and more ambiguous, quiet or gentle and more hopeful, less lurid, less grandly narratable kinds of stories (Pottinger, 2017; Horton, 2020), and anything inbetween. Moreover, by juxtaposing these globally-located accounts, we hoped to suggest something of the complexly-relational, co-incident, always-multiple social-material processes which have often been hidden in normative political-economic analyses of neoliberalisations, austerities and economic crises (Lee et al, 2009; Hitchen, 2016). In so doing, we want the following chapters to act as a series of challenges to (re)frame understandings of hard times in terms of critical theorisations of everydayness, care, homes, families, intimacies, intersectionalities, injustices and activisms and via encounters with children, young people and families themselves.
Growing up and getting by: new perspectives on neoliberalisation, austerities and economic crises
Through encounters with diverse, globally-situated children, young people and families, the following chapters develop new understandings of ‘hard times’ around three key themes. The sections deliberately juxtapose chapters which are globally located, multi-method and multidisciplinary to bring different kinds of research, participants and hard times into dialogue.
In Part 1, chapters share a concern with transformations. Authors present new qualitative and quantitative evidence of the transformative impacts of hard times for contemporary experiences of childhood, youth and family in diverse international contexts (Horton, 2016; Ribbens et al, 2013). The chapters highlight some of the substantial, but unevenly experienced and locally experienced, transformations constituted by neoliberalisations, austerities and economic crises. Chapters will explore the interconnected, but geographically-differentiated, regionally-distinctive and personally-experienced nature of these transformations, via case studies from different states, regions, localities, cities and communities. Case studies as diverse as Swedish educational settings, Peruvian youth migrations, South Korean cafés, North American college campuses and British-Ghanaian households, evidence emergent new conditions of precarious, neoliberalised, austere, indebted or in-crisis childhood, youth and family lives. These chapters provide compelling evidence of some of the harms, anxieties and uncertainties constituted by these contexts. In particular, chapters note the way in which hard times are transforming everyday communities, ecologies and infrastructures and also the discursive formations of childhood, youth and family per se (France, 2016; Pimlott-Wilson, 2017).
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
