Making sense of precarity: talking about economic insecurity with millennials in Canada

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Journal of Cultural Economy in 2019, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/17530350.2018.1485048While there are many effective metrics for quantifying economic precarity, talking to young people about their experiences in the labour and housing markets reveals a gap in explanatory language around living in/through crisis. In particular, in my research with Canadian millennials (born from the early 1980s through the mid-90s), although they could state the facts about how hard it is to get a good job or afford decent housing, what this pervasive sense of insecurity feels like is much harder to put into words. For many, a generalized sense of precariousness invades everyday life, even when work and housing are relatively secure. Thinking through this sense of anxiety, that the future might not be any better than the present and that young people might not be as well off as their parents, leads to a generational understanding of economic crisis – and for a group of young adults who came of age during the downturn of 2008–2009, examining how they talk (or cannot talk) about precarity is revealing.Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council, Grant 430-215-0063

Visual Impairment in the City: Young People’s Social Strategies for Independent Mobility

This article examines the mobility strategies that visually impaired (VI) young people employ as they negotiate their daily lives in the city. In contrast to research which foregrounds difficulties navigating the built environment, the article provides new insights into how VI young people engage with the city as a social space, arguing that VI young people’s goal of achieving ‘unremarkable’ mobility is constrained by an ableist society that constantly marks them out, frustrating goals of independent mobility which are important to young people’s transitions to adulthood. Drawing on young people’s narratives, three mobility strategies of young people are examined: concealing VI with friends, performing VI with white canes and travelling with guide dogs. Each is evaluated for its potential to help VI young people achieve identities as ‘competent spatial actors'.The author wishes to acknowledge financial support during the research from the Higher Education Funding Council for England and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada

Boomeranging home: understanding why millennials live with parents in Toronto, Canada

This article examines young adults’ experiences of living at home with their parents in the Greater Toronto Area. Although media frequently references co-residence as part of the trope of struggling/lazy millennial adulthood, it has received little academic attention from geographers. Co-residence offers a unique lens to understand some of the vital economic geographies of young adults, especially when set within a context of financial uncertainty, inaccessible housing markets and a job market characterized by precarious work. The research draws on a feminist economic geography framework to understand why millennials (those born between 1980 and 1995) live at home. Analysis of qualitative interviews reveals the key social structures and processes that organize and shape millennials’ experiences, including the economy, education and debt, as well as the family, culture and mutual reliance. This research highlights the role families play in the struggle to maintain a middle class social position for their children, providing insight into the complexity of young adults’ decisions to coreside with parents, where motivations of choice and constraint often overlap.This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [430–2015–00637]

Understanding Youth Transition as 'Becoming': Identity, Time and Futurity

The final publication is available at Elsevier via http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2009.07.007. © 2009. This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Drawing on recent work in psychology, philosophy, and youth geographies, this article responds to calls for theoretical rigour in children's geographies by developing the concept of becoming for youth transitions research. Becoming has been used by psychologist Gordon Allport (1955) in his work on the processual nature of personal identity, while Elizabeth Grosz (1999) has used the concept of becoming to explore conceptions of time as a lived experience, focusing on the dynamics of time as duration. This article uses the unifying concept of futurity to tie together the works of Allport and Grosz, exploring how the concept of becoming can be used to consider the inherent complexities of contemporary youth transitions. To demonstrate the value of working with these reconceptualizations, examples of becoming will be explored through research with visually impaired young people. This research productively uses narrative and a life mapping technique to capture the messiness of becoming, seeing transition through the scale of a life and important life events. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

