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СКАЧАТЬ implacable situations. They also risk perpetuating crisis-led discourses of childhood and youth, wherein children, young people and families are overwhelmingly defined and shaped in terms of crises and related moral panics (O’Toole, 2015). Constantly writing about neoliberalisations, austerities and economic crises can feel overwhelming and hope-less. Thinking in terms of ‘hard times’ feels a little more hopeful: it contains a sense that hard times might, sometimes, hopefully, be endured, survived, eased and moved-beyond; it allows us to breathe a little easier; it allows the possibility that hard times might pass, and that some sort of tenacity, solidarity, care, reckoning or resistance (see Askins, 2015; Jupp, 2017) might, somewhere, be possible …

      Children, young people and families in hard times

      In developing this book, we wanted to advance understandings of neoliberalisations, austerities and economic crises in three key ways. First, we wanted to make space to recognise and better understand the distinctive experiences and constitutive presence of children, young people and families within these contexts. We are really troubled by the way that children, young people and families are overwhelmingly absent from chief scholarly accounts of neoliberalism, austerity and the global financial crisis. There are just so many landmark accounts of these processes in which children/childhood, young people/youth and families/family do not appear once (for example, Peck and Tickell, 2002; Crotty, 2009; Martin, 2011; Peck, 2012; Blažek et al, 2020). These kinds of accounts have been critically important in shaping understandings (including our own) of contemporary political-economic processes. But these agenda-setting narratives have consistently declined to acknowledge the everyday experiences of children, young people and families. Their modus operandi – typically starting with slick city-, state-, or corporately-scaled case studies – seems to disallow any encounters with diverse, personal, or more raw lived experiences of those at the sharp end of these processes. Even where these kinds of analyses mobilise data around, for example, child poverty or youth unemployment, we would argue that children and young people themselves are rarely given voice. The authors of the following chapters redress this absence via work which explicitly foregrounds the experiences, lives, fears and hopes of children, young people and families in diverse hard times. The chapters do not just ‘fill a gap’ in extant accounts of neoliberalisations, austerities and economic crises: rather, as we argue later, these accounts require a more radical rethinking of how these hard times matter, how they cause harm and intensify marginality, and how they are lived-with and lived-through (or not).

      Second, conversely, the book stands as an argument that more multidisciplinary researchers working with children, young people and families should directly consider neoliberalisations, austerities and economic crises. We are struck by how few scholars from, for example, Children’s Geographies and interdisciplinary Childhood and Youth Studies have directly engaged these political-economic contexts (thus further perpetuating the absence of children, young people and families from normative scholarly accounts of these processes). There are important exceptions to this, and certainly our own work has been inspired by the exceptional, haunting work of scholars like Cindi Katz (2004; 2011), Sue Ruddick (2007a; 2007b) and Karen Wells (2015) on global neoliberalised childhoods, as well as studies by Jupp (2016), France (2016), Wilkinson and Ortega-Alcázar (2018), Stenning (2018) and van Lanen (2017; 2020) who vividly evoke youth and/or family in diverse austerity contexts. However, we suggest that this work has often been situated as a somewhat substantive, specialist concern within Children’s Geographies and interdisciplinary Childhood and Youth Studies, in a way which seems vastly out of proportion to the profound impacts of global neoliberalisations, austerities and economic crises for children and young people’s lives. Certainly, it seems remarkable that searching for ‘austerity’ or ‘economic crisis’ in titles/abstracts/keywords of research published in leading subdisciplinary journals currently only turns up one paper in Childhood (Filho and Neder, 2001), one paper in Children’s Geographies (Cairns, 2017) and seven papers in Journal of Youth Studies (McDowell, 2012; Cairns et al, 2014; Gateley, 2014; Bendit and Miranda, 2015; Allen, 2016; Michail and Christou, 2016; Nikunen, 2017). In this context, the following chapters signpost many ways in which multidisciplinary researchers could do more to address the impacts of neoliberalisations, austerities and economic crises for children and young people’s lives (Pimlott-Wilson and Hall, 2017), particularly inasmuch as they intersect with gendered, classed, ableist, post-colonial, heteronormative, and cis-normative modes of marginality and social exclusion.

      Third, more broadly, we worry that too much is lost in normative accounts that figure neoliberalisations, austerities and economic crises in primarily political-economic terms. To us, assured, well-worn, important political-economic narratives of neoliberalism, austerity and economic crisis have a peculiar, distancing effect. City- and state- scaled critiques of these problems can inure us to lived experiences and impacts, as all manner of traumatic effects/affects go unseen and undocumented (Stenning, 2020). In preparing this collection, our central concern was to constitute a space where often-overlooked experiences of hard times as lived, as felt, as endured, as intimately experienced and as personal (Hall 2019a) could be articulated. As a counterpoint to normative political-economic analyses, the following chapters offer multiple instances of hard times ‘lived in, through, and punctuating everyday life … shaping lifecourses, biographies and imaginaries’ and as ‘lived, intimate, and so very personal’ (Hall, 2019b: 480, 490).

      Our aim, then, has been to bring together new work which (re)connects scholarly research with everyday spaces and experiences, to address how diverse hard times ‘bleed into the very fabric of everyday geographies – the spaces in which people live, meet, work, play – in different ways and at a range of magnitudes’ (Hall, 2019c: 770). We also wanted contributors to write about/with a wider emotional-affective register than has typically been the case, to acknowledge raw, visceral feelings of trauma occasioned by austerity’s ‘diffusive cruelties’ (Hitchen, СКАЧАТЬ