Precarious Life Research Articles

'The World Called Him a Thug'

Widespread police violence, often targeted at black people, has increasingly entered public debates in recent years. Inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, various African American young adult novelists have addressed the topic of police brutality and offer counternarratives to the stories about black victims disseminated in the media. This article illustrates how prevalent debates of Black Lives Matter are reflected in contemporary young adult fiction. To this end, the first part elucidates substantial issues that have led to the precarious position of African Americans today and to the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement. Drawing on theoretical concepts such as Judith Butler’s notion of "precarious lives" and Frantz Fanon’s description of the black experience in a white-dominated world, I will analyze Angie Thomas's novel The Hate U Give in view of ongoing debates about racial inequality. As I will show, the novel features striking similarities to real-world incidents of police brutality while simultaneously drawing attention to the manifold ways in which society disregards black lives and continues to subject African Americans to racial injustice.

Angifi Dladla (1950–2020): An Embodiment of Ku Femba as a Poetry Teaching Philosophy for Renewal

Angifi Dladla’s poetry and teaching doctrines are considered tools for consciousness raising, healing and popular education for decoloniality. Through ku femba, an age-old practice that serves as a channel to cast away evil spells in a society bedevilled by violence, Dladla displays the relationship between man, ancestors and the otherworldly as a vehicle for decoloniality. His feisty narrative poems, “I Failed My Children” and “Marikana Chorus”, explore the spiritual dimension and infinite possibilities of experience rooted in oral and written tradition. Dladla’s Femba Writing Project, based on his philosophy of teaching poetry, affirms that poetry rooted in decoloniality reflects not only the poet’s political convictions, but a shared communal experience of those on the edges of existence who are capable enough to challenge the master’s voice (the voice of the Western canon) that often defines quality in poetry. Dladla is steeped in direct knowledge of the precarious life in South African townships; he draws on his accrued knowledge and on the complexities of history and memory to create and teach compelling poetry that resonates with the ordinary without falling into the trap of ghettoising his experience. Dladla’s poetry and teaching philosophy challenge the colonising practices that have shaped and continue to influence the teaching of poetry in South Africa. They form part of a wider agenda of defining African selfhood in a decolonial context.

Standing out while fitting in: Examining linguistic choices by boundary spanners

ABSTRACT Boundary spanners live a precarious social life. They need to stand out to receive ideas from different groups and fit into some groups enough to influence their peers. We investigated how boundary spanners make linguistic choices to manage the tension of distinctiveness and belonging. We identified boundary spanners based on their betweenness centrality in a large review network (23,851 users and 118,545 reviews). We found that, compared to non-boundary spanners, boundary spanners used less bonding language to set themselves apart, but used more utility language to enhance social value. Boundary spanners’ use of bonding language varied with their popularity in social networks. More (vs. less) popular boundary spanners showed a stronger tendency to avoid we-words but not positive emotional words.

Reflexões das ações do PIBID no processo formativo de docentes na Educação do Campo

Neste trabalho apresentamos reflexões a partir dos relatos e observações acumuladas a partir das vivências dos acadêmicos e acadêmicas do Curso de Educação do Campo - Licenciatura com ênfase em Ciências da Natureza, da Universidade Federal do Pampa, no Programa Institucional de Bolsas de Iniciação à Docência (PIBID) no período de 2018 a 2020. Neste processo participaram 24 bolsistas distribuídos em três escolas no campo, duas de Dom Pedrito e uma de Sant’Ana do Livramento, atendendo uma média de 300 estudantes da Educação Básica. O trabalho desenvolvido partiu das demandas das escolas, sendo que estas foram identificadas a partir da inserção dos estudantes no cotidiano e a partir do diálogo com docentes das diferentes áreas do conhecimento e comunidades. Isso culminou em diferentes propostas e ações educativas, dentre elas destacamos as seguintes: i) horta escolar e plantas alimentícias não convencionais; ii) agrofloresta; iii) composteira e minhocário iv) revitalização da área dos pomares. Como resultado percebemos que: a) é possível ensinar ciências tendo como ponto de partida a prática social da comunidade escolar, uma vez que toda a vida humana está cercada pelas Ciências da Natureza (Biologia, Física e Química); b) que é possível superar o cotidiano precarizado e irrefletido com amparo na ciência; c) aprendizagem por meio do “ensino lúdico”, jogos pedagógicos e atividades experimentais. Frente a esses elementos o PIBID tem sido fundamental para qualificar o processo formativo dos discentes, formadores e supervisores.

