Austerity and Everyday Relationships in Low-to- Middle Income Families in the UK

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This is a PDF of my recent presentation at the Nordic Geographers’ Meeting in Stockholm. I’m hoping to get this written up in the next few months, but in the meantime…

NGM Presentation

The paper’s abstract was as follows:

In the context of a research project which explores the experiences of austerity in a small number of ‘squeezed middle’, ‘just about managing’ (low-to-middle income) families in north east England, this paper focuses on the place of everyday relationships within and beyond the family in mediating austerity. It uses a psychosocial framing to foreground the importance, complexity and diversity of relationships in making sense of and negotiating changing socio-economic circumstances, attempting to think about and connect the psychic dynamics of families’ relationships and the social dynamics of austerity and recession, and to develop a psychosocial geography of everyday austerity. After setting out some ideas about the nature and value of relationships, the paper asks how and why relationships with family, friends, neighbours, acquaintances and wider communities have been invoked, used, challenged, remade, and imagined as families have navigated the transformations of austerity. As part of the ‘squeezed middle’, these are not families living in poverty, but they have all experienced real threats and losses in the context of austerity, redundancies, falling incomes, tightened budgets, and growing insecurities, for example. The paper explores the ways in which these shifts are connected, in families’ reflections and narrations, to the place of children and their futures in family dreams, the diverse support and demands of friends in crises, large and small, memories of earlier family lives, and everyday negotiations with partners, husbands and wives, and wider families. It seeks to map these shifting relationships, identifying the varying sites and spaces, within and beyond the family home, in which they are made and remade. In these ways, the paper connects to ongoing debates, political, popular and academic, about relationships, austerity, and neoliberalism more widely, to reflect on their diverse and complex articulations.

Thanks to Sarah Hall, John Horton and Helena Pimlott-Wilson for organising the session.

Street Play and Everyday Relationships

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I spent yesterday at the play and playwork conference at Leeds Beckett University, my first play conference. I’ve been thinking more and more about play in the last year or so. Since December 2015, I’ve regularly coordinated with my neighbours to close my street for play about once a month, following the playing out model. In the last few months, I’ve started working with two other local street organisers to develop and promote opportunities for street play across North Tyneside. And in the last few weeks, I’ve realised that street play offers a fantastic opportunity to research the geographies of our everyday relationships, an idea that’s been central to my research and teaching for the last few years.

I love seeing kids play out in our street, I love the slightly subversive temporary displacement of cars, I love the chalk left on the street, often for days after we’ve been playing. But what I’m hoping to explore in my research is why adults plan street play, what they hope will happen, and what does happen, to them and their streets, as street play progresses.

From the very start of yesterday’s conference, the synergy between children playing and adult sociability was clear. Leeds’ Lord Mayor noted in her welcoming address that playing out is important not just for kids but for whole communities, as play builds relationships across diversity and difference, and as children’s presence in public space encourages – or even forces – adults to hang out outside too, watching their children, chatting with neighbours, and sometimes starting to play in their own ways too.

In the first workshop I attended, John McKendrick explored how we might make our cities and neighbourhoods play-friendly, and asked what it means for a place to be play-friendly, child-friendly or even family-friendly. What kinds of spaces do these different, if related, initiatives imagine?

The possibility of play is certainly at the heart of these visions, but so too is a broader idea of building relationships within communities, to draw people out into public spaces within their neighbourhoods, and to enable communities to develop shared identities and senses of belonging. The ‘play rhetorics‘ developed by Brian Sutton-Smith and cited by John might be augmented by an idea of play as relationships, as a catalyst for connection, friendship, recognition and community.

This is an idea at the heart of street play, and of my experiences of and hopes for playing out in my street and elsewhere. It is also one recognised by Helen Forman in her contribution to the conference’s street play workshop. Reflecting on the kinds of residential spaces that encourage and enable play, Helen reported that most research on the topic documents an improvement in adult ‘hanging out’ and sociability in places where children play outside.

Play is clearly at the heart of street play. This is a movement that is about kids playing out, but it is also about an idea of our streets and neighbourhoods as spaces that enable and reflect lively, hopeful, ordinary, everyday relationships. We can perhaps re-imagine play-friendly, child-friendly and family-friendly streets as relationship-friendly, streets that help us make and sustain connections which enable us to feel recognised, known, at home. It is these ideas that I’m hoping to explore, using ideas not only from literatures on play, children’s geographies, and communities, but also from theorisations of relationships, especially those which are part of and inspired by Donald Winnicott (for whom play itself was extraordinarily important) and the British object relations school. These thinkers imagine, in different ways, that our relationships, with intimate and imagined others, create the environment within which we find ways of going on being. This is the start of the idea that I hope to work with to explore and understand street play and everyday relationships.

Updated Resources for Geographies of Austerity and Recession

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As in previous years, I’m updating my reading list for the Newcastle Stage 2 module on Social Geographies (GEO2110) and am uploading the references and links here for ease of access, and so that others can use this too.

The usual disclaimer that I can’t cover everything here and I’m sure I’ve missed some great stuff. Please do let me know of things I can add. 

Previous versions of this list are accessible here, here, and here. Note that some of the links for the policy reports are broken but all of the reports are still available – you can Google the report titles and find the updated links.

