Concept Of Precarity Research Articles

“We are in a very precarious position”: Exploring the resilience of Khawaja Sara and Hijra communities during the COVID-19 pandemic in Pakistan

This paper draws upon empirical data in order to offer insights to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the lives of Khawaja Sara and Hijra communities in Peshawar City, in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa region of Pakistan. The paper also considers the resilience that the community developed during this time. Drawing on Butler’s concept of precarity and liveability, we in this article demonstrate how the precarious positionalities of Khawaja Sara and Hijra were exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic and thereafter in Pakistan. 10 members of Khawaja Sara and Hijra communities were engaged in face-to-face interviews, and the paper demonstrates how community is made and maintained by Khawaja Sara and Hijra, who are amongst the most vulnerable, marginalized, oppressed, and isolated people in South Asian communities. Whilst not shying away from the violence that characterises the lives of participants, who face familial rejection, community, and social pressure to conform to strict cultural gender norms, and sexual and physical violence, the paper also works to highlight the ongoing adaptability and resilience of these ancient communities through engaging with the ways in which participants supported each other through the pandemic.

The psychology of precarity: A critical framework.

This article presents the rationale and a new critical framework for precarity, which reflects a psychosocial concept that links structural inequities with experiences of alienation, anomie, and uncertainty. Emerging from multiple disciplines, including anthropology, cultural studies, sociology, political science, and psychology, the concept of precarity provides a conceptual scaffolding for understanding the complex causes of precarious life circumstances while also seeking to identify how people react, adapt, and resist the forces that evoke such tenuous psychosocial experiences. We present a critical conceptual framework as a nonlinear heuristic that serves to identify and organize relevant elements of precarity in a presumably infinite number of contexts and applications. The framework identifies socio-political-economic contexts, material conditions, and psychological experiences as key elements of precarity. Another essential aspect of this framework is the delineation of interrelated and nonlinear responses to precarity, which include resistance, adaptation, and resignation. We then summarize selected implications of precarity for psychological interventions, vocational and organizational psychology, and explorations and advocacy about race, gender, and other systems of inequality. Future research directions, including optimal methodologies to study precarity, conclude the article. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Expanding the youth discourse: everyday precarity through a young South Korean woman’s autoethnography

ABSTRACT This study expands the youth discourse in South Korea through an autoethnographic account. The concept of precarity is explored through multifaceted attributes such as subjective feelings, subjectification, and daily practices. Through an examination of feminist critiques, which argue that gender is another primary aspect of precarity, this study reflects upon gender blindness in existing research and explains the youth’s anxiety based on modern gender relations. It employs the author’s first-person account to describe and analyse the mechanisms of everyday precarity in the labour context and coping strategies as a young woman. The analysis revealed that everyday precarity operates across generations and genders, beyond class struggles, manifesting in individualized coping strategies. This result asserts how female youth, thus far marginalized subjects, offer a new horizon in youth research.

"Contours of Precarity: A Perspective on Vulnerability and Insecurity in Southeast Asia"

Southeast Asia is experiencing high levels of accumulation, extractive activity, speculation, infrastructural development, and indebtedness. At the same time, state-business-investment agendas regularly downplay issues of marginality and disadvantage. This paper provides a perspective on vulnerability and insecurity in the region. Drawing on observations over a number of years, combined with a review of relevant literature and the use of illustrative examples, it details how and why the concept of precarity is particularly relevant for understanding contemporary forms of jeopardy in Southeast Asia. What follows is the case for a grounded and disaggregated precarity perspective to decipher the less acknowledged forces and interests shaping circumstances we seek to prevent. Rather than relying on limited frames of reference, such an approach can bring greater awareness to localized distress stemming from untrammelled accumulation, speculation, extractive activities, and indebtedness. This conceptual shift is arguably crucial for effectively understanding and mitigating vulnerabilities. If states in Southeast Asia continue to disregard the significance of the interplay between politics, commercial interests, and development agendas in driving ecological degradation, social disadvantage, and marginalization, then the likelihood is a precarious future for many.