Reassessing the Aging Enterprise: New Perspectives on the Social Construction of Later Life

Four decades on from the publication of 'The Ageing Enterprise', this paper provides a critical review of the relationship between social theory and social policies for later life. To what extent do current theoretical perspectives in gerontology bear the influence of ideas laid out in that pioneering book? How has the ‘ageing enterprise’ fared given the dominant ideology of neo-liberalism and the precarious lives faced by people moving through the life course? The paper considers these questions in the context of globalization processes, and the imposition of austerity policies. The paper will consider the continuing importance of ‘The Ageing Enterprise’ by reviewing three main themes: first, assessing the changing relationship between the state and social policy; second, through examining current perspectives within critical gerontology; third, highlighting new forms of empowerment developing amongst older people, and the relationship of these to the values and ideas expressed in ‘The Ageing Enterprise’. Part of a symposium sponsored by the Women's Issues Interest Group.

After precarity: A geography of dark news and digital hope on the island of Lolland

Journalists and artists in the global North tend to amplify certain geographies as go-to scenes of post-industrial abandonment. But sometimes those who live in these geographies foreground hope against this dark imaginary. How do we make sense of a situation that seemingly calls for an analysis of precarious life when those who live in that situation do not want to be understood in precarious terms? By enjoining cultural representations and empirical fieldwork on the Danish island of Lolland with Eve Kosofky Sedgwick’s essay on symptomatic and reparative reading, I show how a troubled post-industrial geography challenges us to open an analysis where both precarity and hope remain available. I begin with interpreting the figuration of Lolland in media and popular culture as symptomatic reading, a reoccurring interpretation of the island as precarity’s prime example. I then work through the locally popular hash-tag of #LollandFalsterLovestorm to show how the jamming of darkness by digital optimism can foreground reparative reading, a willingness to analyze the place in terms of the affective resources it has to offer the self. I finally bring out the mutuality of reparative and symptomatic analysis on Lolland: in representations, strategies and the ordinary, hope moves through precarity in geographies of compromised upwards mobility.

Precarious Lives: Forced sterilisation and the struggle for reproductive justice in Peru

ABSTRACT It is estimated that more than 200,000 women were sterilised without giving free, prior and informed consent in Peru between 1996 and 2000 during the Fujimori regime. This paper places forced sterilisation within the frameworks of precarity and reproductive justice to understand policies that legitimised the violation of women's rights irrespective of the type of political regime: forced sterilisations during a dictatorial regime and denial of access to sexual and reproductive rights during a period of democracy. Through document analysis, this paper examines narratives around sterilisation and reproduction produced by policymakers, political and religious leaders and health care practitioners during these two political periods. This paper shows the continuity of the struggle that marginalised populations face in exercising their reproductive rights in the context of symbolic and structural inequalities.

The Ideology of Self-making and the White Working Class in Rebecca Harding Davis’ "Life in the Iron Mills"

Rebecca Harding Davis’ novella Life in the Iron Mills, published in 1861 in The Atlantic Monthly, is now considered a landmark of early American realism. This paper analyses the text’s depiction of the white working class and the ideological consequences of the myth of upward mobility and self-making, which are presented as an impossibility to Hugh Wolfe, the story’s main character. I will argue that Davis’ choice to offer a representation of the precarious lives of the workers of Northern industrial capitalism implies a criticism of the quintessentially American narrative of upward mobility, and a subsequent reflection on how foundational narratives operate in a society that is not homogeneous in terms of race or class. More specifically, I willmaintain that Life in the Iron Mills operates as a contestation to the myth of the self- made man, evinced by the comparison between Hugh Wolfe’s situation and that of the mill owners, who encourage his aspirations from an oblivious position of privilege. Lastly, Hugh’s tragic death will be taken as proof that the myth of self-making mystifies the actual social and economic dynamics of industrial capitalism.

Silencing the Present? Decolonization, Nationalization, and Natural Right(s) in Émeric Bergeaud’sStella(1859)

AbstractÉmeric Bergeaud wroteStella(1859), his novelistic account of the Haitian revolution (1791–1804), at a most turbulent moment in Haitian history. Faustin Soulouque rose to power in the late 1840 s and soon began to pursue his political opponents with violent means. Coming from a “Boyerist” background, Bergeaud fled the country in 1848 and settled in St. Thomas where he worked on his novel while his health deteriorated. Despite his precarious life in exile, Bergeaud remained silent about Soulouque in his decisively political novelStella. As Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Madeleine Dobie, and others have shown, the history of slavery has often been silenced in literature and public debate, but what does it mean for Bergeaud to silence the present and focus on the past? I argue thatStellain fact makes a significant intervention in the debates about mid-19th-century Haiti. Instead of confronting Soulouque directly, however, Bergeaud addresses a pair of structural problems of which I consider Soulouque and his policy emblematic expressions: decolonization and nationalization. Most existing readings have emphasized Bergeaud’s reflections on history, but in this contextualized analysis, I show that Bergeaud looks not only to the past but also and importantly to nature and natural right(s) philosophy in his novelistic search for a way forward for Haiti.

