Forms Of Precarity Research Articles

Intersecting vulnerabilities and compounded risks of women asylum seekers working in care during COVID-19 in Ireland

This article explores findings from a qualitative participatory study with asylum seekers in Ireland employed in the healthcare sector during the COVID-19 pandemic. By extending an intersectional analysis framework, we demonstrate how the vulnerability of care workers living within the international protection accommodation system ‘under the care’ of the state intersects with power exercised by the neoliberal care market and is compounded by global health controls instituted during the pandemic. Participants reveal a lack of autonomy and forms of precarity that were not faced by other care workers, particularly increased risk of exposure to COVID-19 and multiple forms of stigma.

“A Hard Road With Personal Costs”: How Digital-First Nonprofit News Founders Navigate Precarity

As the journalism industry descends further into economic collapse, precarity has become an increasingly useful concept in studies of newswork. While a growing body of literature has begun to consider how founders of startup journalism outlets navigate their own precarious self-employment, the existing scholarship pays little attention to journalists working at digital-first nonprofit newsrooms. This study draws on a political economic framework and in-depth interviews with founders of nonprofit news organizations in the United States to understand how these newsworkers experience and navigate various forms of precarity. Findings from this research confirm that precarity is ubiquitous among nonprofit news founders, and that financial precarity is particularly acute. Founders rely heavily on their personal and professional communities for support in navigating their precarious working conditions, and find great satisfaction in providing high-quality news and information to their communities. This study adds to growing calls for a labor turn in journalism studies and contributes to the literature on journalistic precarity by extending the concept to examine nonprofit newsrooms and their founders. Additionally, these findings provide insight into specific ways in which the burden of precarity on founders can be reduced.

Live Performers’ Experiences of Precarity and Recognition during COVID-19 and Beyond

COVID-19 devastated the ability of self-employed and freelance live performers working in the UK’s live entertainment industries to sustain a living in an already precarious sector of employment. It also exposed the inadequacies of existing ways of conceptualising precarity in allowing a complete understanding of performers’ experiences of precarious employment, particularly during such a crisis. Combining research into precarity, recognition theory and qualitative data on how such performers experienced and responded to the pandemic, this article identifies two forms of precarity they experienced: socioeconomic and recognitive. In doing so, it contributes to the sociology of work by demonstrating how these two modes of precarity generated considerable operational and existential challenges for performers while extending the conceptualisation of precarity in such a way as to offer a more nuanced understanding of its impact, not only on the livelihoods of those experiencing it but also on their work identities and sense of self.

Roof/Room Pieces: An Ethnography of Lockdown Lives, and Digital Perfor- mances of Rabindranritya

This essay is an exploration of precarity and sociality within performing arts in India. It analyses dances made digitally for audiences during the COVID-19 pandemic (2020-21) and engages with scholarly literature and movement system with reference to Bengali polymath Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) and forms of dance identified as rabindranritya. Interpreted through interdisciplinary research methods of digital ethnography, questionnaires, content analysis and dance studies, the essay aims to understand why some of us continued to dance through the global pandemic. I focus on YouTube as a site of research as we realize that technology’s relationship with human and arts have now evolved and ‘liveness’ could be optional. I question various forms of precarity in arts industries through respondents’ answers and observe what notions of sociality are exchanged between the performer and their audience. I bring to light the mundane and vibrant of the quotidian lockdown lives of performers who remained cloistered at home, but with cameras on them, how they seized the pandemic precarity and continued dancing with a sense of immediacy and new kinds of intimacy, communicating their imaginations and emotions and bridging social- temporal-spatial distances.

