Precarious Experiences Research Articles

Appeals to shared Africanness: Negotiating precarious childhoods and intra-African migration in two coming-of-age narratives in contemporary South Africa

Child and youth migration has not only been marginalized within scholarship on literary engagements with global migratory processes, but has also, for the most part, been studied in the narrow context of movements from the Global South to the Global North. This essay examines the complex dynamics of child and youth migration manifest in narratives of migration to South Africa from elsewhere on the African continent. Focusing on the coming-of-age of young migrants and refugees in Meg Vandermerwe’s novel Zebra Crossing (2013) and Aher Arop Bol’s refugee memoir The Lost Boy (2009), I argue that the texts critique common readings of African childhoods as either utopian or dystopian and move beyond dichotomous framings of young migrants through the lens of victimhood or criminality. The texts highlight young migrants’ precarious experiences relating to intersecting hierarchies of race, gender, ability and immigration status, while at the same time foregrounding their situated, relational agency that is often negotiated through appeals to shared Africanness. Drawing on scholarship on the postcolonial Bildungsroman, I suggest that both texts deploy the form to reclaim access to – and subject to criticism – the current human rights order. By focusing on intra-African migration, this essay extends literary migration scholarship to address how the selected texts exact new vocabularies and alternative imaginaries for the study of contemporary migration narratives.

Emotional Pathways of Embodied Health Vulnerability: Maternal Health Risk and Emotional Distress among First‐ and Second‐Generation Immigrants on the US‐Mexico Border

AbstractThis article draws on interviews with pregnant and postnatal first‐ and second‐generation immigrant women in the US‐Mexico border region to explore the relationship among immigration‐related concerns, emotional distress, and birth outcomes. Maternal stress is associated with a range of maternal and infant health complications, making it important to understand how immigration‐related apprehensions shape the emotional experience of pregnancy. In analyzing women's narratives, this article expands on theoretical conceptions of embodiment to explore how a range of immigration‐related anxieties can shape women's emotions in ways they perceived as contributing to health vulnerabilities. In doing so, it examines emotional pathways of embodiment in relation to: (1) the embodiment of immigration‐related precarity, or how one's immigration status generates vulnerability; (2) corporeal kinship effects of migration, or the ways immigration concerns over family generate vulnerability; and (3) embodied histories of migration‐related vulnerability, or the ways past experiences of precariousness can mark one's physiology.

COVID-19: Pandemic Reading

In 1832, a global cholera pandemic reached US shores Like COVID-19, cholera was a wholly new disease in the United States (although considerably deadlier), and it was, like the novel coronavirus, a poorly understood one that disproportionately affected immigrants and African Americans The cholera pandemic began immediately following Nat Turner’s rebellion, which had triggered a wave of punitive laws against Black Americans The early 1830s was, in other words, a time of brutal devastation for the African American community, particularly in the South How, we might wonder, when faced with horrific violence, systemic injustice, and a descending global pandemic, could an enslaved fifteen-year-old Frederick Douglass do anything but despair? Crucially, he did not Instead, Douglass’s understanding of Nat Turner’s murder, the racist legal retribution that followed, and the horrors wrought by cholera appear in the context of his awakening to the

‘It’s My Passion and Not Really Like Work’: Balancing Precarity with the Work–Life of a Volunteer Team Leader in the Conservation Sector

Working with volunteers is a challenging occupation, especially in an environment of increasingly precarious casualisation. Although this trend is evident in other types of work, workers’ engagement with the purpose and mission of volunteerism can particularly emphasise blurred boundaries between the work and non-work spheres, potentially confusing employee identities. Emerging from an ongoing ethnographic study, this account draws on Sally’s precarious experiences as a leader of volunteers in the conservation sector. She reflects on the joys and challenges of leading volunteers in a messy environment of paradoxically interacting overwork and underwork, while highlighting issues of precarity and balance within and beyond her role as employee.

