Feeling the squeeze: Towards a psychosocial geography of austerity in low-to-middle income families.

• Argues for a psychosocial geography of austerity. • Offers a rich account of austerity for low-to-middle income families in the UK. • Interrogates the category of the 'squeezed middle'. • Documents the manifestation of austerity in the intimate spaces of family life. • Concludes that austerity is felt and negotiated psychosocially. This paper seeks to explore the experiences of recession and austerity in a small number of low-to-middle income households in North Tyneside. To try to make sense of the diverse and intimate ways that austerity is thought about, felt, related to, engaged with, and contested, the paper connects a psychosocial perspective to a focus on everyday social geographies and insists on the relation between the psychic and the social. It starts by exploring the coordinates of a psychosocial geography, outlining and building on the growing work in psychosocial studies and connecting this to an explicitly geographical perspective. It then sets out the focus of this particular study – low-to-middle income families in North Tyneside – placing them in the narrative context of the squeezed middle, both sketching the demographic outlines of this cohort and interpreting the squeezed middle as a psychosocial category. At this stage, it also describes and reflects on the research process, one designed to access the psychosocial dimensions of living with austerity. The focus then shifts to narrating and exploring the researched households experiences of austerity, framing them through a focus on 'big things' and 'little things', following the language and sense-making of my participants, and at every stage engaging with the psychosocial aspects of these experiences, attachments, values, practices, spaces, senses and times that need to be understood by holding together the psychic and the social. These experiences are drawn together in a discussion section which attempts to map the psychosocial landscapes of austerity and which concludes by making connections to wider psychosocial framings that signpost further explorations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]