Transgender athletes and Canadian sport policy: a story of stigma and precarity

ABSTRACT Policy can serve as a form of institutionalised stigma, working to create and maintain discrimination against groups of people. Some Canadian National Sport Organizations (NSOs) have developed policies that address transgender inclusion within sport. However, where these policies exist, they vary in their approaches to inclusion of transgender persons. This article examines how Canadian sport policies prohibit and/or police transgender persons’ participation in sport. In 2019, the publicly available policies of 53 NSOs were reviewed to determine the presence and content of so-called transgender inclusion policies, as well as policies related to equity, discrimination and harassment. At the time of the study, only 17 of the 53 NSOs had policies specifically related to transgender inclusion. In this study, we review these policies to understand the varying approaches to transgender inclusion in Canadian NSOs. We classified the NSOs into three broad categories: inclusive (n = 11), problematic (n = 1) and prejudicial (n = 5), in relation to naming, disclosure and medical specifications. Using Judith Butler’s concept of precarity, we demonstrate that participation in sport is a precarious choice for transgender athletes, as most NSO policies lacked clear guidance on inclusion and there were next to no policy statements on gender non-conforming people. The development of inclusive policy within sport should be proactive, actionable, consistent with best practices and must include meaningful conversations with transgender and gender non-conforming athletes, coaches and officials.

24 February 2022 - for a Geocinematic Use of Found Images

Underlying the idea of precarity and the moving image, this paper describes the and theorizes about the original artwork 24TH FEBRUARY 2022 as a video-installation interconnected with the concepts of precarity in production, circulation, and participation in media culture today, this art-based research artwork tries to underpin the very nature of found material as a gateway from the public to the private, commenting on the spectacle of mass media images and also the production of “anarchival” gestures through which its possible to research a specific historic event. Included in a research project entitled FrameScapes that the authors are undergoing at this time, this research outcome relates to the war that Russia brought again to the gates of Europe when it invaded the Ukrainian territory, and also to the conflict in real-time - live action we could call it - in a way we haven’t seen since Desert Storm back in 1991. A continuous feed of videos and photographs in an era of multi-screen distraction and tiktokian dystopias, artists and creatives have the upper hand in constructing from scratch, just like the cubists would glue together a piece of old newspaper and a matchbox to paint a still-life. The precarious nature of found material to make art is present since the first vanguard movements, from Picasso to Duchamp. Through the arts, we’ve been always confronted with gestures of appropriation, quotation, found-footage, archival art, collage or the ready-made, all of these related to meager images. From Marcel Duchamp to Kurt Schwitters, from Douglas Gordon to Christian Marclay, artists have always looked into the metaphor of the precarious as a recontextualization and remediation of image and sound. The artwork 24TH FEBRUARY 2022 is an exploratory artwork about the world-as-camera-screen, responding critically and creatively to different structures of the social, economic and political contexts in today’s art research practice that deals with found materials. The phenomenon of a tele-visual structure presupposes different atopic tele-communities, built under the aegis of tele-presence and tele-objectivity – a dissolution of real space, that embraces geocinematics as a strong narrative contemporary structure, constructed with and bound by precarious images – images that are consistent with a tangible structure of the Real.

Representing the unrepresented: precarity of refugeehood in Vanni: a family’s struggle through the Sri Lankan conflict

ABSTRACT Vanni: A Family’s Struggle through the Sri Lankan Conflict (2019), is an ethnographic novel about the Sri Lankan civilians who were caught between the army and the LTTE during the final months of the Civil War. The novel is read in the light of Butler’s concepts of precarity, grievability and alternate frames to demonstrate how the affordances of the graphic novel negotiate the representation of trauma, loss and vulnerability of refugeehood, in order to provide for alternate frames that make visible those lives that have been deemed losable and ungrievable by the mainstream narratives. The paper analyses how Vanni, through its participatory methodology and ‘distillate fiction’ (Dix and Kaur 2019, 33), becomes a ‘human document’ (Stott 1986, 8) that contributes to an attitudinal change in the perception of the Sri Lankan refugees. It may be noted that one of the authors is a practising cartoonist whose graphic intervention, which involves the perspectival revision of a selected panel, provides a way of conducting the argument in the paper. The leverage of praxis allows the author to pick the affordances of the frame and analyse how the suppression or expression of the elements of visuality contributes to the totality of the message.