Bieg z przeszkodami. Ambiwalencje sukcesu artystycznego w poszerzonym polu kultury

Celem artykułu jest analiza ambiwalentnego charakteru kategorii sukcesu w świecie spo­łecznym artystów. W tekście przedstawiam znaczenia sukcesu z perspektywy twórców, osadzając nar­racje zogniskowane wokół sukcesu w kontekście przemian poszerzonego pola kultury. Wyjaśniam, ja­kie znaczenie ma transformacja pola kultury dla strategii adaptacyjnych stosowanych przez artystów. Odwołując się do prekarnych doświadczeń twórców, dokonuję rekonstrukcji sposobów zarządzania przez nich ich własnymi karierami. Bazując na zebranym materiale empirycznym, próbuję jednocześnie odpowiedzieć na pytanie o trudności i wątpliwości związane z osiąganiem sukcesu w środowisku ar­tystycznym oraz opisać uwarunkowania defensywno-kompensacyjnej strategii zarządzania sukcesem. W zakończeniu tekstu formułuję wnioski dotyczące sposobów hakowania przez artystów reguł gry zainstalowanych w poszerzonym polu kultury.

The Development and Initial Validation of a Self-Report Job Precariousness Scale Suitable for Use With Young Adults Who Study and Work

Precarious employment has been increasing worldwide. Yet there are few scales suitable to assess it, and no scales to measure perceived job precariousness in working students who are particularly vulnerable. Using classic test theory, we generated 21 job precariousness items and had them reviewed by experts. In Study 1 ( N = 282, 63% female, mean age 22 years), exploratory factor analysis yielded four factors of job conditions, security, remuneration, and flexibility, each with 3 items. In Study 2 ( N = 211, 75% female, mean age 22 years), confirmatory factor analysis confirmed that this four-factor model was the best fit compared to unidimensional, second-order, and bifactor models. Cronbach’s α coefficients for all factors and the full-scale score were sound (all >.78). Validity was supported by showing that precariousness was related negatively to life satisfaction and employer support and positively to job insecurity, financial strain, and subjective social status. Precariousness was unrelated to age, sex, and hours worked. The Job Precariousness Scale has the potential to promote research into the effects of precarious employment on working students’ current and future functioning and achievement and how experiences of precariousness influence the development of a precarity identity.

A qualitative study of precarious experiences of fixed-term secondary teachers

A qualitative study of precarious experiences of fixed-term secondary teachers

Legal Reform and Struggles Against Precarity: The Case of State Workers' Early Retirement in Vietnam

This paper contributes to the literature on precarity in Asia by examining the way in which state law interacts with social, political, and ideological factors in shaping experiences of precarity. Different from studies of precarity that see law as a set of state regulations underpinning the precarious economic and political status of individual workers, this paper adopts a socially grounded view of law that incorporates workers' understandings of and engagements with state law in commonplace settings. It also adopts a view of precarity as a complex dynamic of social, legal, and political processes shaping and reproducing workers' experiences of insecurity and vulnerability at work, rather than a broad, identity-based category of non-standard and informal types of employment. Through an ethnographic study of former state workers' working experiences in Vietnam, this paper sheds light on different aspects of workers' collective and individual struggles against precarity and workplace injustice, and the role that law plays in these struggles. It argues that law contributes to reinforcing workers' precarious experiences, which are underpinned by the tension between their expectations grounded in the socialist era and the realities of workplace injustice and insecurity in a market economy.

‘You can’t put your roots down’: housing pathways, rental tenure and precarity in older age

In light of housing affordability concerns, we examine older people’s experiences of renting within a context of enduring home-ownership norms and aspirations. Adapting Clapham’s housing pathways framework, we ask: How is rental tenure experienced by older people who have encountered precarity in their housing history? Drawing on interviews with 13 older tenants, we observe the uneasy relationship between tenure insecurity and housing quality, and tensions between choice and luck in experiences of renting in later life. Three pathways related to renting in older age were apparent: life-long renting; loss of homeownership through adversity; and deliberate decisions to transition to renting. We note that challenges encountered in current and previous housing situations lead to diverse narratives of precarity in later life. These precarious experiences can be exacerbated by intersecting uncertainties associated with health, financial and personal circumstances. Older tenants’ housing pathways and experiences illuminate ways in which precarity can disrupt opportunities for ageing well and ageing in place.

