Paper short abstract:

As financial difficulties increased in Portugal as a result of 2011 socioeconomic crisis, in this paper I wish to describe how feelings and emotions prompted family concerted agency to solve day to daily life in a Lisbon peripheral semi rural context.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I wish to describe a particular way to address long standing precarity in a Portuguese context. In 2014 Portuguese government undertook a bundle of measures arising from the political economic arrangement established with TROIKA, a body composed by International Monetary Fund, European Central Bank and European Commission. This measures aimed to balancing budget deficit which was strongly affected by 2007/08 global financial crisis. These measures took several forms mainly in the social domain, mostly cuts in social benefits, wages and pensions, and facilitation of unemployment. In general terms, austerity resulted in a drastic loss of family budgets which forced families to rearrange their lives, rethinking and reframing their present and future, forcing them to deal with daily needs that seemed to be covered till then. David's family had to cope with the long standing scarcity of family resources, in that time exacerbated by the shrinking of family revenue. This family had to redesign the ways of solve needs and reconstruct the idea of personal agency as the mainly structure that would be helpful for them to "get by". Despite scarcity and deprivation of material and intellectual assets were already part of their life, insecurity took new symbolic shapes as difficulties become more evident in their livingness. I wish to explore and offer analytic material to analyse in greater detail how macroeconomic and historic contexts frames feelings and emotions, that triggers harsh mechanism to solve needs in a sociocultural context strongly boosted by national political solidarity paradigm.