A Very Personal Crisis: Family Fragilities and Everyday Conjunctures in Austerity

Abstract

With this chapter, I explore the ways in which austerity and economic crises manifest as personal crises, shaping lifecourses, and ideas thereof, in the future. By bringing literatures on the geographies of crisis to speak to research in the wider social sciences (particularly sociological and anthropological contributions) regarding personal lives, vital events and the lifecourse, I show how austerity is woven into the temporalities of everyday life, knotted together with memories, experiences and imaginaries. Setting austerity in the language of crisis also reveals connections to the concept of conjuncture, which has been deployed in work on both economic and familial crises to describe spatial-temporal disruption but not brought together before in this way. I also place this work in conversation with theories of the family, namely Judith Stacey’s (1990) notion of inherent ‘structural fragility’ of the modern family system, to illustrate how economic crises play out in everyday life and are felt—as per the title of the chapter—as a very personal crisis.