Between Informality and (Il)legality: Congolese Migrants’ Survival Mechanisms in South Africa

Drawing on interviews with Congolese in Johannesburg, this research explains some of the impact of the discriminatory immigration laws in South Africa that expose refugees to various forms of precarity. I show that precarity becomes a driving force for these people to engage in illegal or unauthorized activities, and I analyze how Congolese refugees attempt to obtain legal status and adapt to intensified discriminatory immigration policies and practices. I argue that the criminalization of migration creates a paradox: it subjects migrants to increased vulnerability due to restrictive policies, but it also empowers them to assert their agency in response. Yet due to the generally illegal nature of their chosen activities, migrants are exposed to more exploitation, perpetuating their criminalization and vulnerability. I demonstrate the adverse outcomes of government antimigrant policies that push people into precarity without necessarily endorsing the illegal activities migrants may employ.

Engaging with communities and precarity theory to bring new perspectives to public mental health

ABSTRACT In this paper we explore the role of precarity theory in bringing new perspectives to public mental health. The paper draws on a qualitative, participatory research study carried out in Glasgow that illuminates the entangled and complex relations between the social, bio-political, cultural, economic, and environmental conditions that produce mental health and ill health. Through the accounts of Sassy Queen, Tony, Simba, John, and Rhianna, we explore the attrition of everyday lives that are lived in constant states of crisis, the forms of precarity that it precipitates, and how this plays out for them concerning how they talk about and experience ‘mental health’. Their experience provides an alternative vantage point to understanding mental distress to those which are made possible through recourse to prevalent social determinant and behavioural models of public health. The paper concludes that the operations of the political as everyday biopolitics must become more visible within public health, and this requires interdisciplinary and narrative approaches to fully understand the border zone between macro-level politics and the biopolitics of everyday life.

Precarious Family Spaces in Petina Gappah’s The Book of Memory

Human beings are social creatures, and the family space is their principal institution for socialisation and reproduction. The Book of Memory by Petina Gappah (London: Faber & Faber, 2015) reveals that family spaces (both heteronormative and non-normative) can become precarious. In exploring how the entanglements of family, cultural prejudices, and personal choices dialectically give rise to and result from precarious family spaces, this article examines parental roles in relation to precarity and emerging family structures as forms of precarity. I argue that by focalising albinism, queer sexualities, and race, Gappah exposes normative practices as responsible for creating precarious family spaces. With an awareness of its ontological and philosophical shortcomings, this article deploys the theory of precarity as a descriptive category.

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'.

“If Something Were to Happen”: Communicative Practices of Resilience in the Management of Work-Life Precarity

A substantial body of literature considers the experience of precarious work in market economies. Only recently, however, have scholars of work begun to consider the impact of precarity in the workplace on work-life interrelationships. This study contributes to that research and expands its focus beyond the form of precarity represented by job insecurity to other forms of precarity that inhere in the management of work-life interrelationships for working families in industrialized nations. Taking a communication as constitutive of work-life interrelationships perspective, we identify four forms of precarity in middle class working mothers’ accounts of work-life, and then examine how these forms are communicatively managed through classed and gendered discursive and material/technological practices of resilience. Using Weick’s organizational sensemaking model, in particular his notion of “partial inclusion,” we discuss the implications that individuals’ practices of resilience to manage work-life precarity have for the individual-organization relationship among middle class working mothers.

Review of “Precarious Asia: Global Capitalism and Work in Japan, South Korea, and Indonesia”

Precarious Asia: Global Capitalism and Work in Japan, South Korea, and Indonesia, authored by Arne L. Kalleberg, Kevin Hewison, and Kwang-Yeong Shin, is a timely and ambitious book that examines increasing precarity in employment relations in three Asian economies. It is timely in the sense that it sheds light on the precarization of work, the central feature in the transformation of contemporary labor markets under neoliberal pressures. It is ambitious as it brings three economic powerhouses in Asia—Japan, South Korea, and Indonesia—into a comparative examination and in conversation with other advanced capitalist economies. The book traces how work has become increasingly uncertain, unstable, and insecure in three Asian economies in the last 20 years. To offer the comparative analysis, the authors provide the historical background of the developmental state, the shift in global capitalism, domestic institutional arrangements and social welfare regimes, and implications for inequality and poverty. In doing so, their overarching argument is centered on the changing balance of power among class actors. By looking into the political and economic dynamics behind the liberalization of employment and social protections, the book ultimately maintains that the shifting interests of global capitalism and the configurations of national institutions and class relations have shaped different degrees and forms of precarity in the three countries.