New academic work (late 2015 or 2016)

(As more and more academic work has been published on austerity, I’ve focused more on the explicitly geographical work here, but there will be a lot of relevant work in the other social sciences too. If you have references to any other relevant work, please do let me know and I’ll add it – alison.stenning@ncl.ac.uk)

Bambra, C. (2016) Health Divides: Where You Live Can Kill You, Policy Press. (See also the supporting website: Health Divides.)

Brown, G. (2015) Marriage and the spare bedroom: Exploring the sexual politics of austerity, ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 14(4), 975-988.

Garthwaite, K. (2016) Hunger Pains: Life inside Foodbank Britain, Policy Press. (See also a Guardian piece by Kayleigh which introduces some of the themes of her book.)

Garthwaite, K. (2016) Stigma, shame and ‘people like us’: an ethnographic study of foodbank use in the UK, Journal of Poverty and Social Justice, Fast Track.

Greer Murphy, A. (2016) Austerity in the United Kingdom: the intersections of spatial and gendered inequalities, Area, Early View.

Hall, S. M. (2016) Personal, relational and intimate geographies of austerity: ethical and empirical considerations, Area, Early View.

Hall, S. M., & Jayne, M. (2016) Make, mend and befriend: geographies of austerity, crafting and friendship in contemporary cultures of dressmaking in the UK, Gender, Place & Culture, 23(2), 216-234.

Hall, S. (2017) Family relations in times of austerity: Reflections from the UK, in Punch, S. and Vanderbeck, R. (eds.) Families, Intergenerationality, and Peer Group Relations: Geographies of Children and Young People (Vol. 5), Springer-Verlag (follow link from my blog)

Holdsworth, C. (2015) The cult of experience: standing out from the crowd in an era of austerity, Area, Early View.

Horton, J. (2015) Young people and debt: getting on with austerities, Area, Early View.

Horton, J. (2016) Anticipating service withdrawal: young people in spaces of neoliberalisation, austerity and economic crisis, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Early View.

Jupp, E. (2016) Families, policy and place in times of austerity, Area, Early View.

Lambie‐Mumford, H., & Green, M. A. (2015) Austerity, welfare reform and the rising use of food banks by children in England and Wales, Area, Early View.

McDowell, L. (2014) The sexual contract, youth, masculinity and the uncertain promise of waged work in austerity Britain, Australian Feminist Studies, 29(79), 31-49.

McDowell, L. (2016) Youth, children and families in austere times: change, politics and a new gender contract, Area, Early View.

Morse, N. and Munro, E. (2015) Museums’ community engagement schemes, austerity and practices of care in two local museum services, Social & Cultural Geography, 1-22.

Patrick, R. (2016) Living with and responding to the ‘scrounger’ narrative in the UK: exploring everyday strategies of acceptance, resistance and deflection, Journal of Poverty and Social Justice, Fast Track.

Power, A. (2016) Disability, (auto) mobility and austerity: shrinking horizons and spaces of refuge, Disability & Society, 31(2), 280-284.

Williams, A., Cloke, P., May, J., & Goodwin, M. (2016) Contested space: The contradictory political dynamics of food banking in the UK, Environment and Planning A, Online Before Print.

 

The Centre for Regional Economic and Social Research at Sheffield Hallam University recently completed a research project on The Uneven Impact of Welfare Reform. The final report is available to download here and a series of maps here.

Amy Greer Murphy, a Geography PhD student at Durham, has compiled this list on Austerity & Welfare Reform in UK.

 

 

Film, TV and Radio

Ken Loach’s new film, I, Daniel Blake, focuses on austerity and welfare reform and is set in Newcastle. It won the Palme D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. There’s a trailer here, and you can find numerous reviews online. It opens in cinemas on October 21st. The synopsis explains:

“Daniel Blake, 59, who has worked as a joiner most of his life in the North East of England needs help from the State for the first time ever following an illness. He crosses paths with a single mother Katie and her two young children, Daisy and Dylan. Katie’s only chance to escape a one roomed homeless hostel in London is to accept a flat some 300 miles away. Daniel and Katie find themselves in no-man’s land caught on the barbed wire of welfare bureaucracy now played out against the rhetoric of ‘striver and skiver’ in modern day Britain.”

The Divide tells the story of 7 individuals striving for a better life in the modern day US and UK, including a care worker from Newcastle. The film is inspired by the book The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. There are screenings across the UK over the coming months – nothing planned for Newcastle at the moment.

BBC Panorama produced a film about cuts in Selby, North Yorkshire, called Living with Cuts: Austerity Town. You can watch it here. There’s a BBC News article about it here.

 

Recent reports

The Women’s Budget Group have produced “A cumulative gender impact assessment of ten years of austerity policies” (March 2016).

A NatCen British Social Attitudes report on “Britain Divided? Public Attitudes after Seven Years of Austerity” (June 2016).

The British Medical Association‘s report on “Health in All Policies: Health, Austerity and Welfare Reform” (August 2016).

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation‘s report on Falling Short: The Experience of Families below the Minimum Income Standard; they estimate that 1 in 3 UK families lives below the Minimum Income Standard.

In June 2016, there was considerable media coverage of a United Nations report deemed to be a damning indictment of the UK’s austerity policies, declaring them to be a human rights violation. You can see reports here from The New Statesman, The Independent and from Just Fair, the consortium of social justice organisations who submitted evidence to the UN. And there are many others which you can search for.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies reported in May 2016 that “Brexit could add two years to austerity“. If you search for IFS, Brexit and austerity, you’ll find various accounts of the report and its findings.

