This article analyzes the impact of different consumption patterns that are used to counteract economic hardship and to mitigate the effects of such hardship in times of crisis in Germany. We focus on resilient socioeconomic practices, such as the development of formal or informal practices of consumption, production, and saving. We develop a critical approach of social resilience that is combined with the idea of a bricolage (Levi‐Strauss, 1962) of “mixed economy” practices (Malcolmson, 1988). This is done by demonstrating the relevance of preconditions for resilient practices. Based on an analysis of in‐depth biographical interviews, two main types of resilient consumption practices and strategies of those who experience economic hardship are identified. First, saving, as the predominant practice, includes buying low‐priced items at discount stores, taking advantage of the offerings of charity organisations, and reducing expenditures overall. Second, home production consists of subsistence farming or do‐it‐yourself activities for personal use or bartering. In this context, particular attention is paid to the reactivation of traditional noncommodified practices, such as the nonmonetary (mutual) exchange of goods and services within social networks, and the reactivation of previously undervalued knowledge that results in new spheres of production. We conclude by discussing the relevance of preconditions and consequences—as well as the demands and personal costs—of the resilient practices used.
This article is about the relevance of social class within emotional geography. Based on life history interviews with former metalworkers in Bavaria, it analyses their identity-related sense of place and the feelings of loss they experience when encountering their former places of work. By concentrating on the perspective of those who have worked on industrial sites, and their encounters with those sites, now transformed, this article focuses on a specific identity-related emotion experienced by working-class people, which is often underestimated. Recollections of common experiences linked to the workplace may seem haunting in the form of memories of body routines within a place ballet, or of former buildings and walls. Workers describe how, when they visit their former workplace, they have to confront this haunting from the past; and it is through these haunting experiences that their class identity takes on a new but often painful existence.
This paper examines poverty and hardship in Europe after the 2008 crisis, using household interviews in nine European countries. A number of findings deserve highlighting. First, making a distinction between 'the old poor' (those who lived in poverty before as well as after the crisis) and 'the new poor' (those who fell into hardship after the crisis), we show that hardship is experienced quite differently by these groups. Second, the household narratives showed that while material deprivations constitute an important aspect of hardship, the themes of insecurity and dependency also emerged as fundamental dimensions. In contrast to popular political discourse in countries such as the UK, dependency on welfare or family was experienced as a source of distress and manifested as a form of hardship by participants in all countries covered in this study.
This article explores the transformation of a community and its diversity as narrated by former industrial workers from a neighbourhood in Nuremberg, in a context in which company-based social housing of workers had been replaced by private rented accommodation accessed by middle class residents of migrant backgrounds. In biographical interviews, narratives emerge in which diversity and social difference are not seen as ethnic difference, but rather as a power difference within an established-outsider figuration. In this figuration, heterogeneous past and present cultural practices are homogenised through community control and regulation along normative rules as defined by the established. Workers' nostalgic laments for the loss of their former status show that figuration of established and outsiders is dynamic, opening up new ways of thinking about diverse place-making and alternative perspectives on urban gentrification.
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