Economic Precarity Research Articles

‘This is the plan’: mature women’s vocational education choices and decisions about Honours degrees

ABSTRACT This paper discusses a piece of qualitative research that explored the narratives of a group of mature women when they discussed influences on their post-16 educational decisions. This encompasses their initial vocational education and training (VET) and their choice to study higher education (HE) programmes in England. The research draws on Nancy Fraser’s dual-perspectival notion of social justice to analyse how gender may have affected their educational choices. The research also explores some of the tension experienced in feminist research practice. Data collection was undertaken primarily via semi-structured individual interviews with six female Foundation degree graduates who decided to study an Honours top-up degree. In addition, a research journal was also used to explore a feminist standpoint approach and the research relationships. A thematic analysis of the data found that gender plays a crucial and complicated role in vocational choices. The findings also highlight that although VET is not a second choice, the low pay and misrecognition of ‘pink collar’ work leads the women into HE study. HE is used to gain credibility and employment security. The research concludes that top-up degrees offer the women individualised solutions to the low status and economic precarity vocational education provides.

Contingent Homes: Mobility and Long-Term Conflict in the Contested Periphery of Georgia

Abstract Displaced Georgians in the de facto Georgia-Abkhazia borderland have lived in a zone of protracted ambivalence and contingency for almost three decades. During the war between the post-Socialist Georgian state and Abkhaz forces supporting the independence of Abkhazia, Georgian residents of Abkhazia were forced to flee to Georgia proper. Soon after the war’s end, thousands of displaced people started to access their homes in Gali, the southern borderland of the de facto state of Abkhazia. By persistently navigating shifting places and sovereignties, displaced Georgians from Gali construct lives on the move in a disputed and militarized borderland where contingency, surveillance, and economic precarity infiltrate everyday life. In such a space of life projects grounded in contested mobilities, home emerges as a question of being able to move across a disputed border rather than returning to a singular and fixed place.

PSYCOVID-19, dispositif de soutien psychologique dans les champs de la santé mentale, du somatique et du médico-social

In December 2019 the World Health Organization (WHO) recorded the first cases of an infectious disease that appeared in China in November of the same year. Generated by the new coronavirus SARS-CoV2, it is quickly named COVID-19 for COronaVirus Infectious Disease 2019. The spread of this unknown disease will soon have worldwide consequences: the contagiousness of the virus is extremely high and potentially lethal. In France, the population initially reacted with disbelief until the disease reached Europe and the first cases appeared on French territory, at the end of January. A few weeks later, on 16 March 2020, President Macron declared the country “at war” against COVID-19. The next day the population was placed in lockdown. At the present time, the country's activity is at a standstill. Schools, businesses and shops are closed. The French citizens are astounded. They suddenly have to face fear: fear of falling ill or that a close relative may fall ill, fear of being locked up and experiencing restrictions of liberties, fear of economic precariousness. And, above all, fear of uncertainty. In order to prevent the mental consequences of this crisis, psychological support units have been created with urgency at national scale. These units are intended to support the healthcare professionals as well as the patients and more broadly, the general population. The unit responsible for the department of Gironde has been set up quickly, over the weekend of March 21, 2020. The COVIDPSY33 listening unit has thus been created in Bordeaux by the Charles Perrens Hospital with support from the Agence Régionale de Santé Nouvelle-Aquitaine (ARS). Simultaneously, the PSYCOVID-19 unit was created. This additional unit works in collaboration with the COVIDPSY33 platform and offers psychological assistance to the general population and caregivers in the sectors of Bordeaux Rive Droite, Bordeaux Gare, Rives de Garonne, Rives d’Arcins and Sud Gironde. It thus covers an area equivalent to approximately half of Gironde, the largest department in metropolitan France. In the present interview, Samantha Al Joboory and Florence Monello, psychiatrist and psychologist coordinating PSYCOD-19, present this psychological support unit.

