Cumulative Precarity: Millennial Experience and Multigenerational Cohabitation in Hackney, London

This article interrogates and expands understandings of millennial economic insecurity by focusing on the experiences of three people living in socially rented accommodation with their families of origin in Hackney, London. Taking into account the legacies of state violence that racialise Britain’s political economy, I argue that millennial precarity requires theorisation across multiple temporalities in order to account for cumulative, intergenerational experience as well as intergenerational dissonance. This article focuses on the affective work required to mediate cumulative precarity with familial relationships, with an emphasis on the ways that participants arduously—yet artfully—weave between multiple temporal scales of experience within concentrated shared space in order to care for and communicate with their family members. Through synthesising geographical scholarship on generational experience, everyday experiences of policy and the spaces of precarious labour, this paper contributes to expanding economic geography’s engagement with ongoing histories of coloniality in the UK.