Housing precariousness and health: a mixed-methods study into households affected by displacements and demolitions in East Jerusalem

BackgroundEast Jerusalem residency status for more than 350 000 Palestinians depends on showing that there is a continued centre of life in the city and can be revoked on the grounds of a breach of allegiance. 2975 Palestinians in East Jerusalem were displaced or had their homes demolished between 2009 and 2021, primarily on the grounds of not having Israeli-issued building permits, which are highly difficult to obtain, or settler takeover. We aimed to explore the perceived health effects of demolition or displacement, and to assess self-reported health and the intersection of housing precariousness and other forms of precarity in East Jerusalem. MethodsWe did a mixed-methods study in East Jerusalem. Drawing on a database of demolition or displacement in East Jerusalem from 2009 to 2019, we undertook ten household case studies, using in-depth interviews, site visits, and visual ethnography, and surveyed a systematic random sample of 120 women, each representing a separate household that underwent demolition or displacement during 2017–19. In the qualitative component, we chose a mix of different types of demolition or displacement and post-displacement housing trajectories. We used survey tools to assess household demographics; exposure to different forms of precarity and occupation-related violence; a measure of human insecurity (Birzeit University human insecurity scale); and self-reported health (SF-12 version 2 assessment), wellbeing (WHO-Five Wellbeing Index), and disability (Washington Group short questions). FindingsWe examined the perceived health effects of demolition or displacement related to experiences of the event; subsequent housing quality; subsequent neighbourhood and its environmental quality; the under-provision of municipal services; and psychosocial stress connected with affordability, tenure, and absence of security and legal protections. The survey response rate was 84 households (70%) of 120. 79 households (94%) of 84 underwent demolition, whereas five households (6%) were displaced without demolition. 19 households (24%) of 79 experienced two or more incidences of demolition and six households (7%) of 84 had at least one family member who had lost East Jerusalem residency. Economically, in 22 households (26%), the head of the household was unemployed, 45 households (54%) worried daily about debt, and 32 households (38%) met the criteria for overcrowding (three or more people per room). From 18 households (21%), women reported experiencing personal humiliation by occupation forces, whereas women from 33 households (39%) reported exposure to acts of humiliation of others, and women from 18 households (21%) reported the detention or arrest of other household members. Women from 39 households (46%) experienced high human insecurity; the mean SF-12 version 2 assessment score was 46·6 (SD 22·1) for physical health and 43·4 (SD 18·3) for mental health, where a score of less than 50 would indicate a state of health worse than expected for the mean of the population; whereas the prevalence of poor wellbeing, according to the WHO wellbeing index, was 86% (72 households). InterpretationOur study supports previous research on the damaging health effects of housing precariousness, shown by the poor self-reported health of the women surveyed and a high exposure to different forms of precarity. Israel's occupation policies in East Jerusalem result in insecure residency status and tenure for many households, neglect in the provision of health and public health services, overcrowding, and unsanitary housing and neighbourhood conditions that are hazardous to health. FundingSwiss Development Cooperation.

‘I was a refugee, at first’. Aspettative, desideri, fallimenti e ricostruzioni nell’esperienza degli studenti rifugiati a Torino

In the last years, Italian universities have implemented several programmes supporting refugees who want to start university, or return to studies after forced migration. Drawing on the projects developed at the University of Torino, this paper analyses students’ different trajectories, across the difficulties posed by a different academic environment, the imagined possibilities, the obstacles to self-realisation. The paper looks at the interplay between different forms of precarity – material (citizenship status, housing, job), social and existential: how are university careers constructed and reconstructed? Is it possible to imagine being university students, even in a condition of constant insecurity and partial inclusion? Particularly, the paper explores how experiences of suffering are shaped by the discrepancies between students’ desires and aspirations, possibilities offered (or not) by universities, and family and social expectations.

