This is mostly info for GEO2110 Social Geographies students at Newcastle University but I’m very happy for others to use and circulate it too. For now, it’s a fairly random set of links to work, academic and more popular, that I’ve come across recently.

Mary O’Hara’s book Austerity Bites “chronicles the true impact of austerity on people at the sharp end, based on her ‘real-time’ 12-month journey around the country just as the most radical reforms were being rolled out in 2012 and 2013” (see her webpage). Her Guardian page has links to all sorts of different articles on related issues (welfare, legal aid, disability, mental health etc.). You can also follow Mary on Twitter.

Whilst we’re focused on The Guardian, a reminder about Patrick Butler’s articles. Patrick is The Guardian‘s editor of society, health and education policy. He can be followed on Twitter too.

I’ve focused on the ‘bedroom tax’ a bit myself: here is a report by Insa Koch, Assistant Professor in Law and Anthropology at the LSE, titled ‘A policy that kills’.

A major research project based at Bristol University, in collaboration with Liverpool John Moores University, is exploring “The uneven impact of the global economic recession and austerity on places and people: Bristol and Liverpool compared“. Their website has links to findings so far (such as this) and a range of background documents, including a review of ‘grey literatures’ on the “Impact of the Recession and Period of Austerity on Households“.

A series of seminars are being organised by Middlesex University, and partners, around the theme of Work-Life Balance in the Recession and Beyond. Their website includes copies of papers and presentations from the seminars, and from related events (such as this on “Work-Life Balance in Times of Financial Crisis and Austerity in Europe”).

Professor Clare Bambra, from Durham University, has written extensively on health inequalities in a time of austerity. This from Class (a thinktank on the left) is a good example, but you can find more references and links on her website.

The charity Gingerbread has research the effect of austerity on single parents in a project called “Paying the price: Single parents in the age of austerity“.

Stephen Crossley (Durham University) and Tom Slater (Edinburgh) have just published a blog/article on “Benefits Street: territorial stigmatisation and the realization of a ‘(tele)vision of divisions’” which reflects on the way right-wing commentators have engaged with the TV programme Benefits Street and other versions of ‘poverty porn’. On this theme, it’s also worth looking at Tracey Jensen’s “Welfare Commonsense, Poverty Porn and Doxosophy“, “Thinking with ‘White Dee’: The Gender Politics of ‘Austerity Porn’” by Kim Allen, Imogen Tyler and Sara De Benedictis, and other papers in the same special issue of Sociological Research Online.

I’ll keep adding to this as I find more to link to, so check back occasionally.