises in diverse settings. In the UK, for example, the right-wing Conservative-led government’s HM Treasury Spending Review of 2010 instituted an unprecedented programme to cut public spending in England by £81bn by 2015, including a 51% cut in the budget of national government departments, a £7bn cut in national welfare budget, and a 27% cut in the budget for Local Authorities, while devolving responsibility for implementation of these cuts to local agencies and actors (HM Treasury, 2010). The consequences of this round of multimillion spending cuts are still, at this time of writing, emerging. As with the 2007–08 global financial crisis, academic
