ABSTRACT

Drawing together multidisciplinary research exploring everyday life in Europe during times of economic crisis, this book explores the ways in which austerity policies are lived and experienced - often alongside other significant social, political and personal change. With attention to the inequalities produced by these processes and the measures used by individuals, families and communities to help them ‘get by’, it also envisages hopeful, affirmative socio-political futures. Arranged around the themes of intergenerational relations and exchanges, ways of coping through crises, and community, civic and state infrastructures, Austerity Across Europe will appeal to social scientists with interests in everyday life, family practices, neoliberal state policy, poverty and socio-economic inequalities.

chapter 1|12 pages

Introduction

Austerity across Europe: lived experiences of economic crises

part I|55 pages

Intergenerational relations and exchanges

chapter 2|13 pages

Eating out, sharing food and social exclusion

Young people in low-income families in the UK and Norway

chapter 3|13 pages

‘I feel like it’s just going to get worse’

Young people, marginality and neoliberal personhoods in austere times

chapter 4|14 pages

Austerity, youth and the city

Experiences of austerity and place by disadvantaged urban youth in Ireland

part II|72 pages

Ways of coping through crises

chapter 9|15 pages

Beyond coping

Families and young people’s journeys through austerity, relational poverty and stigma

chapter 10|16 pages

Escaping from capitalism

The enactment of alternative lifeworlds in France’s mountain regions

part III|54 pages

Community, civic and state infrastructures

chapter 11|11 pages

E-government and digital by default

Normalising austerity as the new norm

chapter 12|13 pages

Requesting labour activation without addressing inequalities

A move towards racialised workfare in Slovakia

chapter 14|14 pages

Care, austerity and citizenship

Story-telling as protest in anti-austerity activism in the UK