The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. AbstractThis paper moves beyond conceptualisations of austerity as a fiscal policy towards understanding austerity as lived and felt in everyday life, with a particular focus on its affective life. Through an ethnographic focus on public libraries, this paper argues that that austerity can take the form of an affective atmosphere. Bringing together psychoanalytic and Spinozist-Deleuzian accounts of affect this paper explores austerity as an uncanny atmosphere, in which austerity is lived through a series of unknowns that re-emerge throughout the library space. Paranoia subsequently emerges as a way in which to live with uncanny austerity -to make known the unknowns generated by austerity. This paranoia cannot be attributed to 'paranoid individuals', but to practices that become paranoid due to the blurring of reality and fiction that uncanny austerity generates. As austerity continues year after year, the uncertainties that emerge as a result of continual budget reductions are at the same time felt as something already known. In other words, there is a felt sense that austerity will inevitably lead to the contraction of the library service. Lived austerity, therefore, now carries such weight and has a particular depth of experience due to the innumerable previous years of, and encounters with, austerity.

This paper moves beyond conceptualisations of austerity as fi scal policy towards exploring the multiple ways austerity may be lived and felt in everyday life. Drawing on research with families affected by disability, this paper argues that austerity is felt as a series of atmospheres that envelop and condition times and spaces of the everyday. Austerity is made both affectively and materially present through these atmospheric intensities as they register and radiate between individual bodies and everyday objects. As they shape both day-to-day practices and future imaginaries, atmospheres of austerity generate numerous individualised experiences that result in multiple affective relations towards austerity. As a result, this paper holds together the following relations to austerity: anticipating austerity, adapting to austerity, 'getting on with life' and accepting austerity. These show that austerity is more than an economic policy; it is a phenomenon that is understood through individuals' lived and felt realities that are often experienced through fl uctuating, non-coherent and sometimes confl icting affective relations that come to shape how people feel and act in the everyday. It is through a conceptualisation of austerity as lived that we might galvanise people against austerity by encouraging a more nuanced and multi-tonal counter politics that takes into account the multiple affective relations that are expressed through various domains of everyday life.

The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.