Youth Experiencing Poverty in a Neoliberal Canadian Context: Understanding Systems Access from the Experiences of Young People and Frontline Staff

Abstract

Scholars of contemporary Western government have noted how changes in public policy and program delivery reflect a shift in political rationalities from welfarism to neoliberalism (Harvey, 2005; Miller and Rose, 2008; Saint-Martin, 2013; Shields and Evans, 1998). Welfarism worked under the assumption that the activities of government should be directed towards the betterment of economic and social life for citizens; neoliberalism, on the other hand, rests on the belief that the state “[represents] an unnatural intrusion into the workings of the market” (Clarke and Newman, 1997: 14). Neoliberal economics and values have been depicted as an inevitable reaction to a sluggish and unresponsive welfare state (Clarke and Newman, 1997; Bradford 2000; Smith and Orsini, 2007; Downing, 2012; Banting and Myles, 2013; Jenson, 2013). The political, economic, policy, programmatic and ideological shifts associated with the neoliberal global capitalist turn, which has been re-shaping social life for the last 30 years, have had a profound impact on the lives of people growing up during this same period of time. Our chapter explores how the political-economic relations associated with global-capitalism and neoliberalism appear in and structure young people’s lives. We are particularly interested in the ways that political-economic relations operating in and through public institutions make it difficult for young people to live the lives they desire. The chapter is framed by a conceptualization of governance (neoliberal or otherwise) as a textually organized relation that is accomplished in the coordinated actions of people as they go about their everyday work (Griffith and Smith, 2014; Nichols and Griffith, 2009). In other words, our interest is not in a theorization of the changing political-economic relations of the state; rather, we are interested in how these shifts become evident in relations among actual people at particular moments in time. We will first look at the experiences of young people over two studies to see how their everyday work is organized by these neoliberal shifts and follow with stories from service-providers and