 

Austerity and recession in the North East

For GEO2110 Social Geographies first assessment, these are the links to the ‘storified’ tweets from 2014. You can find the Twitter account for the module @geo2110NCL.

Updated and Consolidated List of References and Links on the Social Geographies (Broadly Defined) of Recession and Austerity

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Because of the very contemporary nature of these issues, much of the best material on the social geographies (broadly defined) of recession and austerity is only beginning to be formally published, but much is accessible through newspaper columns and blogs, both by academics and by others.

Previous versions of this list are accessible here and here, but I hope I’ve included all I’ve previously referenced in this updated and consolidated list.

This page doesn’t look very pretty – I may tidy it up sometime, but I think, at least, all the links work. Let me know (alison.stenning@ncl.ac.uk) if they don’t – and let me know if you know of publications I could add. Thanks!

There’s an article about some ‘austerity’ blogs here: http://www.theguardian.com/media/shortcuts/2013/jul/07/rise-and-rise-of-austerity-blog

These are some of the most interesting, and some other links that document the experience of austerity in the UK today.

Geographer Danny Dorling writes widely about inequality, poverty, and most recently, austerity. Search his most recent publications here: http://www.dannydorling.org

http://agirlcalledjack.com – Blog by Jack Monroe who has published particularly about food and food poverty; her Guardian columns (and recipes!) are available here: http://www.theguardian.com/profile/jack-monroe

http://katebelgrave.com – “Talking with people dealing with public sector cuts”. Kate Belgrave’s Guardian columns are here: http://www.theguardian.com/profile/kate-belgrave

http://mumvausterity.blogspot.co.uk – Bernadette Horton, “a mum of 4 fighting everyday battles against austerity – and hoping to win!”

From Guardian Witness, personal accounts (https://witness.theguardian.com/assignment/52933b6ee4b0fc237c3f02c9) and Patrick Butler’s Cuts Blog (http://www.theguardian.com/society/patrick-butler-cuts-blog).

Patrick Butler is The Guardian’s editor of society, health and education policy. His articles can be found here: http://www.theguardian.com/profile/patrickbutler.

The Telegraph’s ‘Recession Tour” of 2008: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/recession/uk-recession-telegraph-tour/

The journalist 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” (http://www.austeritybitesuk.com/). Her Guardian page (http://www.theguardian.com/profile/maryohara) has links to all sorts of different articles on related issues (welfare, legal aid, disability, mental health etc.). You can also find her discussing “Austerity Economies and Mental Health” on Madness Radio http://www.madnessradio.net/austerity-economies-and-mental-health-mary-ohara-madness-radio/

 

In addition, there are numerous policy and charity reports on the effects and experiences of austerity and recession.

The Centre for Human Rights Practice at Warwick University has compiled a very comprehensive list of “Reports on the Impact of Public Spending Cuts on Different Disadvantaged Groups within the UK” which can be found here

Others include:

Real Life Reform – “an important and unique study that tracks over a period of 18 months how people are living and coping with welfare reforms across the North of England” – there are six reports available here: http://www.northern-consortium.org.uk/reallifereform

The Association of North East Council’s report on The Impact of Welfare Reform in the North East: http://www.northeastcouncils.gov.uk/curo/downloaddoc.asp?id=601

Voices of Britain – http://voicesofbritain.com – “A Snapshot of the Condition of Britain in 2013” from the Institute of Public Policy Research

The Family and Parenting Institute’s work on Families in the Age of Austerity: http://www.familyandparenting.org/our_work/Families-in-the-Age-of-Austerity/Family+Matters.htm

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 (http://www.gingerbread.org.uk/content/1813/Paying-the-price).

Relate and a range of other organisations produced a report on Relationships, Recession and Recovery: The role of relationships in generating social recovery (http://www.relate.org.uk/policy-campaigns/publications/relationships-recession-and-recovery-role-relationships-generating-social-recovery)

The Campaign for the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) Working Group for the North East produced this report on the impact of austerity measures on women in the North East: http://wbg.org.uk/pdfs/NEWN-impact-of-austerity-measures-case-study-(June-2013)-.pdf

Other sites/organisations include the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, Shelter, Poverty and Social Exclusion (http://www.poverty.ac.uk) and the New Economics Foundation. Search for these online and see what you can find.

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation has continued to analyse the reform of welfare budgets, including in this report on living standards: http://www.jrf.org.uk/publication/will-2015-summer-budget-improve-living-standards-2020.

For an Irish perspective, have a look at http://irelandafternama.wordpress.com – a blog written mostly by geographers on Ireland’s experience of financial crisis and austerity.

 

There is a useful summary of the 2012 reforms here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_Reform_Act_2012.

Other summaries can be found here:

The government: https://www.gov.uk/government/policies/simplifying-the-welfare-system-and-making-sure-work-pays

Child Poverty Action Group: http://www.cpag.org.uk/sites/default/files/CPAG_factsheet_the%20cuts_May13.pdf

Local Government Information Unit: http://www.lgiu.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Welfare-Reform-Act-20121.pdf

Some of the emerging academic and related work…

Allen, K., Tyler, I. and De Benedictis, S. (2014). Thinking with ‘White Dee’: The gender politics of ‘austerity porn’, Sociological Research Online, 19/3, http://www.socresonline.org.uk/19/3/2.html.