Ragpicking as Method

Abstract This article explores the relationship between precarity, waste, and the ragpicker in contemporary Chinese visual culture. It asks first why precarity has come so little and so late to the theoretical scene in China, a society in which precarious experience is so rife as to be almost endemic. The essay then goes on to show how some of China's leading artists now work profusely with refuse—as a core theme of the precarious present—while noting the strange anomaly that their works offer up scant if any space for the figure of the waste picker. The artist, instead, has taken over her mantle as the sifter and sorter of garbage. This missing human figure matters, in part because waste is always about people—and their absence from aesthetic space suggests that art is responding to a felt sense that personhood is coming under assault as basic life sureties fray. But this essay also argues that the garbage takeover is part of a sustained practice of appropriation, effacement, even cruelty in the artistic representation of precarity in China. China's wasteworks are art forms born at the tense interface between different class actors, and they disclose fraught fears over where brittle life experience begins and ends in a society that has tried to eliminate class as a category of political action and analysis.

‘Glorified Janitors:’ Creativity, cachet, and everyday experiences of work in Portland, Oregon’s craft brewing sector

Although rooted in tasks of manual labour, craft production is increasingly cast as part of the creative industries through a shared mode of production that emphasizes the aesthetic, design and cultural features of the final product, as well as a common experience of precariousness among workers. This paper highlights an emerging connection between craft production and the creative industries based on the glamourization of work, a characteristic that has been noted in the creative industries but that has received less attention in craft-based sectors. Focusing on the case of the craft brewing sector in Portland, Oregon, the paper documents the newfound cachet attached to craft brewing work and contrasts it against the everyday experiences of work in the sector. In doing so, the paper develops the argument that, while the recent glamourization of craft brewing as an occupation has allowed craft brewers in Portland to assume a quasi-celebrity status and has appeared to bring craft brewing in closer alignment with other forms of creative work, it has not resulted in improved working conditions or enhanced prospects for creativity. Rather, the glamourization of craft brewing work has exacerbated precarious working conditions in the sector by creating an oversupply of potential workers, which has raised entry barriers, while simultaneously keeping wages low.

Internationalised School Teachers’ Experiences of Precarity as Part of the Global Middle Class in China: Towards Resilience Capital

The purpose of this study was to explore three International School Teachers’ experiences as part of the Global Middle Class (GMC) in China. This group is worthy of study, as their numbers are increasingly growing, particularly in the Asia-Pacific region. However, little has been written about the negative aspects of sustained global mobility or how individuals, as opposed to families, accrue and deploy cosmopolitan capital for social advantage. In-depth interviewing was employed in order to bring into focus the participants’ experiences of prolonged mobility. In addition to highlighting the precarious aspects of being part of the GMC, the study also identified and illustrated a new form of capital that emerged during data collection and analysis, which was labelled ‘resilience capital’. Resilience capital is produced when teachers take a more positive attitude towards negative or precarious experiences, utilising them in order to develop skills, dispositions and endurance which also can be converted into more traditional economic and cultural forms of capital.

Precariously placed: Home, housing and wellbeing for older renters.

Older renters may encounter a wide range of challenges and constraints in their experiences of ageing, housing and community life that influence their wellbeing. We employ a two-part conceptualisation of precarity and resilience to investigate how housing-related precarities may impact upon experiences of ageing and home during later life. We draw on narratives collected through in-depth interviews with 13 older renters living in a particularly high-pressure housing market within the greater Auckland area. We ground our analysis in ideas of precarity and resilience evident in participants' experiences of being 'at home' at the scale of both the dwelling and wider community. Results show that experiences of renting and ageing can be complicated and compromised in diverse ways by interrelated aspects of precarity and resilience related to housing, community, health, financial and personal circumstances. Distance or isolation from services and healthcare, tourism-related infrastructural pressures, and community changes can intensify precarious experiences of home, and can have implications for older people's wellbeing, as well as their ongoing opportunities to age well in place. In addition to these potential precarities, older renters appear to draw strength from their familiarity with, attachment to, and enjoyment of, place and community. These responses demonstrate older renters' capacity for resilience to challenge and adversity when ageing in rented places.

