Imagining a future in the austerity city: Anticipated futures and the formation of neoliberal subjectivities of youth in Ireland

Abstract

This paper explores what anticipated futures of disadvantaged urban youth can reveal about the contemporary and future consequences of austerity. As austerity has disrupted several transitions associated with adulthood, such as finding work and moving out of the parental home, it affects how young adults imagine their future. Young adults living in neighbourhoods of concentrated deprivation were particularly vulnerable to such disruptions. Therefore, this paper builds on semi-structured interviews with youth from Knocknaheeny (Cork) and Ballymun (Dublin) in Ireland to present two vignettes reflecting dominant narratives on anticipated futures. First, a narrative that embraces neoliberal logic, where young adulthood is the basis for future success through dedicated hard work rather than a phase of exploration of possible futures. Second, a narrative of “acceptance” where youth imagines the future to “go on” from the present and becomes a source of anxiety or resignation. This paper shows that combining vignettes with interview data presents two benefits. First, they illuminate the complex and sometimes contradictory stories of youth making sense of their present, past and future. Second, comparing and contrasting the vignettes to multiple participant stories can disentangle roles of location, class, gender and other differentiations. In conclusion, the paper stresses the importance of imagined futures for understanding everyday geographies of austerity as anticipated futures surface in everyday practices, behaviour, and attitudes.

Social reproduction, labour and austerity: Carrying the future

“…Janine 3 talked in similar ways about simultaneously carrying multiple possible futures. She spoke about wanting to start saving money, after having fallen into considerable debt in her late twenties, so that she might be able to buy her own house and have children in the future (Davis & Cartwright, 2019;Lebano & Jamieson, 2020;van Lanen, 2021). Like Jonny, she also held deep-seated worries about having moved far away from her family and working-class community (having also been raised by a single mother), and yet there being remaining parental care needs for which she felt personally and socially responsible.…”

“…Vihaan also indicated the significance of this labour of life-planning, and how his reproductive future had originally involved ‘having our own home, I mean, we were planning a new house and then have kids’. However, with the increasing unaffordability of private rents, growth in the housing market and difficulties saving for a mortgage, and lack of social housing provision, achieving these ideals proved difficult (Davis & Cartwright, 2019; Saunders, 2020; van Lanen, 2020, 2021).…”

“…Attention has been drawn to the lives of children and young adults growing up in this period and the implications for their lives (Horton et al, 2021; van Lanen, 2021), with intersectional inequalities where identities and difference coalesce (Erel, 2018; Hall, 2022b; Soldatic & Morgan, 2017). Austerity reinforces pre-existing socio-economic inequalities that are ongoing, long-term, embedded and intergenerational.…”

‘I guess I really survived many crises’: On the benefits of longitudinal ethnographic research

“…The choice to focus the analysis on one research participant is aimed at giving a rich, detailed picture of both the experience of ‘crisis as context’ in one's life (see van Lanen, 2021 for a similar choice) and the sense of familiarity developed between RD and myself thanks to the longitudinal character of the research.…”