Atkinson, W., Roberts, S. & Savage, M. (eds.) (2012) Class Inequality in Austerity Britain, Palgrave MacMillan: Basingstoke. (The first chapter is available to download here: http://www.palgrave.com/PDFs/9781137016379.pdf)

Bailey, N., Bramley, G. and Hastings, A. (2015) Symposium Introduction: Local responses to ‘austerity’, Local Government Studies, ahead-of-print.

Bambra C. (2013) ‘All in it together’? Health inequalities, austerity and the ‘Great Recession’, Health in Austerity, Demos: London. http://www.demos.co.uk/publications/healthinausterity [see also a brief report at http://classonline.org.uk/blog/item/paying-the-highest-price-austerity-will-accelerate-area-health-inequalities]

Bambra, C. and Garthwaite, K. (2015) Austerity, welfare reform and the English health divide, Area, 47/3, 341-343.

Beatty, C. and Fothergill, S. (2013) Hitting the Poorest Places Hardest: The Local and Regional Impact of Welfare Reform, http://www.shu.ac.uk/research/cresr/sites/shu.ac.uk/files/hitting-poorest-places-hardest_0.pdf

Brown, G. (2013) The revolt of aspirations: contesting neoliberal social hope, ACME http://www.acme-journal.org/vol12/Brown2013.pdf

Clayton, J., Donovan, C. and Merchant, J. (2015) Distancing and limited resourcefulness: Third sector service provision under austerity localism in the north east of England, Urban Studies, ahead-of-print.

Clayton, J., Donovan, C. and Merchant, J. (2015) Emotions of austerity: Care and commitment in public service delivery in the North East of England, Emotion, Space and Society, 14, 24-32.

Copeland, A., Kasim, A. and Bambra, C. (2015). Grim up North or Northern grit? Recessions and the English spatial health divide (1991–2010). Journal of Public Health, 37/1, 34-39.

Crossley, S. and Slater, T. (2014) Articles: Benefits Street: territorial stigmatisation and the realization of a ‘(tele)vision of divisions’, Values and Value Blog, https://values.doc.gold.ac.uk/blog/18/.

Donald, B., Glasmeier, A., Gray, M. and Lobao, L. (2014) Austerity in the city: economic crisis and urban service decline? Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, 7/1, 3-15.

Dowler, E. and Lambie-Mumford, H. (2014) Rising use of “food aid” in the United Kingdom, British Food Journal, 116/9, 1418-1425.

Dowler, E. and Lambie-Mumford, H. (2015) How can households eat in austerity? Challenges for social policy in the UK, Social Policy and Society, 14/3, 417-428.

Dowler, E. and Lambie-Mumford, H. (2015) Introduction: Hunger, food and social policy in austerity, Social Policy and Society, 14/3, 411-415.

Flaherty, J. and Banks, S. (2013) In whose interest? The dynamics of debt in poor households, Journal of Poverty & Social Justice, 21/3, 219-232.

Fraser, A., Murphy, E. and Kelly, S. (2013) Deepening neoliberalism via austerity and ‘reform’: The case of Ireland, Human Geography, 6, 38-53.

Garthwaite, K., Collins, P. and Bambra, C. (2015) Food for thought: An ethnographic study of negotiating ill health and food insecurity in a UK foodbank, Social Science & Medicine, 132, 38-44.

Hall, S. M. (2015) Everyday ethics of consumption in the austere city, Geography Compass, 9/3, 140-151.

Hall, S. M. (2015). Everyday family experiences of the financial crisis: getting by in the recent economic recession. Journal of Economic Geography, online first.

Hall, S. M. and Jayne, M. (2015) Make, mend and befriend: geographies of austerity, crafting and friendship in contemporary cultures of dressmaking in the UK, Gender, Place & Culture, ahead-of-print.

Hamnett, C. (2010) Moving the poor out of central London? The implications of the coalition government 2010 cuts to Housing Benefits, Environment and Planning A, 42/12, 2809-2819.

Hamnett, C. (2011) The reshaping of the British welfare system and its implications for geography and geographers, Progress in Human Geography, 35/2, 147-152.

Hamnett, C. (2013) Shrinking the welfare state: the structure, geography and impact of British government benefit cuts, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Early View Online.

Hancock, L. and Mooney, G. (2013) “Welfare ghettos” and the “Broken Society”: Territorial stigmatization in the contemporary UK, Housing, Theory and Society, 30/1, 46-64.

Harrison, E. (2013) Bouncing back? Recession, resilience and everyday lives, Critical Social Policy, 33/1, 97-113.

Hodkinson, S. and Robbins, G. (2013) The return of class war conservatism? Housing under the UK coalition government, Critical Social Policy, 33/1, 57-77.

Horton, J. (2015) Young people and debt: getting on with austerities. Area, online first.

Jacobs, K. and Manzi, T. (2013) New localism, old retrenchment: The “Big Society”, housing policy and the politics of welfare reform, Housing, Theory and Society, 30/1, 29-45

Jensen, T. (2014). Welfare commonsense, poverty porn and doxosophy, Sociological Research Online, 19/3, http://www.socresonline.org.uk/19/3/3.html.

Jensen, T. and Tyler, I. (2013) Austerity parenting: New economies of parent citizenship, Studies in the Maternal, 4/2 http://www.mamsie.bbk.ac.uk/back_issues/4_2/editorial.html

Jensen, T. and Tyler, I. (2015) ‘Benefits broods’: The cultural and political crafting of anti-welfare commonsense, Critical Social Policy, online first.

