Families, policy and place in times of austerity

Abstract

Families in the UK have played a key role within the ‘third way’ policy regimes of the past two decades, promising to act as arenas of citizenship between the individual and the market. Such a framing has always posed questions about which families are imagined to be capable of this role, with competing constructions of ‘risky’ and ‘resourceful’ families within social policy discourses. Over the past five years UK families have been hit with an array of cuts and reforms to state benefits and other forms of government support. This paper argues that, within this context of austerity, problematic binary constructions in policy discourses are increasing. Certain families and households are relied on to deliver aspects of care, while others are vilified as unstable and ‘troubled’, in ways that view families as individualised and removed from their wider geographies. Against this background it is argued that detailed geographical research into the everyday lives of disadvantaged families can talk back to these powerful representations. This means paying attention to the ways that families navigate everyday landscapes of care, both material and emotional, which are in turn shaped by the unequal resources available, including increasingly unevenly distributed state services.