Precarity and patriarchal bargain: women’s experiences in post-disaster recovery housing after the 2011 Van earthquake

In this paper, we frame women’s experiences in post-disaster recovery housing to highlight the differential distribution of their vulnerabilities. While studies have reported women’s resilience in their new residence, their social vulnerability is often exacerbated in post-disaster recovery housing as they disproportionately shoulder the familial responsibilities with limited resources. We collected and analyzed 350 face-to-face interviews with women survivors living in the post-disaster recovery housing after the 2011 Van earthquake. Using Butler’s concept of precarity, we argue that under the prevailing patriarchal system, the physical location and the configuration of the new residence, and women’s familial status continue to differentially pose challenges for displaced women and worsen their vulnerabilities even years after their relocation. We found that while some women experienced positive changes, they continue to bargain with patriarchy, underlining the oppressiveness of the patriarchal system

Phenomena of precarity among young graduates – Hungarian case study

ABSTRACT. In our study we analyse the risk factors of precarity among young graduates. We aim to explore the characteristics that can turn young graduates towards precarity. The position of young graduates is better on the labor market than that of job seekers with lower qualification. Nevertheless, there are some risk factors that can also affect young graduates, such as the uncertainty on the labor market, and the chance and danger of falling into precarity. In this paper, different interpretations of and approaches to precarity are validated as a theoretical framework, taking into account the main theories dealing with the concept of precarity and with precarity as a class. We focus on young graduates as a group at risk of precarity, and thus also analyse the theories dealing with their situation. Our empirical investigation tests the claims of the main theories. For this purpose, we conduct a secondary analysis of the 2018 database of the Graduate Tracking System based on the responses of 15 102 recent graduates. Studies show that the risk of precariousness in Hungary is mainly shaped by the level of education and the post-graduation job. However, since no similar empirical analysis has been conducted for the country, our study is exploratory in nature, which gives it both its value in terms of novelty and its limitations.

“Piling on the stress”: Low‐income students' experiences in a neoliberal majoritarian university

The United States is experiencing state disinvestment from higher education and significant wealth inequality. This article documents how low‐income college students both experience and attempt to manage these contexts in their daily lives at a public flagship university in the American Midwest. We theorize these experiences as forms of precarity entailed by a culture and institutional form that we describe as the neoliberal majoritarian university (NMU). We argue that the concepts of precarity and of NMU provide a more robust framework for conceptualizing the consequences of college‐going for low‐income students than do conventional discourses of social mobility, college affordability, or student stress.

Towards a social psychology of precarity.

This article introduces the special issue 'Towards a Social Psychology of Precarity' that develops an orienting lens for social psychologists' engagement with the concept. As guest editors of the special issue, we provide a thematic overview of how 'precarity' is being conceptualized throughout the social sciences, before distilling the nine contributions to the special issue. In so doing, we trace the ways in which social psychologists are (dis)engaging with the concept of precarity, yet too, explore how precarity constitutes, and is embedded within, the discipline itself. Resisting disciplinary decadence, we collectively explore what a social psychology of precarity could be, and view working with/in precarity as fundamental to addressing broader calls for the social responsiveness of the discipline. The contributing papers, which are methodologically pluralistic and provide rich conceptualisations of precarity, challenge reductionist individualist understandings of suffering and coping and extend social science theorizations on precarity. They also highlight the ways in which social psychology remains complicit in perpetuating different forms of precarity, for both communities and academics. We propose future directions for the social psychological study of precarity through four reflexive questions that we encourage scholars to engage with so that we may both work with/in, and intervene against, 'the precarious'.

A social-psychological examination of academic precarity as an organizational practice and subjective experience.

Research and teaching conditions have, particularly for those who are junior or from disadvantaged backgrounds, deteriorated considerably over the years in the higher education sector. Unequal opportunities in access and advancement in careers have led to increasing levels of precarity in the higher education sector. Although the concept of precarity has been grasped in many other disciplines, the social-psychological understanding of this concept remains unexplored. In this paper, we aim to develop a social-psychological understanding of precarity to examine how identity dynamics and intergroup relations, as well as associated organizational controls, reinforce inequality regimes and power structures that create precarious conditions in academia. In doing so, we use social identity theory and system justification theory under an inequality regime framework. We argue that even though change towards equality and equity in academia should be possible, it is difficult to achieve this because of entrenched identity interests by power holders and the perceived legitimacy of the existing system. Therefore, academic precarity should be recognized both as a subjective experience and as an organizational practice to make inequalities more visible and decrease the perceptions of legitimacy-and to eventually achieve a fundamental positive transformation in academia.

