Austerity Parenting: new economies of parent-citizenship

Editorial Guest editors: Tracey Jensen and Imogen Tyler Austerity Parenting: new economies of parent-citizenship This Special Issue of Studies in the Maternal on the theme of 'Austerity Parenting' examines the central positioning of parents within public narratives of "austerity". Focusing on analyses of political, policy, and news media accounts of economic crises, austerity is explored through this issue as a discourse which produces accounts of waste and inefficiencies, moral conduct and lifestyle, work, worth and labour, around temporalities of the past and future within which parents are imagined as key actors of both blame (feckless parents as scapegoats for moral and economic decline) and change (good parenting as the solution to the social impact of welfare rollback and stagnant class mobility). Austerity is examined in this Special Issue in terms of the new requirement for parents to become 'austere', to do more with less, for the sake of the future that their children and grandchildren will inherit. We explore the ways in which austerity is invoked as a solution to debt and the condition of indebtedness, whereby we must learn to do without, to wait for what we want, and to put scarce resources to better use. We detail how austerity is spoken through romances of the past: how it re-animates fantasies of resilience and independence which are seen to have atrophied in the context of rampant consumerism and greed in the Global North. We ask how austerity – as a cultural object, as a set of economic practices, as a subject-making discourse, as a web of socio-historical fantasies – is reconfiguring our sense of public, mutual and collective sensibilities. In particular we consider the ways in which the moral discourses of parenting are central to public narratives of austerity.