Rethinking the crisis in historicity: Precarity and postmodernism in French science fiction and film after May ’68

This article re-examines the crisis in historicity, an aesthetic hallmark of postmodernism, in light of unemployment and economic precarity in France during the 1970s. Whereas influential critics like Jean Baudrillard, Jean-François Lyotard and Fredric Jameson famously diagnosed an inability to represent historical movement, I argue that the decade’s literature and film represent changes to the organisation of working time. The article first discusses how time in post-war France was mediated through practices like national economic planning, industrial chronométrage, and staggered shifts, a temporal structure dramatically disrupted in the 1970s. The article then examines the aesthetic response to such economic disruption, drawing on examples like Michel Jeury’s science fiction novel, the cinétracts of May 1968, and the protest film, Rhodia 4/8. The crisis in historicity, I suggest, should be understood not as general disorientation, but rather as a specific solution to the problem of representing precarious employment in France.

Net, Module, Chance

Contemporary Cuban art often highlights the widespread practice of repair. Fixing broken appliances and subdividing houses via DIY construction are frequent real-life responses to economic and social precarity. At the same time, these creative practices constitute political and ethical forms of engagement with crises, inequality, and an uneven access to modernity. I discuss specific objects and practices as a way to explore what repair says about Cuba today, as well as to reflect on how Cuban repair art contributes to a more general understanding of what it means to live in a world at risk.

Post/Colonial Reconfigurations. The Disregarded, Renewed Arrival of Spaniards in Rio De Janeiro

Given the renewed arrival of Spanish migrants in Brazil since 2008, I analyze how post/colonial power relations are re/configured and contradictions produced when legal and economic precarity question status hierarchies based on origin, race, and class. Brazil currently hosts the largest number of illegalized Spaniards worldwide. Illegality and precarity contest the favorable effects of nearly unconditional whiteness in Brazil and globally racialized, colonial power hierarchies. Derived from 2.5 years of ethnographic fieldwork in Rio de Janeiro since 2014, my interlocutors’ trajectories show how they struggle with and embrace the urban fabric and its structural post/colonial configuration.

Not a luxury: a call to maintain sexual and reproductive health in humanitarian and fragile settings during the COVID-19 pandemic

Not a luxury: a call to maintain sexual and reproductive health in humanitarian and fragile settings during the COVID-19 pandemic

Instituciones, música, niños y jóvenes en orquestas sinfónicas y bandas musicales.

En éste trabajo exploramos como niños y jóvenes a través de su participación en bandas y orquestas musicales son reproductores de valores, instituciones e ideales tan grandes como la nación, la música mexicana, las casas de cultura, la familia. Ellos con sus esfuerzos individuales o colectivos las recrean y reproducen frecuentemente en situaciones de precariedad e incertidumbre, sin un entendimiento más amplio de la función que están cumpliendo.

Promising precarity: the lives of Dublin’s international students

ABSTRACT There has been a considerable growth in the number of international students in Dublin, Ireland. In this paper, we first explore the broader context for this growth, showing the ways in which international student migration to Dublin has been facilitated, and the consequences in terms of the creation of different categories of international student migrants. We then discuss the experiences of international student migrants in Dublin by focusing on precarity and promise. We use Lorey’s tripartite understanding of precarity (2015. States of Insecurity: Government of the Precarious. London: Verso) to show how international student migrants in Dublin experience legal precarisation, economic precarity and personal precariousness. This is, we argue, mitigated by promise (Ahmed 2010. The Promise of Happiness. Durham: Duke University Press), as international student migrants seek to navigate their way through precarity in place. The paper offers important insights into the complexity of international student migration, based on the lived experiences of migrants themselves.

The achievement of food and nutrition security in South Asia is deeply gendered

Women form an integral part of the agricultural sector, and in much of South Asia women make up a majority of the agricultural workforce and are often compelled to work to meet their families’ basic needs. While their contributions are recognized as central to the food and nutrition security of households and communities, their work is not recognized or supported adequately by public policy and social institutions. Women continue to face inequality across key development indicators including health, education and nutrition; discriminatory laws; and high levels of precarity in terms of income, employment conditions, safety and well-being. Social structures that promote gender inequality and inhibit the agency of women contribute to the South Asian enigma — the persistence of undernutrition despite economic growth — and must be addressed to achieve food and nutrition security. Gender inequality, discriminatory laws and economic precarity persist for many women in the agriculture and food sectors. This Perspective frames the persistent malnutrition and food insecurity experienced in parts of South Asia, despite economic growth, in terms of social and political structures that inhibit the agency of women.