Dispossession, Un-freedom, Precarity

The partition of the Indian subcontinent forced millions of people to flee to the other side of the borders, freshly demarcated by the British colonial rulers just on the eve of their departure from South Asia. Almost a decade-long migration of people could not, however, settle the boundaries and lives of the people once and for all. The postcolonial rulers retained many of the draconian laws of the late colonial period, like the Foreigners’ Act in India, and laced them with new laws and regulations, thus leading to greater dispossession of people of homes, generating widespread situations of un-freedom, and creating countless refugees and stateless persons, mostly forced to survive in sites of precarious life, without any right to have rights. The concern of this contribution is this politics of dispossession in postcolonial South Asia and its relation with citizenship laws of the region.

Framing the Path to Conformity: Comics Strategies and Social Justice in Barbara Yelin’s Irmina

This article examines Barbara Yelin’s 2014 graphic novel Irmina in order to investigate the visual narrative strategies employed by the cartoonist in revealing her protagonist’s path to conformity under National Socialism. Yelin thereby also seeks to raise awareness of social justice and personal responsibilities in the comic’s readership. I use Judith Butler’s conceptions of framing and precarious life from Frames of War (2009) as an interpretive lens to read the comics medium’s convention of panel frames and storytelling through individual panels separated by the space of the gutter. I demonstrate how the interplay of text and image in Irmina reveals the importance of visual framing in developing compassion and recognizing the lives of others as precarious. Through this narrative strategy essential to the comics form, Irmina’s decline to a Mitläufer underscores the role of visibility—or lack thereof—in the lives framed and recognized as precarious under the Third Reich.

Speculative biology: precarious life in art and science resurrection projects

ABSTRACT This paper examines a series of experimental art-science projects that attempt to resurrect dead or endangered forms of life. Focusing on works by Marguerite Humeau, Diemut Strebe, Pinar Yoldas and Svenja Kratz, each of which was developed in close collaboration with scientists, often in laboratory environments, the paper approaches art-science collaborations of this sort as a flourishing field of emerging and experimental art. It takes as its central onbject of concern the shared practice that has made recent art-science collaborations so productive: their mutual interest in reimagining the possibilities of life and the body in an era in which these can be so fundamentally re-engineered, which this paper examines this under the rubric of ‘speculative biology’. The multi-disciplinary art projects examined in this paper thus invite us to reflect upon the precarity of life, during a period that finds itself at the crossroads of a rapidly increasing series of extinction and climate change events, on the one hand, and an equally rapidly accelerating scientific and technological capacity to reengineer life and living materials, on the other.

Serious Dreaming

The following article unpacks the portrayal of digital or screen-based trauma and the gamification of war within contemporary video art. A riff on Harun Farocki's eponymous multi-channel video installation Serious Games (2010), the article questions if the screen has the power to transmit violence and thus affect trauma, or if this focus heightens what Judith Butler termed precarious life. Conversely, for those who experience PTSD, as noted by Freud, the gamification or dreaming following traumatic events brings one to an entirely different game. This repetition, re-play, as I note, is for premonition, mastery or sight, while war in the age of simulation is characterised by a lack of human optics. As information bombs and pop monuments to atrocity flood the public imagination, what other experiences are also covered over? What lies behind the schism between the virtual and the lived?

Gênero e Covid-19 no contexto da população de refugiados e migrantes na cidade de Manaus–Amazonas

O presente texto é composto por uma análise de conjuntura social sobre o impacto da Covid-19 no cotidiano de refugiados e migrantes residentes em Manaus. Para esse fim, buscamos trabalhar com dados e informações de sites oficiais que veicularam as ações promovidas pelas organizações (nacionais e internacionais) implicadas. A análise é enriquecida pela narrativa de um Trabalhador Humanitário, coautor do texto, que desenvolve suas atividades junto à população de refugiados e migrantes LGBT e nos traz um olhar atento sobre a vida precária de mulheres transexuais durante a quarentena.

Shahram Khosravi. Precarious Lives: Waiting and Hope in Iran

Shahram Khosravi. Precarious Lives: Waiting and Hope in Iran

Surviving the NDH

This autoethnography is an account of the survival of a Mischling (half-Jew) of the genocidal NDH (Independent State of Croatia) Ustasha regime, against the background of the persecution of Jews during the Second World War. It dwells upon the collapse of a young Jew’s world with the German occupation and the creation of that regime, his religious conversion, and his and his family’s precarious daily life under the latent existential threat posed by the regime. It stresses the tensions between external conformity and internal resistance against the regime, dwells upon the author’s liminal state of suspension between worlds, and asserts that the wartime experience left lasting marks on his sense of personal identity: he remained a partial outsider, never fully identified with, or belonging to a group, but able to adapt to wherever he lived, resembling in many respects Simmel’s “stranger.” The author believes that his experience of suspension between cultures reflect those of other adolescent Michlinge in the War, but the absence of similar autoethnographies precludes a confirmation of this assumption.

