Grassroots Economies: Living with Austerity in Southern Europe

The austerity crisis has radically altered the economic landscape of Southern Europe. But alongside the decimation of public services and infrastructure lies the wreckage of a generation’s visions for the future. In Greece Italy Spain and Portugal there is a new difficult reality of downward mobility. Grassroots Economies interrogates the effects of the economic crisis on the livelihood of working people providing insight into their anxieties. Drawing on a wide range of ethnographic material it is a distinctive comparative analysis that explores the contradictions of their coping mechanisms and support structures. With a focus on gender the book explores values and ideologies including dispossession and accumulation. Ultimately it demonstrates that everyday interactions on the local scale provide a significant sense of the global.