Precarity and Healing: On the Role of Grief in Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones (1998)

"Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones (1998) is a fictional account of the undocumented Parsley massacre of 1937, when black Haitian migrant workers were killed by Rafael Trujillo’s government in the Dominican Republic. The paper places the novel in the African diasporic tradition of writing about the traumatic past, with the Parsley massacre being one such traumatic event of Haitian diasporic writing. The paper highlights the critical problem that unlike most post-colonial fiction, this Haitian diasporic story about gaining voice and agency fails to provide a satisfactory therapeutic valence or an explanation for individual suffering. The paper proposes an application of Judith Butler’s concept of precarity in order to reconsider the problem of healing the wounds of the past in Danticat’s novel. For Butler, social relationality makes subjects vulnerable within the social structure they inhabit, but this vulnerability may also carry a potentiality for the experience of social vulnerability to be shared in makeshift acts of solidarity. The paper claims that precarity does have a limited potential in the novel, which can be detected through the analysis of the water imagery. Amabelle Désir, the protagonist, is already living a precarious life before the Parsley massacre, but the brutality to which she is subjected isolates her socially even more afterwards. She is unable to bear her testimony, living in the past, mourning her lost lover. The representation of precarity in the novel’s water imagery indicates that making contact with her former employer in 1961 brings a momentary sense of connection and community that enables her to commit suicide eventually. This element of truncated healing can be read as the limited potential of precarity available in the Haitian diasporic context. Keywords: Edwidge Danticat, Toni Morrison, Judith Butler, Haitian diasporic women’s writing history, empowerment, healing, precarity, grief "

Arts-Based Research in Precarious Pedagogy-Making Experiences

Framing through the concept of precarity, we share our arts-based research on the experiences of creating a collaborative performance-making project focused on connecting students from different education levels, to create a film-dance integrated performance to advocate for social justice issues in education. We, as instructors and researchers, embarked on an arts-based research journey creating sketches, poems, videos, and a dance performance to analyze and represent our research findings. Our performance from the performative inquiry shows our understanding of the collaboration project through the same art form we required our students to utilize: film and dance-integrated arts performance.

Precarity in the Times of Partition: Personal vs Communal Love in Khushwant Singh’s <em>Train to Pakistan</em> and Saadat Hasan Manto’s “Gurmukh Singh ki Wasiyat”

The paper studies how various shades of love respond to precarity in anarchic times by comparing the narrative representation of the aftermath of the Partition of the British colonized Subcontinent into independent countries of India and Pakistan in 1947 with particular focus on Sikh-Muslim relationships in Punjab as presented in Khushwant Singh’s novel Train to Pakistan and Saadat Hasan Manto’s short story “Gurmukh Singh ki Wasiyat.” Employing Judith Butler’s concept of precarity, the paper analyzes how both the writers sketch precarity in partition times ensuing in post-Partition communal violence and effacement of love. The selection of the texts is significant because Singh presents precarity in the multi-ethnic village of Mano Majra whereas Manto presents the city of Amritsar on fire, thus encompassing rural and urban life. Both the texts gradually unleash how the love between communities fades away precipitated by the increasing violence while personal love unflinchingly last even during the times of anarchy, irrespective of communal and religious differences. Jugga who is a Sikh by ethnicity sacrifices his life for his Muslim beloved Nooran and Gurmukh Sing assigns the responsibility of his unflinching gratitude for Mr Abdul Hayee to his son after his death. Whereas before the Partition personal and communal commitments were equally strong, the divergence takes place between the two due to the precarity after Partition that rifts communities apart but personal love remains resilient to socio-political pressures.