Sårbarhetens mysterium

Globalization strengthens mutual interdependency between persons, nations and peoples. Such dependency implies exposed and experienced vulnerability. The significance of religion in people's lives seems to increase with their experience of insecurity. Whereas secularization continues where people enjoy a basic level of welfare and security, the perceived importance and impact of religion is generally increasing around the globe, due to globalized experiences of precariousness and vulnerability affecting the majority. This situation raises the question of how different forms of religiosity relate to people’s sense of vulnerability. In this article I explore in what ways a Lutheran and ecumenical theological approach inspired by liberation and feminist theologies may provide resources that make it possible to see human vulnerability as a value and strength that should be protected, not removed. Might vulnerability even be perceived as sacred? Can God be seen as a deus vulnerabilis? I also ask in what ways liturgical practice may visualize and operationalize such a theology of vulnerability.

My Boss is an App

In this self-ethnographic text, the author tells us about his precarious experience both as a doctor without a position and as a driver for Uber and Lyft in Pittsburgh. He shows the striking ability of platforms to capture the lives of its subjects-workers and to extend their availability by manipulating their perception of possible rewards. The author thus exposes how platforms overburden workers in terms of the constant availability required from them, and shows what ensues from it: an appropriation of the present, invaded by the urgency to do, to be there, at all cost, in the hope of obtaining a fare, a situation that is not so different from the effects entailed by precariousness in the field of academia.

De la précarité du travail émotionnel du care

Partant d’une analyse des expériences quotidiennes de travail de soignant⋅e⋅s racialisé⋅e⋅s employé⋅e⋅s dans le secteur privé des soins aux personnes âgées à Londres, Paris et Madrid, cet article avance que, pour comprendre la précarité vécue par les soignant⋅e⋅s au quotidien et éclairer les multiples vulnérabilités que leur travail engendre, il est nécessaire de repenser la précarité au travail non plus à travers mais à partir du genre. Les apports théoriques d’une philosophie morale féministe permettent ici de faire émerger une compréhension qualitativement genrée des expériences de travail au-delà des inégalités objectivées statistiquement selon le sexe. L’article aborde tout d’abord la non reconnaissance du travail physique et l’invisibilisation du travail émotionnel au travers de l’organisation du travail dans les structures de soins privées. Sont ensuite explorées les implications genrées de l’intensification du travail dans un contexte de privatisation croissante des soins aux personnes âgées. L’article s’attache enfin à faire apparaître comment ces précarités vécues au quotidien révèlent les inégalités genrées et racialisées sur lesquels repose la reproduction sociale des sociétés occidentales contemporaines. Les élaborations théoriques de cet article sont fondées sur l’analyse de 82 entretiens avec des soignant⋅e⋅s racialisé⋅e⋅s réalisés dans le cadre d’un travail doctoral.

Prayers of the Precariat? The Political Role of Religion in Precarious Times

Este artigo apresenta e discute o uso de Guy Standing do conceito “precariato” e sua possível utilidade ao analisar o papel da religião nas atuais crises políticas. Combinando o conceito clássico marxista do “proletariado” com várias experiências de precariedade num mundo globalizado como exclusão social, trabalho de tempo parcial ou inseguro, e migração, o termo “precariato” é apresentado como uma ferramenta socioanalítica sugestiva. O uso de Standing desse neologismo, porém, também é criticado, em particular, por apontar certos grupos sociais como “perigosos”, assim indiscutivelmente revelando um viés implícito, eurocêntrico e colonizador. Nem Standing nem seus críticos abordam o papel da religião em um relacionamento com o precariato. Portanto, referindo-se ao trabalho sociológico de Inglehart e Norris sobre a crescente relevância da religiosidade nas condições precárias de vida, este artigo coloca o desafio de analisar de que maneiras tipos diferentes de religiosidade (fundamentalista, carismático, libertacionista) podem ser vistos como afetando os processos políticos e de precariato para superar a precarização.

