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privatisation, whether frontally or incrementally introduced’ (Hall 2005: 322; Garrett, 2009; Shaw, 2009) became default operating principles of diverse organisational-institutional spaces in many post-1945 economies and policy contexts. It is thus argued that neoliberal reforms over the last half century created preconditions of vulnerability and risk which were profoundly exposed by the global financial crisis (Crescenzi et al, 2016). Or, somewhat differently, it is argued that recent austerity policies should be understood as intensified moments of neoliberalism, where neoliberal claims for deregulation, state roll-back and efficiency measures advanced dramatically after, or even through, the global financial crisis (Harvey, 2007, 2017). In this book, we do not intend to frame our discussion solely in terms of these political-economic theorisations of neoliberalism: instead, the following chapters focus on children, young people and families who find themselves in diverse neoliberalised settings. Indeed, we share concerns about the totalising, daunting metanarrative of neoliberalism (Barnett, 2005; Peck, 2013; Roy et al, 2012). However, we have found critical work around this concept important in diagnosing multiple forms of individualism, competitiveness and cost-effectiveness (Larner, 2003) which surface in all kinds of ways in the following chapters. We thus write in terms of neoliberalisations to highlight processes which are demonstrably affecting children, young people and families encountered in our research, without necessarily claiming it as a coherent, singular, stable or uncontested -ism. Again, we prefer to think in terms of plural neoliberalisations to recognise the multiple processes and experiences going on within this term.
After much discussion, we settled on hard times as a focal concept for the book. We use ‘hard times’ as a figure of speech – encompassing neoliberalisations, austerities and economic crises – for four reasons. First, we want to emphasise hardness. Through our research, we have witnessed first-hand the hard, hurtful, bruising, crushing, distressing, inequitable and inflexible impacts of neoliberalisations, austerities and economic crises for children, young people and families. The chapters in this book are full of experiences of painful, strain-filled, horrible, stressful situations: truly hard times, although the nature and severity of this hardness varies from context to context, shaped by all manner of structural inequalities, longstanding exclusions and power imbalances. In preparing this book, we therefore wanted to allow space for voices that speak of the sheer hardness of growing up in situations of social injustice and marginality that are being constituted or intensified by neoliberalisations, austerities and economic crises. There are clear resonances between our ‘hard times’ and Cloke et al’s (2016) coining of the mean times to describe austerity-era Britain, or Loach’s (2015) powerful evocation of the conscious cruelty inherent in contemporary neoliberal welfare regimes. Likewise, our ‘hard times’ are closely related to notions of precariousness (‘an ontological condition common to all life’) and precarity (how certain lives and spaces experience markedly and structurally greater exposure to risks, harms and traumas) (Harker, 2012; after Butler, 2009). However, second, in talking of ‘hard times’, we wanted to write and think in a register that children, young people and families might relate to. We wanted this book to centre the actually-existing, personal, everyday, emotive experiences of children, young people and families living with neoliberalisations, austerities and economic crises. Rather than totally impose a grand, inaccessible scholarly language – of neoliberalisations, austerities, economic crises or precarities – onto those experiences, we want to explore the critical potential of more colloquial understandings that come more from children, young people and families themselves: hence ‘hard times’. Third, in particular ‘hard times’ helps us think about how complexly relational and interrelated processes are lived and experienced. We use ‘hard times’ to encompass neoliberalisations, austerities and economic crises and the ways in which these processes are always already materially, experientially, ideologically and affectively intertwined in practice. Thus, while a cool scholarly reading might enforce a nuanced distinction between neoliberalisations, austerities and economic crises, in this book we want to recognise how these processes are lumped together, materially and spatially (Katz, 2004; 2018) and in people’s everyday experiences. Fourth, we like ‘hard times’ precisely because it feels a little colloquial, indefinite and conditional. We want our slightly flip notion of ‘hard times’ to serve as a point of critique of singular metanarratives of neoliberalisation, austerity and economic crisis. We worry about using terms like ‘neoliberalisations’, ‘austerities’ and ‘economic crises’ because (even with our pluralisation and critique) they feel proper and seem to denote quite intractable, permanent, inevitable, 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