A supercyclone, landscapes of ‘emptiness’ and shrimp aquaculture: The lesser-known trajectories of disaster recovery in coastal Odisha, India

• Reconfiguration of paddy growing landscape after a supercyclone in Odisha to commercial aquaculture backed by the state and private capital. • Transformation based on a powerful shared narrative of the landscape rendered empty and unproductive by the supercyclone. • This narrative is misleading and obliterates previously disastrous attempts at shrimp culture, to the detriment of poor farmers. • Experience of aquaculture reveals new forms of precarity and differentiation, and the lack of regulation and support by the state. • Disaster recovery as long-term transformation left to capitalist development; state pursues a techno-infrastructural response strategy. This paper critically examines the reconfiguration of post-supercyclone Ersama in coastal Odisha in India, to encourage the introduction of a new form of shrimp aquaculture as the principal livelihood. It demonstrates the operation of a powerful shared construction of Ersama, a typically paddy cultivating area, as a landscape rendered ‘empty’ and ‘unproductive’ by the supercyclone of 1999. The paper shows how this notion, shared by locals and external actors, facilitates the entry of the forces of commercial aquaculture at the cost of increased socio-economic inequalities and risk-taking for the poorest participants, as well as the exclusion of women from this new livelihood. Memories of previous disastrous attempts at shrimp culture are obliterated through misleading narratives about the potent productivity of a new type of shrimp by the proponents of aquaculture. The state has presided through uneven regulation, disregarding the damaging effects of commercial aquaculture for the coastal environment. The paper argues that besides the provision of disaster relief, the state restricts its own responsibilities towards disaster prone and affected populations to the creation of warning systems and physical infrastructures. However, it assigns the broader challenge of disaster recovery to ongoing processes of capitalist development. Even as the resulting precarity, both economic and environmental, threaten long-term and inclusive recovery, the state delinks disaster recovery from questions of structural risk resulting from exclusionary development pathways, depoliticising it considerably.

The Transindividual Act of Self-Burning

Recognized in the 20th- and 21st-century history of political suicides as a radical act of protest and a spectacular expression of an intense experience of suffering, self-burning has returned since 2010 when Mohamed Bouazizi's act sparked protests in Tunisia. Its last wave in Europe includes those cases of self-incinerations in which the conditions for their political performativity are only partly fulfilled: the acts are public and communicate with the antagonist in the symbolic places of power, but their motivations aren't explicitly formulated as political. When self-annihilation is triggered by the basic needs and rights to maintain life - such as unemployment, housing crises, conflicts at work and other forms of precarity - means and ends with respect to life become indistinguishable. How can life be weaponized as a transindividual form of dissent if self-destruction also brings an end to desperation and suffering of the person? How are we to attend to irreperable acts of self-annihilation, which stand in dire contrast to contemporary practices of self-care, vitalist intensity and self-enhancement?

Labour Recruitment Systems in Global Production Networks: The Ruralisation of Labour Regimes in South India’s Garment and Textile Industries

ABSTRACT This article argues that the labour regime in the garment and textile industries in Tiruppur and Coimbatore, India has transformed from an unorganised feminisation to formalised, ruralised labour, which locates new forms of precarity in the region’s larger factories. Labour brokers’ recruitment of long-distance male migrants has fashioned a national labour market for the recruitment of the region’s garment and textile workers. Feminisation of the workforce now includes the specific recruitment of unmarried women through labour brokers, the use of lump-sum employment contracts and company provision of hostel accommodation. Combining theoretical insights from the literatures on local labour regimes and global production networks, the article argues that labour recruitment strategies play an active role in the construction of regional labour markets and organisation of global production networks.

