Family, Friendship and Intimacy: A Relational Approach to Everyday Austerity

Abstract

In this chapter I outline what a relational approach to everyday life in austerity looks like and how it can be employed. Bringing work around economic, urban and financial geographies into conversation with ideas about family, friendship and intimacy, I develop a conceptual framework for the more empirically detailed chapters of this book. Throughout this discussion, I use the phrase ‘everyday austerity’ to encompass the lived elements of contemporary austerity. This term also acknowledges that time, place and context are important in shaping what austerity means in different spaces and moments. I show how the everyday elements of living in and through austerity have the potential to enhance and extend current geographical understandings, and across sub-disciplinary divides, as to the contextualised and multiscalar experience of austerity.