Everyday Life in Austerity
Description
This book is about the impact of austerity in and on everyday life, based on a two-year ethnography with families and communities in 'Argleton', Greater Manchester, UK. Focused on family, friends and intimate relations, and their intersections, the book develops a relational approach to everyday austerity. It reveals how austerity is a deeply personal and social condition, with impacts that spread across and between everyday relationships, spaces and temporal perspectives. It demonstrates how austerity is lived and felt on the ground, with distinctly uneven socio-economic consequences. Furthermore, everyday relationships are subject to change and continuity in times of austerity. Austerity also has lasting impacts on personal and shared experiences, both in terms of day-to-day practices and the lifecourses people imagine themselves living.
Reviews / Votes
"Everyday Life in Austerity is a beautifully crafted and powerful account of living in and with austerity. Sarah Marie Hall brings economic, urban and financial geographies together with ideas of family, friendship and intimacy, to provide an intellectually compelling and empirically grounded analysis of everyday relationships and practices for hard times. This book is a vital resource for researchers, students, policymakers and practitioners who are concerned with poverty, families and communities." (Rosalind Edwards, Professor of Sociology, University of Southampton)"This book challenges the way we think about austerity. Drawing on rich ethnographic research with families and communities and innovative ways of theorising everyday life, Sarah Marie Hall exposes austerity as a personal and relational condition. The chapters provoke emotions of both despair at the fraying tapestry of care, but also hope through stories of quiet politics: creative spaces of togetherness and solidarity. This is an important and timely book that will appeal to readers across disciplinary boundaries." (Gill Valentine, Professor of Geography and Pro-Vice-Chancellor, University of Sheffield)
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Person
Dr Sarah Marie Hall is Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Manchester. Her research sits in the broad field of geographical feminist political economy: understanding how everyday socio-economic processes are shaped by gender relations, lived experience and social difference.
Content
Chapter 1: Introduction.- Chapter 2: Family, Friendship and Intimacy: A Relational Approach to Everyday Austerity.- Chapter 3: Everyday Social Infrastructures and Tapestries of Care in Times of Austerity.- Chapter 4: Austere Intimacies and Intimate Austerities.- Chapter 5: The Personal is Political (and Relational).- Chapter 6: A Very Personal Crisis: Family Fragilities and Everyday Conjunctures in Austerity.- Chapter 7: Conclusion.