of transnational flows of migrants, capital and ideas. The chapter thus suggests that understandings of youth and family in hard times must apprehend the diversity of kin, household and family-like networks through which family is being done in practice.
The chapters in Part 2, deal with what we are calling inequalities/intersections. Through diverse case studies, the chapters explore how hard times intersect with wider social-cultural geographies (for example, notably, here, of age, gender, ethnicity and social class) to produce new or intensified forms of poverty and inequality (see also Donald et al, 2014). A number of chapters explicitly use the term ‘intersectionality’ – which originated in black feminist scholarship (Crenshaw, 1991) – to denote ‘the simultaneous, intersecting, inseparable, coterminous and multiple forces of oppression acting on individuals/groups’ (Chadwick, 2017: 2). In juxtaposing these chapters, we invite reflection on how these forces of oppression are constituted via particular comings-together of social-cultural differences and inequalities, but also via intersecting discourses, norms, materialities and institutions (see Horton and Kraftl, 2018). Thus through international case studies encompassing Indian and Bangladeshi migrations, Ethiopian child labour, UK child poverty policies, corporate financial education, Filipino-Canadian masculinities, and international youth voluntarism, the chapters evidence the multiple forms of harm, vulnerability and precarity that are constituted by these inequalities/intersections. Authors consider how normative concepts of poverty, gender, stigma, parenthood and social class are being rethought or entrenched in and through the everyday lives of children, young people and families in diverse, global contexts. The chapters thus consider how the ‘diffuse and extended events’ of neoliberalisations, austerities and economic crises are materialising in practice (Hitchen and Raynor, 2020) and intersecting with diverse other forms and discourses of marginality (Garthwaite, 2015; 2016b).
For example, in Chapter 7, Heather Piggott explores how experiences of poverty in rural Bangladesh and North India intersect with experiences of motherhood and family caregiving. Piggott notes that previous research on women’s labour market participation in the global South has overwhelmingly taken the form of nationally- or regionally-scaled quantitative economic analysis, overlooking families’ lived experiences of poverty and work. Through rich mixed methods research with families in rural Bangladesh and North India, the chapter explores how experiences of poverty, inequality and marginality are compounded by neoliberal labour market restructurings and traditional patriarchal gender roles. The chapter suggests that subtle shifts in social attitudes may be allowing some hopeful, affirmative futures for women and girls in this context, but these attitudinal shifts remain uneven in terms of religion, class and caste norms. In so doing, Piggott calls for further intersectional work exploring intra-household and intra-familial labour relations and negotiations and their impacts for young people and families.
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