YOUTH AND COVID-19 IN CHOSEN EUROPEAN UNION LABOUR MARKETS: FROM JUNK JOBS TO UNEMPLOYMENT

The main purpose of the paper is to consider the impact of Covid-19 pandemic on the situation of youth in chosen countries of the European Union in the years 2009–2021. The study area includes four countries: Poland, Germany, Spain and France. The structure of the paper is following. At first, the concepts of precarity and labour market theories are presented. Then the statistical analysis of the situation of young people in Polish, German, Spanish and French labour markets is conducted to assess the economic position of youth in the labour market in the aspect of unemployment and to scrutinise temporary and precarious employment among youth. The principal research interest includes the impact of the pandemic on the situation of youth in the labour market. The conclusion is presented at the end of the paper. The article uses the methods of descriptive statistics and simple statistical measures describing the dynamics of studied phenomena. Main conclusion of the paper is that the labour market in the pandemic era has become hugely challenging for youth. They often work in crisis-sensitive sectors and workplaces. As a result, young people experience increased job insecurity, relatively higher unemployment rate and worse economic conditions compared to total population in the labour market. Due to the results of our analysis implementing the dual education system at the macro level is the strongly recommended solution for improving the situation of youth in the labour market.

Physical Education and the Quest for Relevance in the Age of Precarity: Lessons from the Weight Inclusive Thinking Project (WIT)

ABSTRACT For the 31st Delphine Hanna Lecture, this paper draws parallels between Dr. Delphine Hanna’s approach to establishing physical education’s professional legitimacy in the late 1800s to the field’s current quest for social and cultural relevance. Drawing on the concept of precarity, the paper outlines society’s current challenges and argues that the physical education field remains disconnected from the lived experiences of young people. In the spirit of hope and purpose, the paper suggests physical education professionals can learn from the innovative and interdisciplinary path Dr. Hanna forged during her trailblazing career. As one potential example of what this approach may look like today, the author highlights the lesson learned from the Weight Inclusive Thinking (WIT) project – an interdisciplinary effort to promote body size diversity across physical activity settings.

Embracing theories of precarity for the study of information practices

PurposeThe paper aims to explore the value of various notions of precarity for the study of information practices and for addressing inequities and marginalization from an information standpoint.Design/methodology/approachSeveral interrelated conceptualizations of precarity and associated terms from outside of library and information science (LIS) are presented. LIS studies involving precarity and related topics, including various situations of insecurity, instability, migration and transition, are then discussed. In that context, new approaches to information precarity and new directions for information practices research are explored.FindingsStudies that draw from holistic characterizations of precarity, especially those engaging with theories from beyond the field, are quite limited in LIS research. Broader understandings of precarity in information contexts may contribute to greater engagement with political and economic considerations and to development of non-individualistic responses and services.Originality/valueThe presentation of a framework for an initial model of information precarity and the expansion of connections between existing LIS research and concepts of precarity from other fields suggest a new lens for further addressing inequities, marginalization and precarious life in LIS research.

Vulnerability and precarity of Palestinian women in the Naqab

Many studies have broadly addressed the status of the Naqab/Negev Bedouins in Israel, particularly the status of women. However, women from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip who are married to male Bedouin citizens of Israel in the Naqab face a particular experience of vulnerability that has not been sufficiently explored. Based on 26 semi-structured interviews with women from the West Bank and Gaza who are married and living in the Naqab, as well as additional interviews with six psychosocial and legal professionals working with these women, this article describes the vulnerability and precarity of these women within the precarious context of the Naqab. Drawing on Judith Butler’s concept of precarity as a heightened risk of disease, poverty, starvation, displacement and exposure to violence without protection, this study examines layers of precarity in these women’s lives. These layers are described through an examination of the intersections between Israel’s settler colonial management of Palestinians’ lives and the Palestinian patriarchal management of women’s lives, thereby uncovering how both these controlling structures intensify women’s precariousness and make them the precariat of the Naqab. Further, the study addresses women’s performativity through their self-erasure and creation of invisible communities as a way to survive.

From Patterns to Freefall: Exposing the Vulnerability of Human Predicament in the Times of the Pandemic

COVID-19 demands a paradigm shift in modes of human interaction and challenges hegemonic social structures to adapt and evolve themselves to the altered reality of human existence. Across the world, these shifts have been triggered by the new social order threatening to erase existing social systems. My paper attempts to look at the lives of the precariats, caught up within neoliberal structures, assuming these structures to be hegemonic normative systems, and the manner in which they refuse to change, thereby putting the precariats into a more exploitative crisis situation, dehumanizing them, demonizing them, thereby risking their erasure from the socio-political and legal systems that rule the world. I have used the context of India to substantiate my argument. My paper is divided into the following sections: a reading into the concept of precarity and contextualizing it in the neoliberal framework, analysing the pandemic against precarity using examples from Indian society.