The right to be weary? Endurance and exhaustion in austere times

Abstract

This paper seeks to advance understandings of austerity's everyday affects by examining how neoliberal welfare retrenchment is lived, experienced and resisted. Drawing on interviews with young people in housing need, we demonstrate the ways in which day‐to‐day coping with welfare reform can lead to a state of fatigue, a gradual slow wearing‐out that comes with having to endure everyday hardship. Such weariness, we argue, is an integral part of understanding the everyday impacts of austerity. Yet despite the apparent centrality of weariness to issues such as precarity and poverty, there has not yet been sustained discussion into the idea of weariness itself. A common conceptualisation positions weariness as the antithesis of political action, where individuals are slowly worn down until they no longer have the strength or capacity to resist. However, this paper offers a more reparative reading of weariness, one which does not narrowly conceptualise weariness as simply a closing down. Instead we question whether weariness should necessarily always be equated with inaction. The paper focuses on forms of suffering and violence that are felt as a kind of steady on‐going form of endurance, rather than as a sudden eruption. We foreground affective moments that are neither passionate nor intense, but instead listless and still, generating feelings of inertia, flatness, impasse. The paper concludes with some reflections on what we term “the right to be weary,” examining how weariness could be understood as a potential retreat from the relentless drive to move forwards, a form of passive dissent.

Exploring employment as a space of respite and resistance for family caregivers

“…Yet by reinforcing the point that analyses of resistance depend on perspective we feel confident that our findings provide a foundation upon which others can build. In particular, Wilkinson and Ortega‐Alcazar’s () work on the political potential of weariness and resistance resonates for its relevance to challenges that our caregivers face. Such emerging conceptualisations of resistance underscore that there is still much to explore on this topic.…”

A very personal crisis: Family fragilities and everyday conjunctures within lived experiences of austerity

“…Recent and emerging writings regarding financial crisis and austerity make the case for deeper understandings of impacts at the personal scale, with individuals, families, and households simultaneously affected in multiple ways (Elwood & Lawson, ; García‐Lamarca & Kaika, ; Horton, ). Such work, on “subjective experiences” and personal responses to financial crisis and austerity (van Lanen, , p. 1605), has been conceptualised according to austerity urbanism, indebtedness, responsibilisation, embodiment, and financialisation (e.g., Fields, ; García‐Lamarca & Kaika, ; Stenning, ; Wilkinson & Ortega‐Alcázar, ), to name but a few. Austerity is also acknowledged as exacerbating everyday social differences and inequalities (Christophers, ; Fields, ; van Lanen, ), with emerging personalising, stigmatising discourses that “situate some people and places as sympathetic and deserving of help and others not” (Elwood & Lawson, , p. 104).…”

“…For instance, van Lanen's study of disadvantaged urban youth in Ireland found austerity “directly and indirectly narrows the lifeworld” (, p. 1607) for this group. In research based in the north of England, Pimlott‐Wilson found significant emotional burdens and negotiations for young people who “acknowledge their own responsibility as future adult citizens” (, p. 288; also see Wilkinson & Ortega‐Alcázar, ). Further research on generational inequality by Christophers (), Hochstenbach (), and MacLeavy and Manley (, p. 1438) reveals the intergenerational transmission of inequality, “embedded over time” and across the lifecourse, leading to socio‐economic polarisations.…”

“…The accumulation of these personal strains took their toll on Selma and other participants, often describing themselves as tired – physically, mentally, and of their precarious situation (also see Fields et al., ). Stenning () and Wilkinson and Ortega‐Alcázar () similarly write of the embodied impacts of austerity, creating feelings of weariness, exhaustion, and being squeezed.…”

“…Geographical contributions to literature on crisis point to the uneven spatialities of economic crises, the power differences and inequalities they expose, and the possibilities they unleash (Aalbers, ; Castree, ; Larner, ). More recent writings also identify how crises are multi‐scalar and involve impacts at the personal scale (e.g., Fields, ; García‐Lamarca & Kaika, ; Horton, ; Stenning, ; van Lanen, ; Wilkinson & Ortega‐Alcázar, ). This paper extends and enriches these literatures on how crises “play out” in everyday life, by conceptualising austerity and economic crisis as constituting a personal crisis ; lived in, through, and punctuating everyday life, manifesting as a life crisis, and shaping lifecourses, biographies and imaginaries of the future (Christophers, ; Fields et al., ; MacLeavy & Manley, ).…”