Jones, G., Meegan, R., Kennett, P. and Croft, J. (2015) The uneven impact of austerity on the voluntary and community sector: A tale of two cities, Urban Studies, ahead-of-print.

Kennett, P., Jones, G., Meegan, R. and Croft, J. (2015) “Recession, austerity and the ‘Great Risk Shift’: Local government and household impacts and responses in Bristol and Liverpool, Local Government Studies, ahead-of-print.

[The two papers above, and Meegan et al (2014) below, come from a research project on “The uneven impact of recession on cities and households: Bristol and Liverpool compared”. More details and publications can be found here: http://www.bristol.ac.uk/sps/esrcunevenimpact/. Their website has links to a range of background documents, including a review of ‘grey literatures’ on the “Impact of the Recession and Period of Austerity on Households”, http://www.bris.ac.uk/sps/esrcunevenimpact/findingssofar/otherpapers.html.]

Koch, I. (2014) ‘A policy that kills’: The bedroom tax is an affront to basic rights, http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/a-policy-that-kills-the-bedroom-tax-is-an-affront-to-basic-rights/

Lambie-Mumford, H. (2013) ‘Every town should have one’: emergency food banking in the UK. Journal of Social Policy, 42/1, 73-89.

Lambie-Mumford, H. and Jarvis, D. (2012) The role of faith-based organisations in the Big Society: opportunities and challenges, Policy Studies, 33/3, 249-262.

Loopstra, R., et al. (2015) Austerity, sanctions, and the rise of food banks in the UK.” British Medical Journal h1775. http://www.bmj.com/content/350/bmj.h1775.short

MacDonald, R., Shildrick, T. and Furlong, A. (2014). ‘Benefits Street’ and the myth of workless communities, Sociological Research Online, 19/3, http://www.socresonline.org.uk/19/3/1.html.

Meegan, R., Kennett, P., Jones, G. and Croft, J. (2014) Global economic crisis, austerity and neoliberal urban governance in England, Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, 7/1, 137-153.

O’Hara, M. (2014) Austerity Bites: A Journey to the Sharp End of Cuts in the UK, Policy Press: Bristol.

Pearce, J. (2013) Commentary: Financial crisis, austerity policies, and geographical inequalities in health, Environment and Planning A, 45/9, 2030-2045.

Purdam, K., Garratt, E. and Esmail, A. (2015) Hungry? Food insecurity, social stigma and embarrassment in the UK, Sociology, ahead of print.

Ridge, T. (2013) ‘We are all in this together’? The hidden costs of poverty, recession and austerity policies on Britain’s poorest children, Children & Society, 27/5, 406-417.

Schrecker, T. and Bambra, C. (2015) How Politics Makes Us Sick: Neoliberal Epidemics, Palgrave Macmillan: London.

Schrecker, T. and Bambra, C. (2015) Neoliberal epidemics: the spread of austerity, obesity, stress and inequality, The Conversation, http://theconversation.com/neoliberal-epidemics-the-spread-of-austerity-obesity-stress-and-inequality-46416

Slater, T. (2011) From ‘criminality’ to marginality: Rioting against a broken state, Human Geography, 4/3, http://www.geos.ed.ac.uk/geography/homes/tslater/RiotingAgainstABrokenState.pdf

Slater, T. (2014) The myth of ‘Broken Britain’: welfare reform and the production of ignorance, Antipode 46/4, 948-969.

Stenning, A. (2013) The Costs of Austerity [blog post] https://blogs.ncl.ac.uk/alisonstenning/the-costs-of-austerity/

Stuckler, D. and Basu, S. (2013) The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills. Basic Books.

Tyler, I. (2013) The riots of the underclass? Stigmatisation, mediation and the government of poverty and disadvantage in neoliberal Britain, Sociological Research Online, 18(4) http://www.socresonline.org.uk/18/4/6.html

See also the themed issue of Critical Social Policy on “Social Policy in an Age of Austerity” in August 2012 (32/3)

Call for Interest: Emotional Geographies conference, June 2015

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 Everyday Relations with/in Economic Insecurities

Roundtable and workshop sessions at the Emotional Geographies Conference, Edinburgh 10-12 June 2015

Convenors Alison Stenning (Newcastle University, UK) and Kye Askins (University of Glasgow, UK)

The impacts of cuts, freezes and squeezes have attracted considerable attention across the UK, Europe and in other parts of the west in recent years, echoing longstanding concerns in parts of the global south (Oxfam 2013). Economic crisis and the austerity policies designed to respond to crisis have ushered in widespread experiences of economic insecurity. This sense of insecurity has spread to include marginalised communities and those who, until recently, lived with relative stability in their everyday economic lives.

This session seeks to explore what everyday economic insecurity feels like. What kinds of emotions and emotional relations are produced by the material realities of economic insecurity? What does a focus on the emotional offer to understanding everyday relations – with family, friends, neighbours, communities and strangers, as well as with institutions, organisations and the state – as they develop, shift and emerge through old and new economic insecurities? What roles might blame, stigma, embarrassment, anger and fear play in these relations and geographies of insecurity? How do care, concern and love factor into lives marked by insecurity? And what kinds of relations nudge struggling and coping with economic insecurity into escaping it – and vice versa?

Further, given feminist, postcolonial and other calls to pay attention to voice, agency and resistance, how might the lens of everyday emotions speak back to policy and practice? Can taking a critical approach to mundane, embodied emotions and relations facilitate knowledges and ways of knowing that may translate into governmental policy and/or institutional practices?

