Children of the financial crisis

What does the recent financial crisis look like through the eyes of children in the intimate spaces of everyday life? Over the last three years we have been carrying out a comparative ethnography, the Connectors Study, funded by the European Research Council (ERC-StG-33551), to understand how children in Athens, Hyderabad, and London encounter, experience, and engage with the civil and the political in their everyday lives, and might become oriented towards social action.

One of our points of departure were the classic cohort studies of children growing up in the Great Depression (Elder, 1999; Elder, Modell, and Parke, 1993). Elder and his colleagues understood that ‘children’s lives and [the] ever-changing world’ around them were connected. Children do not grow up in vacuum and one motivation behind the original US cohort studies was to find ways of creating knowledge about children’s lives that was not divorced from the historical, economic, and political events of their times.