Project Team and Partners
The Project includes senior academics, experts and organisations from all around the world in the field of austerity and altered life-courses.
Prof. Sarah Marie Hall, Project Investigator and co-lead for research in Greater Manchester
With my research I develop understandings of how socio-economic changes, such as austerity, are shaped by gender relations, lived experience and social difference. My interests and contributions focus on everyday life and the economy; social reproduction, care, ethics and consumption; and feminist methods and praxis. I also go to lengths to share widely insights from this research, across publics, policy and practice. This includes in writing, expert advisory roles, animations, podcasts, zines, films and in broadcast media. You can read more here.
Dr Liz Ackerley, Research Associate and lead for research in Sardinia
I am interested in young people’s politics and activism and how the socio-economic context shapes young people’s everyday lives particularly in terms of relationships and ideas about the future. I studied languages at undergraduate level (Italian and French) and spent a year teaching English in Rome. Since then I have worked mainly in educational contexts and recently completed my PhD in Human Geography, exploring young people’s activism in times of austerity. You can find out more about my research here.
Dr Laura Fenton, Research Associate and co-lead for research in Greater Manchester
I am interested in how young people’s lives change over time, both in terms of the life course and socio-historical time. I am particularly interested in how young people’s transitions into adulthood act as a litmus test for the state of societies – the nature and extent of (in)equality, social (in)justice, the quality of life they offer, and so forth. I work with others to develop creative, non-extractive ways of generating and communicating insights about young people’s lives and transitions. I completed a PhD in Sociology in 2018 on British women’s changing relationships to alcohol. Since then, I have worked on projects on youth, generation and the life-course, including Girlhood and Later Life at the University of Manchester and Youth Drinking in Decline at the University of Sheffield.
Dr Santiago Leyva del Rio, Research Associate and lead for research in Barcelona
My interests focus on forms of collective organisation that resist the precariousness of life and the housing crisis and that at the same time propose decommodification and decent access to common goods and basic rights. My research in this project tries to clarify how the concatenation of socioeconomic crises since 2008 affects the young adult population. You can find more information about my research here.
Academic partners
- Dr Valentina Cuzzocrea (Università degli Studi di Cagliari)
- Prof. Diana Marre (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)
Partner organisations
- Shelter Greater Manchester (national housing charity & campaign)
- Orbit, UK (national housing association)
- Young Manchester, Greater Manchester (youth support charity)
- Inspiring Futures Partnership, Greater Manchester (family, wellbeing & employment support charity)
- ABD, Catalonia (social inclusion & welfare charity)
- PAH, Catalonia (grassroots housing movement)
- TMD2000 ODV, Sardinia (youth engagement voluntary organisation)
Academic advisors
Kathy Burrell, Clare Holdsworth, Kathrin Hörschelmann, and Alison Stenning