We are also keen to explore what the ethical and emotional demands of working on these issues and with people in precarious positions are. In the widest sense, ethics themselves are relations: as academics we are ourselves interwoven in webs of relations through our (often more than) research. We hope to tease out discussion on methodological approaches and personal reflections, in which paying attention to our own and others’ emotions is central.

We are particularly interested in work/research/practice that considers such questions in the context of:

  • housing and notions of home
  • employment/underemployment/unemployment
  • unpaid labour – emotional labour – caring activity
  • food, food poverty and foodbanks
  • health, ill health, disability
  • welfare … and its relation to wellbeing
  • debt and wider notions of indebtedness (financial and otherwise)
  • money and alternative economies

We wish to convene two sessions on these issues. First, a Roundtable discussion, in which ‘key participants’ briefly outline their thoughts and raise questions for 5 minutes each, before opening out to round the room debate. Second, and building on central themes emerging from the Roundtable, we hope to facilitate a workshop session to further explore conceptual, methodological and ethical issues in smaller groups.

If you would like to offer comments as a key participant, please get in touch with us by Nov. 10th (details below), with a brief outline of your interest. We are especially keen to encourage postgraduate, early career researchers and people who are just beginning to work on these themes to take part, with an emphasis on learning and sharing experiences and ideas. We also wish to support non-academic involvement, and are talking with conference organisers to see how best to facilitate this.  We intend the second session to be developed with all who wish to participate, and if you have specific ideas/thoughts on this, please email us.

So please get in touch with any comments, questions or to outline your interest in being a key participant – contact one or both co-convenors at alison.stenning@ncl.ac.uk and Kye.Askins@glasgow.ac.uk

 

 

 

 

More social geography of austerity/recession links and references

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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.

The Social Geographies of Recession and Austerity

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In preparing for some undergraduate teaching, I’ve pulled together a preliminary bibliography of academic and other material on the social geographies of austerity and recession. It’s a fairly mixed bag of published journal articles, blogs and reports from charities, think tanks and other organisations. It’s far from comprehensive but it offers a starting point. Any suggestions, updates or other comments would be very welcome.

Some basic summaries of the key reforms introduced by the coalition government can be found here:

Wikipedia

The government

Child Poverty Action Group

Local Government Information Unit

My Costs of Austerity blog post

 

Some really great blogs have emerged over the past few years as people have tried to document their own, and others’, struggles with austerity.  There’s an article about some of these blogs here.

These are some of the most interesting and/or prolific:

http://agirlcalledjack.com – Blog by Jack Monroe who has published particularly about food and food poverty; her Guardian columns (and recipes) are available here: http://www.theguardian.com/profile/jack-monroe

http://katebelgrave.com – “Talking with people dealing with public sector cuts”. Kate Belgrave’s Guardian columns are here: http://www.theguardian.com/profile/kate-belgrave

http://mumvausterity.blogspot.co.uk – Bernadette Horton, “a mum of 4 fighting everyday battles against austerity – and hoping to win!”

Most of these bloggers also tweet; you can find them and follow them for more updates and links to other bloggers.

 

Many of the major newspapers have developed sub-sections on their websites in which they document the effects of austerity from a number of perspectives.

On Guardian Witness, you can find personal accounts of families living in poverty; you follow the link to Guardian Witness from this page. The Guardian is also home to Patrick Butler’s Cuts Blog.

In 2008, The Telegraph’s went on a ‘Recession Tour‘ of a variety of UK localities.

 

Much of the material that ends up on the (web)pages of our national newspapers comes from a range of different projects launched by a variety of think tanks, lobby groups, charities and so on. The projects I’m highlighting here are ones which focus on the everyday experiences of recession and austerity in communities.

Real Life Reform is “an important and unique study that tracks over a period of 18 months how people are living and coping with welfare reforms across the North of England”. It has been developed by the Northern Housing Consortium with seven northern housing associations. There are two reports, one from September 2013 and another from December. A third report is due in the spring of 2014. You can follow Real Life Reform on Twitter @RealLifeReform.

The IPPR have developed a Voices of Britain website (http://voicesofbritain.com), as a “snapshot of the condition of Britain in 2013”.

The Family and Parenting Institute’s work on Families in the Age of Austerity is another exploration of the effects of austerity on families.

The Campaign for the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) Working Group for the North East produced this report on the impact of austerity measures on women in the North East.

For an Irish perspective, have a look at http://irelandafternama.wordpress.com – a blog written mostly by geographers on Ireland’s experience of financial crisis and austerity.

 

Some of the emerging academic work…

Atkinson, W., Roberts, S. & Savage, M. (eds.) (2012) Class Inequality in Austerity Britain, Palgrave MacMillan: Basingstoke. (The first chapter is available to download here).

Beatty, C. and Fothergill, S. (2013) Hitting the Poorest Places Hardest: The Local and Regional Impact of Welfare Reform.

Brown, G. (2013) The revolt of aspirations: contesting neoliberal social hope, ACME http://www.acme-journal.org/vol12/Brown2013.pdf

Flaherty, J. and Banks, S. (2013) In whose interest? The dynamics of debt in poor households, Journal of Poverty & Social Justice, 21/3, 219-232.

Fraser, A., Murphy, E. and Kelly, S. (2013) Deepening neoliberalism via austerity and ‘reform’: The case of Ireland, Human Geography, 6, 38-53.