‘Having a thick skin is essential’: mental health challenges for young apprentices in Australia

ABSTRACT Apprenticeships are a common pathway for young people transitioning from education to employment, and adolescence to adulthood. Apprenticeships have undergone considerable reform, and since the 1990s labour market priorities in Australia have resulted in weakening of protections offered to workers through the award system and trade unions. At the same time, mental health issues have increased, with young people carrying a disproportionate burden. The aim of this study was to explore challenges that young apprentices in urban Australian settings face in relation to their mental health. Focus groups were conducted with 54 apprentices, who described a pervasive sense of disposability and poor working conditions as the main challenges to their mental health. These conditions included long work hours, low wages, job insecurity, poor quality education, unrealistic expectations, workplace hierarchies and bullying. Amidst social and economic precarity, apprentices resigned themselves to silently endure poor treatment in their work placements. Findings from this study are especially troubling because, as young people, apprentices simultaneously face a series of life transitions that require support and guidance. This paper brings attention to the workplace conditions that may contribute to young apprentices’ vulnerability to mental health problems, highlighting possibilities for structural changes led by policy reform.

Making “The Beast”: An Interview with Patrick McCurdy

In this interview, Jordan B. Kinder discusses The Beast: Making a Living on a Dying Planet with Patrick McCurdy. The Beast is a 2018 graphic novel published by independent Canadian publisher Ad Astra Comix. It is the result of a collaboration between communications scholar Patrick McCurdy, writer Hugh Goldring, and artist Nicole Marie Burton. Emerging from McCurdy’s work on the MediaToil database project—a database that gathers together competing visual representations of the Athabasca Oil Sands from several stakeholders—the graphic novel addresses themes that arise from these representations while creatively exploring and navigating the tensions at the core of trying to live well in our current petroculture, a culture underwritten by neoliberalism and economic precarity.

Transnational intimacy and economic precarity of western men in northeast Thailand

ABSTRACTThis research examines the increasing migration of western men into Thailand, focusing on men in transnational intimate relationships in the northeastern region (Isan). Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this paper explores the lives of western men by focusing on their shifting social locations and experiences of gendered and economic mobility. While the men in this study could be considered ‘lifestyle migrants’, our findings complicate how lifestyle migration literatures commonly represent migrant subject positions and privilege, and we find that gender and intimate relations play a much larger role in this context than other studies of lifestyle migration suggest. We found class diversity among western men in Thailand and, over time, a complex set of constraints and immobilities that thwarted their ideals of greater control or self-reinvention. We argue that the broad pattern of economic precarity and uncertain futures among these men intertwines substantially with the gendered desires and transnational intimate relationships that originally motivated their migration.

Imagining the Future of Social and Environmental Accounting Research for Pacific Small Island Developing States

ABSTRACTIn this paper, I contribute to the conversation of imagining the future of Social and Environmental Accounting (SEA) research for Pacific Small Island Developing States (PSIDS). I focus on PSIDS as this region is arguably the most disadvantaged region given its low economic base, geographic isolation and environmental precarity. Initially, I conduct a literature review of accounting-related papers based on PSIDS and provide some suggestions for a research agenda of SEA for PSIDS. The literature review highlights that SEA research in the Pacific is an under-researched area and the few studies on SEA in the Pacific have largely been based on Fiji. For many countries in the Pacific, there is a vacuum of academic literature, however, there is a need to better understand the role of SEA in assisting these island nations address pertinent social and environmental issues, and no issue is as important as climate change. I make some inter-related suggestions for the future of SEA research for PSIDS. These suggestions emphasise the production of knowledge that draws on a diversity of perspectives from other disciplines and focuses on developing solutions based on the context of PSIDS and the lived realities of Pacific Island peoples.

