Austerity and Altered Life-Courses: Socio-Political Ruptures to Family, Employment and Housing Biographies Across Europe

Austerity and the global economic crisis have had direct and devastating impacts on young people's life-course biographies across Europe since 2008. This has been particularly acute for those now aged 35 and under, experiencing significant disruption ('socio-political ruptures') throughout their formative years. This includes interconnected impacts on family childbearing decisions, employment opportunities, and housing arrangements.

These vary depending on context. To investigate these issues, this project is focused on three European devolved or autonomous regions: Greater Manchester (UK), Barcelona Province (Catalonia, Spain) and Sardinia (Italy).

A growing body of academic and policy related research on the lived experiences of austerity and economic crisis considers the impact on young people's futures. However, less understood by academics and policy-makers are the interconnections between socio-political ruptures for/within life-course biographies of young people. A lack of understanding about intersecting socio-political ruptures is also mirrored in policy and government silos, whereby housing, family and employment policies and departments are rarely integrated.

There is also a need to embed life-course perspectives into policy-making, to better account for how the social life of policy (such as austerity) has impacts that are felt on the ground long after implementation. As a form of redress, this project proposes thinking about austerity not as a point in time, society or space, but as constantly being formed and reshaped, and in dialogue with experiences, histories and futures.

This project provides the necessary conceptual novelty and empirical innovation to address these complex issues. It does so by synthesising and extending conceptual approaches from across social science disciplines, developing creative methodological tools, and co-designing regional policy recommendations that embed life-course perspectives within regional policy.

It will reprise long-term perspectives offered by a life-course approach within geography, with a new methodological twist, and will develop a new approach to understanding policy that considers the 'social life of policy' as spatially and temporally contingent. To advance this agenda, the project is guided by the following research questions:

1. In what ways have young people experienced overlapping socio-political ruptures to their life-courses, according to local austere contexts?

2. How do young people articulate and envision the impacts of these socio-political ruptures on their future biographies?

3. How can life-course perspectives on austerity shape understandings about and applications of the social life of policy?

To address these questions, in-depth creative oral history interviews (100 per site) will be carried out in each site, documenting the impacts of austerity on young people's life-course biographies, focused on the linkages between socio-political ruptures. This will produce a rich, innovative body of data detailing the lived, complex legacies of austerity.

With permission edited interviews will be submitted to local public archives in each site and used to develop an exhibition. The comparative empirical elements are also underpinned by systematic area profiles and literature reviews that bring together multi-disciplinary and policy work in the field, across languages and contexts. Co-production workshops, drawing on project findings presented via an exhibition in each site and a website, will develop policy recommendations on bringing life-course perspectives and ideas about the social life of policy into regional policies.

These will be discussed at policy implementation workshops with the support of partners and attended by policy-makers from various levels of government. The project will also build a community of praxis leading to the first European research and policy network focused on young people's life-course biographies and austerity (ENYPLA).