Hamnett, C. (2011) The reshaping of the British welfare system and its implications for geography and geographers, Progress in Human Geography, 35/2, 147-152.

Hamnett, C. (2013) Shrinking the welfare state: the structure, geography and impact of British government benefit cuts, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Early View Online.

Hamnett, C. (2010) Moving the poor out of central London? The implications of the coalition government 2010 cuts to Housing Benefits, Environment and Planning A, 42/12, 2809-2819.

Hancock, L. and Mooney, G. (2013) “Welfare ghettos” and the “Broken Society”: Territorial stigmatization in the contemporary UK, Housing, Theory and Society, 30/1, 46-64.

Harrison, E. (2013) Bouncing back? Recession, resilience and everyday lives, Critical Social Policy, 33/1, 97-113.

Hodkinson, S. and Robbins, G. (2013) The return of class war conservatism? Housing under the UK coalition government, Critical Social Policy, 33/1, 57-77.

Jacobs, K. and Manzi, T. (2013) New localism, old retrenchment: The “Big Society”, housing policy and the politics of welfare reform, Housing, Theory and Society, 30/1, 29-45.

Lambie-Mumford, H. (2013) ‘Every town should have one’: emergency food banking in the UK, Journal of Social Policy, 42/1, 73-89.

Jensen, T. and Tyler, I. (2013) Austerity parenting: New economies of parent citizenship, Studies in the Maternal, 4/2  and a variety of other pieces on related themes: http://www.mamsie.bbk.ac.uk/back_issues/4_2/index.html.

Pearce, J. (2013) Commentary: Financial crisis, austerity policies, and geographical inequalities in health, Environment and Planning A, 45/9, 2030-2045.

Slater, T. (2012) The myth of ‘Broken Britain’: welfare reform and the production of ignorance, Antipode Early Online View.

Stuckler, D. and Basu, S. (2013) The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills, Basic Books.

Tyler, I. (2013) The riots of the underclass? Stigmatisation, mediation and the government of poverty and disadvantage in neoliberal Britain, Sociological Research Online, 18(4)  (This is part of a special issue of Sociological Research Online on Collisions, Coalitions and Riotous Subjects: Reflections, Repercussions and Reverberations).

There is a themed issue of Critical Social Policy on “Social Policy in an Age of Austerity” in August 2012 (32/3).

 

 

 

 

On loneliness

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I just returned to my office after teaching an introductory session on relationships to our MA Human Geography students to find a Twitter link to this article by Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian.

Chakrabortty reflects on this government’s record on fighting loneliness, in the light of Health Minister Jeremy Hunt’s recent speech. Chakrabortty argues that “Such stats [about the health hazards of loneliness] should make tackling isolation a public-health priority for any government. This one, however, seems to be doing its best to increase loneliness: its bedroom tax and housing-benefit cuts are wrenching families out of their communities and driving them into other neighbourhoods, even other cities.”

But having just been talking to our MA students about relationships and about nature and value of relationships in the city, I was drawn to Chakrabortty’s discussion of the desperately sad story of Joyce Vincent, a 38 year old Londoner found dead in her flat in 2006, three years after she had died. Chakrabortty writes that “she had sisters, mates, former colleagues and ex-boyfriends. Those social circles appear to have failed her.”

Joyce Vincent’s life and death became the focus of a documentary film by filmmaker Carol Morley, Dreams of a Life. According to Chakrabortty (I haven’t seen the film yet), Morley’s film “shows city living as a series of weak links, forgettable friendships and single people getting by in their single housing units. By the end of it, you not only understand how a person can disappear from view; you wonder how many others suffer the same fate.”

The reviews and discussions of Morley’s film (see Philip French, and two pieces by Peter Bradshaw here and here, for example) pick up on many of the same themes and questions. And Carol Morley herself talks about them here.

I don’t have much to add at this stage but this story and these questions of loneliness in the city struck me hard as I returned from teaching about these very things.

 

A bit more information about interviews for possible participants…

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This is just a quick post with a bit more information about what interviews for this project might involve.

If you’ve just arrived here from a link, tweet or FB message, please first have a look here, where you’ll find more information about this research project.

I’m looking for low-to-middle income families or individuals (the ‘squeezed middle’) living in Cullercoats or on the Marden estate. If you fit the bill, then please read on. 

Ideally, I’d meet you twice over a few weeks (maybe with an additional meeting at the start, just to meet each other and talk about the research in a bit more detail). Each interview will take about an hour, but it depends on how much you have to say.

The first interview will focus on your family – who lives with you, how long you’ve lived in Cullercoats, what jobs you have, if you have other family living locally, for example – and on your experiences of recession – on your jobs, on shopping, on your budgets and so on. I won’t ask for details like your salary or what benefits you receive. I won’t ask many questions, but will leave you to talk about the things you want to tell me.

In the first interview, we’ll also talk about your friends and family, to get an idea of who is important to you. To help do this, I’ll ask you to fill in a diagram (a ‘personal community map’) like the ones below:

At the end of the first interview, I’ll ask if you’re interested in filling in a diary for a week, noting down which of your friends, family, neighbours and acquaintances you meet and what you do with them.

If you do agree to do this, then we’ll arrange another interview for when you’ve finished and talk about these relationships in more detail, focusing particularly on if and how they help you cope with the effects of recession on your family. Again, I’ll try not to ask too many questions and let you tell me what you want me to know.