Staging Discomfort: Performance and Queerness in Contemporary Cuba by Bretton White

Reviewed by: Staging Discomfort: Performance and Queerness in Contemporary Cuba by Bretton White Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes White, Bretton. Staging Discomfort: Performance and Queerness in Contemporary Cuba. Gainesville: U of Florida P, 2020. 258 pp. Queerness is a complex and treacherous topic in Cuba. In Staging Discomfort: Performance and Queerness in Contemporary Cuba, Bretton White focuses on how theater in the Caribbean socialist nation is marked by economic precarity and challenging conditions for audiences and performers. White compellingly analyzes dramatic works in the context of "the Cuban state's project of masculine heteronormativity" (3), focusing on five post-1959 examples that highlight the challenges and tensions related to queerness, cognizant that "queer Cubans have long been targets of state control" (3). As the author states, "The performances studied here concentrate on an aesthetics of fluidity, and thus upset traditional understandings of performer and [End Page 157] spectator, as well as what constitutes the ideal Cuban citizenry" (2), further asking: "How is Cuban theater agile in its critiques considering the state's limitations on expression? How do queer performances allow for new understandings about the effects of the state's failing socialist utopian contract with its citizens? And, can Cuban bodies that come together in queer ways reimagine Cuban citizenship?" (2). In the introduction, White contextualizes post-Soviet life in Cuba, drawing on the work of Jill Lane, Rine Leal, Camilla Stevens, and Norge Espinosa to illuminate Cuban theatre history. In each chapter, White pairs Cuban plays and productions with U.S.-centered queer theorists. Chapter 1 ("Instigating Intimacies: Las relaciones de Clara and Uncomfortable Closeness") focuses on the director Carlos Díaz's creative 2002 staging of a 1999 play by the German playwright Dea Loher, specifically "the blurring of distinctions between audience and actor" (23). White's reading of Díaz's production is informed by Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips's Intimacies. In chapter 2 ("Sharing Shame: Reimagining Entrepreneurship in Baños públicos, S.A."), White focuses on a play by Esther Suárez Durán that received the UNEAC Playwrighting award in Havana in 1998. Dialoguing with Michael Warner, White "shows how a more liquid connection between shame and dignity might allow for the introduction of queerness into dialogues about national identity" (23). Chapter 3 ("Frustrating Futurity: Beauty and Pain in Pájaros de la playa") focuses on a 2004 theatrical adaptation by El Ciervo Encantado of Severo Sarduy's homonymous novel, which focuses on AIDS. White reads the negotiation between suffering and beauty in relation to Lee Edelman's sinthomosexuality theory, which "postulates that reproductive futurity is not representative of possibility, but of restrictive linearity" (24). Chapter 4 ("Vexing Visibilities: Space and Queerness in Chamaco") analyzes a 2005 play by Abel González Melo that was directed by Carlos Celdrán in dialogue with works by José Esteban Muñoz and John Paul Ricco to see "how the play references the characters' cruising of the minor architectural spaces of Central Havana by staging visual nothingness" (24). Finally, in Chapter 5 ("Fronting Failure: Testing Continuity in Perros que jamás ladraron"), White analyzes a 2013 play by Rogelio Orizondo to show how "disabled, queer, black, and female bodies redefine words, images, and legacies of the revolution while courting audience participation" (25), engaging Jack Halberstam's The Queer Art of Failure. White's Staging Discomfort is an elegantly argued, intellectually-stimulating, and necessary read for any scholar interested in the Cuban scene and in theorizations of affect and performance. Its main limitation is its failure to engage the queer of color critique in a more substantive way. [End Page 158] Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes University of Michigan Copyright © 2020 The Center of Latin American Studies

WHAT’S GOING ON?

AbstractOnce nearly eighty percent Black, South LA is now two-thirds Latino. The demographic change was due to many factors, including a Black exodus driven by economic precarity, fear of crime, and experiences of over-policing and a Latino influx initially spurred by an immigration surge that could not be accommodated in traditional entry neighborhoods. While earlier research often focused on the conflicts between groups, time has passed and our new work points to contemporary quotidian accommodations between residents. We also document an emerging style of Black-Brown community organizing that seeks to both acknowledge the nuance of difference and create a shared sense of place identity. This article lifts up the Black experience in that transition of space and politics and notes how a sense of loss can result from such a dramatic change in a place that was once an iconic and literal home for much of Black Los Angeles. We suggest that that sense of loss is exacerbated by a legacy of racist asset-stripping and a deep worry about Black erasure due to current displacement pressures from gentrification. We close by discussing how organizers and political leaders need to take these dynamics into account when both building coalitions and ensuring Black futures in what is now a Black-Brown political and social space.