Care precarity among older British migrants in Spain

AbstractNorthern European international retirement migrants are often viewed as affluent and use migration as a route to a better quality of life. However, as these migrants transition into the ‘fourth age’, the onset of age-related illnesses, frailty and care needs can lead to increased levels of risk and insecurity. Through 34 qualitative interviews with older British migrants in Spain, the paper explores how these migrants access and experience care as they age. It draws on a lens of precarity that allows an understanding not only of individual care needs, but of the political, economic and social context in which they are situated, including social protections and public safety nets. The findings suggest that distant family relationships and limited access to formal social protection can both create and exacerbate precarity. These older migrants therefore develop different strategies to access care that include drawing on informal relationships and voluntary organisations within the British community in Spain. The paper contributes to understanding how international retirement migrants manage their care needs, and theoretically extends our understanding of how the intersection of old age, migration and care can create new forms of precarity.

Imagined futures in precarious working conditions: A gender matter?

Today younger generations are entering adult life with no expectation of guaranteed employment or secure working conditions. In this article the author explores how employment precariousness in subjects with young children shapes the future projections they envisage for themselves, relating to both professional and family life, and considers the politics of gender diversity in this process of ‘projecting’. By drawing on a detailed narrative analysis of the life stories of 40 Italian parents facing job insecurity, three ideal typical future projections are identified that disclose diverse ways of ‘reacting’ to insecure employment and to their futures. They are described as: hopeful open end; discouraged open end; and confident open end. The analysis shows how these imagined futures depend on – and contribute to produce in terms of processes – forms of precarity and of social reproduction of labour which are different between men and women.

Digital Creativity and Urban Entrapment in Kinshasa: Experiments in Solving Precarity

AbstractI attend to the dialectics between precarity, urban sociality, and digital technology (le numérique) in Kinshasa. Tech engineers, and those aspiring to become one, dream of solvent futures. They share a desire to leave various forms of precarity behind and attempt to produce new urban futures by means of tech skills and digital technologies. Especially the lack of trust in urban others is considered a problem solvable with mobile phone applications and other kinds of software. Kinois tech inventiveness draws on an interpretation of the city as a social space of entrapment. The proposed solutions consist of a strategy that I call “short‐cutting” of social relations, a method that involves replacing a human intermediary with a machine. Unfortunately, tech capitalism sets its own traps for Kinshasa’s tech engineers. The very particular forms of precarity from which these ingénieurs want to escape are perpetuated in the digital sphere; would‐be digital innovators remain trapped.

Unsettling the American Dream: Mobility, Migration and Precarity among Translocal Himalayan Communities during COVID-19.

ABSTRACTNew York City (NYC) garnered significant national and international attention when it emerged as the coronavirus epicentre in the USA, in spring 2020. As has been widely documented, this crisis has disproportionately impacted minority, immigrant and marginalized communities. Among those affected were people from Mustang, Nepal, a Himalayan region bordering Tibet. This community is often rendered invisible within larger Asian immigrant populations, but the presence of Mustangis in the US has transformed their translocal worlds, lived between Nepal and NYC. Seasonal mobility and life‐stage wage labour in cosmopolitan Asia have been common in Mustang for decades. More permanent moves to NYC began in the 1990s. These migrations were based on assumptions about attaining financial stability in the US in ways deemed unattainable in Nepal. An ethnographic focus on one translocal Mustangi family frames this discussion of how COVID‐19 has overturned previously held ideas around migration to NYC and uncovered new forms of precarity. The authors build on theories of transnationalism and translocality to position migration as a cyclical process whereby the well‐being of Mustangis in Nepal and NYC rests on the reliability of global migratory networks and translocal kinship relations — a basis for security and belonging that COVID‐19 has challenged and reconfigured.

Note from the Editors

Note from the Editors