Who we are at Work: Millennial Women, Everyday Inequalities and Insecure Work

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Gender Place and Culture on March 16, 2016, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/0966369X.2016.1160037Based on research with millennial women in Canada, this article examines the process of workplace identity, or (un)conscious strategies of identity management that young women employ at work. First, despite increasing labour market participation from women, young women's experience of the workplace can be one of precarity and insecurity. Many millennial women have responded with a positive front' - saying yes to all work tasks while highlighting their likability and acceptance of the status quo. This is not seen as a permanent strategy, but rather one that gets you into the workplace and liked' until your work speaks for itself. Second, and operating at the same time, young women also use tactics to confront intersections of ageism/sexism in the workplace. While some employ conscious strategies to be taken seriously' through dress, small talk, even taking on stereotypical traits of masculinity to be recognized as competent, others explicitly confront inequality through girlie feminism' with a pro-femininity work identity that challenges the masculine-coded norms of how a successful workplace operates and what it looks like. In jobs of all types, who we are at work is a constantly shifting negotiation between how we are treated and seen by others, the workplace as a social space, our past experiences and our own expectations. Considering young women's work identities reveals how power and privilege operate in the workplace, and the possibilities of young women's agential challenges to inequitable workplace norms and a precarious labour market.Banting Fellowship [772 BPF-SSHRC-00020

Feeling Precarious: Millennial Women and Work

In Precarious Life (2004), Judith Butler writes about how a shared sense of fear and vulnerability opens the possibility of recognizing interdependency. This is a wider understanding of precarity than is often present in human geography – recognizing the consequences and possibilities of feeling precarious. Focusing on work and the workplace, I examine the working life stories of millennial women in Canada, a labour market where unemployment and underemployment are common experiences for young workers. Using work narratives of insecurity, I argue that one potential consequence of understanding precariousness is the recognition of our social selves, using millennial women’s stories of mutual reliance and connection with parents, partners and friends to contrast assumptions of the individualizing, neoliberal, Gen Y worker. I use a feminist understanding of agency and autonomy to argue that young women’s stories about work are anything but individual experiences of flexibility or precarity – instead, I explain how relationships play a critical role in worker agency and whether work feels flexible or precarious. Overall I consider what a feminist theorizing of interdependence and precariousness offers geography, emphasizing the importance of subjectivity and relationality.The author received financial support for this research through a Banting Fellowship (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, 201211BAF-303469-236564

The Significance of the Personal within Disability Geography

This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Worth, N. (2008). The significance of the personal within disability geography. Area, 40(3), 306–314, which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4762.2008.00835.x. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving.Drawing on in-depth qualitative data, this article critically examines disability geography as a subfield where the personal is highly valued. The value and the risks inherent in this personal approach will be evaluated, including the usefulness of being an 'insider' and the difficulties of being reflexive and critically making use of one's positionality. The article concludes with reflections regarding how disability geography can confront its marginal status, appealing to researchers who claim no experience of disability while also supporting and encouraging those with personal experiences of disability to participate in the field

Disabling cities

This is a pre-copyedited, author-produced version of a book chapter accepted for publication in: Bain, A.L., & Peake, L. (Eds.) (2017). Urbanization in a Global Context. Oxford University Press, following peer review. The version of record - N. Worth with V. Chouinard & L. Simard-Gagnon (2017). ‘Disabling cities’ Urbanization in a Global Context: A Canadian Perspective Linda Peake & Alison Bain (eds.) OUP - is available online at: https://www.oupcanada.com/catalog/9780199021536.htmlGeographic research on disability and cities is wide-ranging and encompasses the lives of people dealing with disability, physical impairment, and issues of mental ill health. This chapter focuses on what makes cities more and less disabling for persons with physical and mental health impairments whereby “disabling” refers to processes of physical and social exclusion arising from physical and social barriers to full participation in city life. It also engages with different ways of understanding disability (i.e., the medical, social, and embodied social models of disability) and the implications of these for whether and how cities need to change. A review of the literature on cities and disability serves to highlight a primary focus on issues of physical impairment and then is followed by an examination of processes shaping the lives of urban residents with mental health impairments.Banting Fellowship Fonds de Recherche du Québec—Société et Culture Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canad