Vulnerability and the (im)possibilities of becoming: transgenderism in contemporary South African life writing

ABSTRACT Despite increasing engagement with queer theory and its literature in African scholarship, representations of transgenderism have received very little attention, relegating transgender identity to the margins of critical debates informing African queer discourses. Considering that, this article reads two transgender memoirs from South Africa – Landa Mabenge’s Becoming Him: A, Trans Memoir of Triumph and Anastacia Tomson’s Always Anastacia: A Transgender Life in South Africa – as acts of engagement fostering recognition of the vulnerability of transgender identities on the continent. These memoirs represent transgender lives in South Africa as precarious lives due to mainstream culture’s denial of the authenticity of transgender identity. As such, despite being granted constitutional liberties, transgender people in South Africa still find themselves at the margins of society and at risk of violence. The memoirs demonstrate the power of narrative agency in disrupting normative social discourses on queerness in mitigating the vulnerability of transgender subjects in cultures that have negated them.

Living through continuous displacement: Resisting homeless identities and remaking precarious lives

This article considers how individuals who experience continuous displacement from housing manage the ‘spoiled identity’ of homelessness. The research draws on in-depth, biographical interviews with 39 individuals living in Oxford, a high-cost UK city. All had experienced forms of homelessness in the previous three years. Building on critical debates around experiences of precarity in urban geography, the article explores how individuals construct and maintain a sense of identity whilst living precarious lives. Participants were constantly confronted with their own precarity in pressured housing markets, which fostered their displacement, and then undermined re-entry into stable housing. Yet, participants described their attempts to maintain a ‘normal’ life, rejecting homeless subjectivities as they anchored their identity to daily practices of self care. These were also a key means of distinction from others experiencing displacement, enabling individuals to dis-identify from those characterised by moral and personal failings, thus highlighting their own responsibility and resourcefulness. Others described the bodily transformation that was associated with assuming the identity of ‘homeless’. Participants moved between different subject positions, with distinct narratives through which individuals sought to reclaim precarious identities, foregrounding alternative choices, pride in survival and resourcefulness, and freedom. Whilst this occurred within a context of extreme constraint, individuals were actively engaged in attempts to construct a sense of worth and value that was denied by a ‘homeless identity’. The article contributes to contemporary debates foregrounding social processes in understandings of the lived experiences of marginalisation, as well as adding empirical depth to representations of hidden homelessness.

Biopolítica, precariedade e educação

Este ensaio teórico busca apresentar as noções de biopolítica e precariedade mobilizadas pelos teóricos pós-estruturalistas Michel Foucault e Judith Butler. Foucault constrói sua noção de biopolítica pensando-a como a transformação das formas de poder desde o século XVIII, produzindo formas específicas de subjetividades instadas cada vez mais a uma racionalidade neoliberal. Judith Butler apresenta sua noção de precariedade - ou de vidas precárias - partindo da problematização do luto e da violência, percebendo-os como operadores de poder, produzindo formas de vidas danificadas, não passíveis de luto. Ambas as noções pensadas junto ao campo da educação evidenciam como práticas biopolíticas em tempos neoliberais produzem, inclusive na educação, formas diversas de precariedade, corpos que não importam. As contribuições desses teóricos neste ensaio, pensadas junto à educação, podem articular novos problemas ao pensamento, mobilizando, a partir de suas noções, contra-produções que incitam novas possibilidades de habitar o presente e viver uma vida vivível.

GOVERNAMENTALIDADE, BIOPOLÍTICA E VIDA PRECÁRIA: A PANDEMIA DE COVID-19 NO BRASIL

O presente artigo problematiza a pandemia do Coronavírus (COVID–19) no Brasil, tendo como referência as leituras teóricas de Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Nikolas Rose e Byung-Chul Han. O estudo de abordagem qualitativa se insere no campo das investigações transdisciplinares de base teórico-crítica e se utiliza dos conceitos de vida precária, de biopolítica e de governamentalidade. Esta pesquisa está estruturada em três (03) etapas. Primeiramente, se apresentam os elementos contextuais da pandemia do Coronavírus (COVID–19). A seguir, procura-se entender como estes marcos teóricos contribuem contemporaneamente nas análises micro e macrossociais em diálogo com a emergência da doença. Ao fim, procura-se analisar a situação pandêmica no Brasil. Para tanto, como problema de pesquisa, indica-se: em que medida os conceitos de vida precária, de biopolítica e de governamentalidade podem desvelar o contexto da pandemia de COVID-19 no Brasil? Espera-se que os diálogos aqui apresentados possam ser um ponto de reflexão, a fim de compreender os desafios, os limites e as possibilidades da realidade brasileira frente à emergência da COVID-19.