We can meet anywhere that suits you. This may be your home, or someone else’s home, or your workplace, or a public place such as a café or even a park. We can also meet at a time that suits you.

With your permission, I would like to record the interviews but anything we do discuss will be anonymised before I use it in any presentations or publications. I will keep all the information you give me safe.

As a thank you for participating, after our final meeting, I’ll give you £20 worth of high street vouchers.

If you are interested in being interviewed, please contact me by email, phone or text.

Mobile: 07580 386874

Email: alison.stenning@ncl.ac.uk

 

Updates and more information about the project can be found at:

blogs.ncl.ac.uk/alisonstenning

www.facebook.com/researchingcullercoats

Twitter: @alisonstenning

 

On the Edge: Neoliberalism, Austerity and Insecurity

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I touched on the idea of families on the edge, of poverty, security, certainty, anxiety, in my squeezed middle post. I want to explore that idea, of the edge, a bit more here, to think about the ways in which neoliberalism, in general, and austerity, in particular, are associated with experiences of being on the brink, and what it might feel like to be on the brink.

Of course, these are ideas long associated with neoliberalism. Pierre Bourdieu‘s 1998 discussion of the violence of neoliberalism sees the ‘absolute reign of flexibility’ create an environment of competition and individualisation: “the struggle of all against all … through everyone clinging to their job … under conditions of insecurity, suffering and stress”. For Bourdieu, the structural violence of unemployment and the ‘menace’ of job insecurity puts workers on edge.

More recently, Guy Standing has drawn our attention to the precariat, the ‘new dangerous class’, “a multitude of insecure peole, living bits-and-pieces lives, in and out of short-term jobs, without a narrative of occupational development”. A particularly pernicious and increasingly widespread form of precarity is the zero-hours contract, which forces workers (in major public sector organisations, such as the NHS, as well as large corporations) into a liminal, ‘twilight zone’, ‘on standby’, neither fully in nor fully out of the labour market, with little control over their time or their income. It’s easy to see how that loss of any sense of certainty, or predictability, might be associated with anxiety.   

The idea of precarity echoes strongly the idea of an edge, and a danger of falling. As Standing himself suggests “Many people outside the precariat feel they could fall into it at any time.”

on the edge

One of the markers of this period of recession and austerity, then, is the extension of precarity and vulnerability to ever larger parts of the population. What was, until recently, an experience associated with more marginal forms of employment, in informal economies, is now part of the mainstream, an everyday threat. More and more workers – and their families – have been brought to the edge. Media analyses, blog posts and think tank reports are full, day after day, of stories of workers in good jobs, with stable track records of employment, suddenly falling into uncertainty as they face job loss and redundancy.

But perhaps the metaphor of a cliff edge is wrong. Perhaps it’s more like a shoreline, with the edge of the labour market moving backwards and forwards through working populations, leaving people sometimes in, sometimes out. Despite myths of ‘benefit dependency’, most Jobseekers Allowance claims are very short, with many claiming for less than six months. But this in itself is troubling; life is unpredictable and unreliable. The precariousness of life under neoliberalism rests, then, to a considerable extent on the insecurity of employment, the in and out, the threat of redundancy, and the loss of the possibility of continuity.

But this is also coupled with what Rachael Peltz identified as “the absence of a containing governing authority” or what Lauren Berlant has described as a declining “infrastructure for holding the public as a public”. The erosion of welfare provision and the loss of other ‘containing’ institutions, such as unions and certain kinds of community, reinforce the sense of insecurity. The idea of social security and of the ‘safety net’ clearly assert the connection between these institutions and a sense of being contained, or held, of not being allowed to fall (off the edge).

In the context of current period of austerity, not only is welfare provision eroded still further, but the threat of further erosions and a growing sense that any benefit income is itself uncertain, subject to repeated reassessment and ever-changing criteria, provoke still more anxiety.

What is more, neoliberalism also promotes ideas of independence and self-sufficiency. It fosters an ambivalence towards, or even a wholesale rejection of, interdependency (as Judith Butler has explored). Neoliberal subjects should be self-contained, relying only on themselves to achieve success. Of course, this means, following Valerie Walkerdine, that any failure is also ‘achieved’ individually.

As I discussed in an earlier post, the sense of being contained enables us, hopefully, to go on being. In conditions of precarity, that sense is threatened; “trust in the continuity of life” (to quote Lauren Berlant) is replaced by new forms of subjectivity, insecurely balanced on experiences of vulnerability and individualisation. The loss of a secure environment of interdependency makes it difficult to ‘go on being’, to feel a sense of ontological security, as well as a sense of material or financial security. As Adam Phillips suggests, without a sense of containment, living becomes reactive, coping replaces living. Donald Winnicott explains how ruptures and breaks in the ‘holding’ or ‘facilitating’ environment, and the threat of them, erodes the possibility of going on being; when life becomes a struggle against the environment, when the environment impinges on life, then there is a psychic cost.  

Although Winnicott was working in the field of child development, and talking of the welfare of infants, it is possible to think about these ideas in a broader context of welfare. Debates about the ‘psychical effects of social injustice’ (Frost and Hoggett 2008, 442) have enriched our discussions since Bourdieu drew our attention to ‘social suffering’ and since Richard Sennett spoke of the ‘hidden injuries of class’. In this project, what I’m trying to explore further is what this sense of being ‘on the edge’ feels like for families today and, importantly, to ask who (or what) contains these families in the context of austerity.