Austere life-courses and foreclosed futures: a relational geographical approach to work, housing, and family across austerity Europe

This article seeks to advance geographical understandings of the impact of austerity on young adults in Europe and particularly on their social, relational, and temporal sense of the future. We adopt a life-course perspective to theorise personal, generational, institutional, and social change in relation to one another. Firstly, we progress relational life-course perspectives in human geography to illustrate how place-based experiences of austerity shape lived experiences, temporalities, and normative ideas surrounding life transitions. We introduce the concept of ‘foreclosed futures’ to re-examine conceptualisations of young adults’ eroding material conditions as a postponement of adulthood. We argue that the enduring impact of austerity contests the theorisation of young adults’ experiences of precarity as a transient elongation of youth. Expanding upon non-teleological life-course perspectives, we show that while austere institutions have foreclosed stable futures, the paths to precarity are myriad and rooted in geographically varied forms of austerity. Secondly, in examining how austere institutions shape young people's work, housing, and family biographies, we argue that, rather than leading to de-institutionalisation, austerity marks a process of life-course re-institutionalisation or ‘familialisation of the life-course’. To conclude, this article proposes a series of prompts for future international empirical research on austere life-courses and foreclosed futures.