Waiting, Caring, Navigating: An Ethnographic Study of Women's Everyday Lives within and beyond Austerity

There can be little doubt that the United Kingdom’s austerity programme – relentlessly pursued by successive Conservative-led governments – has had profound socio-economic impacts on the country and its inhabitants. While initial analyses and academics engagements were primarily quantitative in nature, and largely underpinned by fiscal understandings, this thesis – like other work interested in ‘actually existing austerity’ – approaches austerity as something that is lived and felt in the very real and intimate spaces of everyday life. This is not to completely abandon or disregard its ‘economic-ness’, but rather to highlight that austerity is a phenomenon that is also rooted in lived experience. Drawing upon ten months of ethnographic data gathered while volunteering at a women’s centre in Leicester, this thesis starts from the contention that austerity is inherently gendered. It uses a combination of volunteer ethnography, Oral Histories and Futures, participant-generated timelines, photovoice and maps of everyday life to develop in-depth and more nuanced understandings of women’s lives. However, rather than continuing to perpetuate the harmful notion that ‘we’re all in this together’, I take an intersectional approach to argue that the interaction of axes of social difference produces uneven experiences of socio-economic change across space, time and bodies. Despite their shared gender identity, I show how participants were unequally positioned in relation to austerity and, as a result, differentially understood, embodied and navigated its effects in their lives. Centred around three practices – waiting, caring and navigating – this thesis provides powerful insights into the extended time-spaces of austerity. Running counter to narrations of the last thirteen years as a ‘short, sharp pain’, it draws attention to the ways in which the adverse effects of socio-economic change can linger, seeping into all aspects of people’s lives. In doing so, I demonstrate the importance of understanding how austerity becomes entangled in and with everyday practices, ebbing and flowing in intensity between the background and foreground of daily life. Experiences of austerity are not, therefore, temporally or spatially discrete; they extend far beyond the implementation of particular policies, framing our lives in the present and shaping the kinds of futures that we think might be possible.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Cambridge

Year dc:date.issued

2024

Author dc:creator

• Parpworth, Catriona

Advisors dc:contributor.advisor

• Jeffrey, Alexander
• Moore, Francesca Patricia

• Austerity
• Ethnography
• Feminist Geographies
• Gender
• Intersectionality

Licence

• https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/3dcfc7d0-2388-4137-9fc0-aa2465968f12/download
• https://www.rioxx.net/licenses/all-rights-reserved/

Language dc:language

eng

DOI dc:identifier.doi

https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.112391

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/374272