Austerity and Altered Life-Courses: Co-Creating Stories, Spaces and Solidarities

Austerity and Altered Life-Courses (AALC) is a major research programme exploring in detail how austerity policies across Europe since the global economic crisis of 2008-2010 have led to 'socio-political ruptures' in young people's life-courses. Austerity-driven policy agendas continue to dominate across Europe, with limited direct policy reversal and reinvestment to date. Austerity’s impacts thus remain ever-present, stretching further into the life-courses and futures of young people who have lived their formative adult years in austerity, and manifest differently according to local and national contexts. Altered lives and futures under austerity thus constitute a form of significant and long-term intergenerational inequality across Europe. This renewal project builds on the successes of the first phase of AALC, which generated over 100 young people’s unique stories of lives and futures of austerity from across the autonomous/devolved regions of Greater Manchester, Sardinia and Barcelona. Our findings and partnerships led to major conceptual and methodological developments in life-course approaches, impactful place-based community co-creation projects and future-proofing policy co-production, facilitated by PI Hall’s distinctive feminist, solidaristic leadership. Advancing this work, the renewal project is framed around a refreshed focus on co-creating space, stories and solidarities, aiming to reframe and redress socio-economic inequalities resulting from austerity across Europe in theory, method and praxis. The research objectives are as follows: ROi. Gather and share stories of socio-economic inequalities under austerity across Europe; ROii. Co-create new spaces at multiple scales and sectors to leverage socio-economic change; ROiii. Build solidarities across and between academic and community researchers. To meet these aims and objectives, the renewal is arranged into four main work-packages. Generating empirically informed and groundbreaking conceptual innovations, expansion of the research sites will enhance understanding of austerity futures across Northern European city regions, to include Dublin County, Ireland and Rotterdam Municipality, the Netherlands, whilst also continuing with research in the three original sites. These two new sites contribute a further empirical layer with a focus on youth migration and housing in the context of austerity, which is a growing and timely issue in these locations and within the field of austerity inequalities research more broadly (WP2). Methodological innovations are likewise anticipated, enhancing our novel Oral Histories and Futures approach to include return interviewing and group-based discussions. Collating insightful future-facing narratives from these novel life-course techniques will contribute to building a unique, cutting-edge longitudinal dataset on young people’s futures in austerity across Europe (WP1). Drawing on our original research insights, and collaborating with creative professionals and community researchers, we will also co-create a range of creative interventions (play, art piece, community podcast, and zine archive) by using storytelling as a powerful technique to engender policy and social change. These creative interventions also support our ongoing innovations in co-creating future-proofing policy praxis at local, regional and national scales (WP3). Finally, the renewal will build radical local and international solidarity research networks via the Bread and Roses collective and the CARE network, respectively, to address the inequalities generated by austerity’s lives and futures (WP4).