Shakeout Poetics: Documentary Poetry from Men of Fact to Data Bodies

Poets in North America have frequently used forms of borrowing and appropriation during the first two decades of the twenty-first century. The most prominent of these interrelated modes of poetic production, documentary poetry, has often been characterized as a "boom." Although documentary poetry has been variously categorized and named, I argue that because documentary forms index global and archival crises they are best understood as a crisis poetics. In this "shakeout poetics," the archive, and its epistemological foundations, is itself plunged into crisis. "Shakeout" combines economic and aesthetic registers into the process by which poets make documentary poems during times of amplified economic precarity, by sifting through evidence, borrowing from and rearranging source texts, "shaking out" the archive for creative reuse. The article uses Muriel Rukeyser's The Book of the Dead (1938) and Solmaz Sharif's Look (2016) to show how documentary poetry reorients its archival and representational practices from the Great Depression to the twenty-first century's multiple crises, from the War on Terror to the global financial crisis. Then, two documentary case studies, Mark Nowak's Coal Mountain Elementary (2009) and Daniel Borzutzky's In the Murmurs of the Rotten Carcass Economy (2015), highlight the continuum of documentary poetries. Whereas Nowak's text is made entirely of source texts, Borzutzky meditates on how to document in the absence of archival evidence. In Borzutzky's writing, the migrant and refugee crises, where human beings can disappear without a trace, underscore the limits of documentary practice and, paradoxically, its urgency.

La parentalité sous contrainte des familles immigrées sans domicile en Île-de-France. Les résultats de l’enquête Enfams

Since the end of the1990s, the number of immigrant families living in institutional accommodation has considerably increased. This is partly explained by widening social inequalities, the setting up of more restrictive migration policies, and more difficult access to housing and work. In this light, this article, based on data from the Enfams survey (Observatoire du Samusocial de Paris, 2013), analyses the effects of homelessness on family reconfiguration in context of migration. The article charts the cumulative effects caused by the geographical separation of some of the children and the spouse, the difficulties of daily living (access to work, childminding, and schooling) and the administrative, social and economic precarity of the parents.

Ocuparea pe platformele digitale în contextul crizei COVID-19: Studiu de caz asupra personalului de livrare

The article intends to critically analyse the implications of economic precariousness integrated into the platform work of food-delivery sector. The recent context of labour market crisis caused by the COVID-19 virus and assisted by the labour policy changes have brought recently on the public agenda the subject of digital employment. However, at the academic level, this subject has been sporadically analysed, marginalizing the dimensions related to the risks and vulnerabilities associated with the precarization effect on digital work. Therefore, by combining different analytical angles, focusing on the socio-economic conditions and vulnerability of workers from the food-delivery sector, the article aims a synthetic analysis of the association between precarious work, the accelerated digitization of work caused by COVID-19 and the phenomenon of flexible employment. Thus, there are two approaches in the proposed article demonstration: first, the article will provide information on the political and economic context of the Romanian labour market before the COVID-19 pandemic crisis and will present the current situation of precarious employment and minimum wage policy. Secondly, the analysis will be focused on digital employment in the platform-based food-delivery sector in Romania, with a case study on the delivery staff situated in the first line exposure to the COVID-19 virus. Keywords: precariousness; platform work; flexibility; COVID-19 virus; minimum wage.

The traders of Central Bazaar, Astana: motivation and networks

ABSTRACTTrading in Astana’s Central Bazaar rests on mutually beneficial people-to-people contacts, or personal networks. Twenty-five years after the Soviet collapse, personal networks are pivotal in whether one succeeds in an informal market economy. I argue that networks cannot be disassociated from trader motivation, which serves as a measure of how these networks evolve over time. I describe how those traders who were driven primarily by lifting themselves out of economic precarity tended to build strong social networks; these strong social networks sometimes evolved into ‘unconditional’ social networks, by which I mean a trader supporting others even though doing so has no commercial benefit. At the other extreme were traders driven by ambition and goal attainment. I argue that such traders are less likely to establish and maintain social networks. Between these two extremes is a middle ground, where traders alternate between strong and weak social networks.