Being in Crisis: Scenes of Blindness and Insight in Tragedy

Tragedy was considered ‘highly serious, political (in some sense)—and religious’, at its origin in Athens in 427 BCE (Winnington-Ingram, 1989: 5). In spite of its centuries-old existence the trope still troubles theatre and performance philosophy scholars. As Simon Critchley (2017) recently put it: ‘What kind of hedonism is the pleasure we take in tragedy, which depicts not just suffering and death, but the ghostly porosity of the frontier separating the living from the dead?’ (37). This paper makes use of, and critiques Critchley’s scholarship. It explores his notion of tragedy’s porous frontier in relation to the skene, the boundary that bisected the ancient stage and restricted audience vision at critical moments in the drama. The paper links the skene functionally to other such pivotal boundaries or ‘scenes’, to generate an interdisciplinary range of approaches to the precarious experience of having sight and hearing momentarily dislocated from each other. In the process the paper contests Critchley’s Platonic concerns about tragedy’s deceptive and sadistic inflections, to offer an entirely new take on the ancient art form; one which may shed fresh light on Performance Philosophy’s foundational debates concerning the use, or demolition, of boundaries.

Analysing Oral Accounts of Women Survivors of 1947 Migration

This paper analyses forty narratives by Muslim women survivors of 1947 migration from East to West Punjab. The respondents were interviewed for their most precarious experience during the migration. The narratives could be divided into three phases, i.e., pre eviction, eviction and journey phase with violence being a permanent and continuous feature of all the three phases. The narrators endured physical and psychological violence as they were attacked and massacred massively. One reason for these attacks may be that the women represent family honour in the subcontinent and therefore attacking, kidnapping or raping them means abasing the whole rival community. The paper explores the ideology behind protecting or exploiting women to safeguard or damage the honour and pride of the Muslim community by the Muslim and non-Muslim men, respectively. Finally, the women’s volition for suicide and honour killing substantiate the argument that the women stood for familial and communal chastity and pride. Women’s apparently passive and honour bound role bears great impact in determining the repute of their family andreligious community at large. Keywords: Migration, partition, women, violence, resistance

Precariousness and the queer politics of imagination in China

ABSTRACTInstead of pursuing reformist LGBT politics, queer activism in China today should embrace imaginative utopianism because it offers the most expansive political method that allows for fully flourishing lives while also addressing the affective needs of the lala (queer women) community. In the neoliberal context of China’s metropolises, female same-sex relationships are socially unrecognised and ungrievable, and romantic love between lalas is deprived of the structural support of kinship, resulting in a state of futurelessness. A sense of precariousness pervades throughout lala culture, as lalas float in a temporal limbo, longing for anchorage.The pragmatist politics espoused by mainstream LGBT organisations in China does not fully address the problem, as it clings onto normative ideals of a good life. A queer politics of imagination, on the other hand, responds to the affective experience of precariousness with the embrace of futurity. Utopian politics defies the power of the limited present and enables us to imagine other possible worlds. It functions like a mirage in the desert that never quite materialises, but inspires radical action and hope.I read narratives of loss and precariousness from the China Queer Digital Storytelling Workshops that reveal the affective dimension of lala activism. To illustrate the politics of imagination, I discuss the queer magical realist play The Rabbit Hole, highlighting scenes that feature immaculate conception, polyamorous families and a drink named the ‘Daydream’. I suggest that daydreaming, as an entry into utopian imaginations, is a queer political method that subverts the nationalist Chinese Dream.