Precarious Subjects Research Articles

“The Brains Are Frozen”: Precarious Subjectivities in the Humanitarian Aid Sector in Jordan

Under the influence of neoliberal policies and marketisation dynamics, the humanitarian sector’s labour conditions become increasingly insecure. Based on one year of fieldwork in Amman, Jordan, and interviews with 39 aid professionals, this article explores the experiences of these insecure and precarious labour conditions of national and international aid workers in Jordan. Precarity in the humanitarian field is often discussed concerning aid recipients, such as refugees. It is, however, understudied in connection to aid professionals and those providing aid and care, and there is a wider lack of research on university‐educated professionals’ experiences of precarity. In line with feminist and decolonial scholars, I understand labour as closely interconnected with other spheres of life and look at precarity through an emotional lens. I explore aid professionals’ emotions around their work conditions to come to a deeper understanding of precarious work and the difficulties of living in precarity. By taking emotions seriously, I show that they are an important yet understudied site of analysis to unravel what generates precarity for aid workers and precarity’s effects on aid workers’ lives and work. I argue that the structural conditions of their work produce precarious subjectivities, which are expressed in feelings such as frozenness, fatigue, and unsafety.

Collecting, assembling, ordering: Border politics and the invisible data work of asylum

This article proposes to understand the ‘invisible data work’ that asylum seekers must do to put together a ‘credible’ asylum application. While the intersections between asylum and work have typically been analysed in relation to access to employment and labour conditions, we attend to the work of collecting, assembling, and ordering different forms of analogue and digital data inherent to the asylum process. Building on feminist interdisciplinary debates on work and drawing on a selection of asylum appeals from Italy and the UK, we argue that seeking asylum entails extensive and continual invisible work that requires significant resources, effort, skills and time. Attending to these forms of invisible work is crucial to understanding the challenges of seeking asylum beyond the migration journey and the implications of performing ‘invisible data work’ unaided and unequipped. It also counters problematic depictions of asylum seekers as passive subjects who are ‘just waiting’ for a decision to be made. Finally, rendering the collection and assemblage of data as ‘invisible work’ rather than just ‘doings’ has political implications for understanding the resources, responsibilities and resistance to the border politics of making precarious subjects.

The neoliberal welfare state and its discontents. Slow violence against irregular migrants in Norway

ABSTRACT Welfare rights in Norway, as in other European nation-states, are increasingly used as techniques of control and management of irregular migration. Proliferation of borders is generated by dispersal of welfare rights, establishing structural differentiations. Drawing on fieldwork and interviews with irregular migrants in Norway, we argue that the neoliberal welfare state produces precarious subject positions in three mundane ways: (a) through demarcation and diversification of rights; (b) through governmentality of time and temporality, such as the imposition of waiting; and (c) through access or lack of access to services in the welfare state, including what we call digital borders. Exploring the bordering structures of the welfare state we analyse the complex relation between technologies of government and its effect on everyday life of irregular migrants and we understand this relation as slow violence. This slow violence operates and is legitimized through the legal, policy and neoliberal welfare structures of the state. We show that the welfare state’s implication in migration management is legitimated by the Norwegian state’s principles of universalism and egalitarianism. Simultaneously, the seeping of migration management into welfare state principles and practices as well as the neoliberalization of the welfare state dwindle egalitarianism as a principle and value.

Precarity in the Capitalocene:

This paper, mapping the trajectory of migrant workers’ lives in Amitav Ghosh’s novel Gun Island, locates precarity in the nexus of capitalism and climate change and identifies the latter as a new determinant of precarity. Heightened precariousness is generally perceived today as an effect of conflicts and wars. Contemporary South Asian novels mostly explore how caste, class, religion, gender, and sexuality condition the production of precariousness in today’s world. My paper looks into the production of a precarious subject seldom represented in contemporary South Asian Literature: climate refugees. Drawing upon Gun Island, I argue that climate refugees inform us about the necessity to expand our understanding of vulnerability so we are able to factor in those whose lives have been upended by the effects of anthropogenic climate change along with the dynamics of neoliberal capitalism.

Precarious Subjectivities and Neoliberal Reconstruction of Modern Family

Parasite (Bong Joonho, 2019) attracted global viewers by addressing the intensifying class stratification and Neo-liberal reconstruction of global economy in the contemporary world. Parasite uniquely features class issues and social criticism instead of depicting typical class struggles between the rich and the poor. Parasite addresses the class structure in transition and highlights the precarious class on the margin. By personalizing class relations into family relations, Parasite features the changing family system along with the breakup of the conventional family. Parasite picks up the very point of this social change and the transformation of family types.

The working class in contemporary British cinema

This article examines depictions of class and precarity in a number of representative films, including TwentyFourSeven (Meadows 1997), The Navigators (Loach 2001), This Is England (Meadows 2006), It’s a Free World (Loach 2007), Fish Tank (Arnold 2009), I, Daniel Blake (Loach 2016), Ray & Liz (Billingham 2018), Sorry We Missed You (Loach 2019) and Bait (Jenkin 2019) in order to illuminate the subtle changes that the tradition of British social realism has undergone over the last few decades and to rethink its political potential. The article poses the following questions: do social realist films endow their precarious subjects with agency or do they depict them as passive victims of socio-economic and political forces beyond their control? What new potential conditions of solidarity (if any) do the films envision? What are the dominant affective states that capture the dynamic of precarity in these films: anxiety, frustration, depression, anger, resentment or resignation?

:Republican Citizens, Precarious Subjects: Representations of Work in Post-Fordist France.

:<i>Republican Citizens, Precarious Subjects: Representations of Work in Post-Fordist France.</i>

In and out of the zoom: The photographic act as frame of precarity in Italy’s postcolonial cinema since 1990

ABSTRACT Michele Placido’s Pummarò (1990) and Carmine Amoroso’s Cover Boy (2006) bring the legal, economic, and social precarity of West African and East European migrants in Italy to the screen. This article examines, firstly, how subjects who come from the Global South, or who are marked as such, are framed in their precarity from a Eurocentric perspective and, secondly, how they exercise agency and break free of the colonial, racializing, gender-critical, or classist frames imposed on them. The ‘illegitimate art’ of photography is suited to reflect this two-sided process of precarization and empowerment because it is accessible to diverse social classes. This heterogeneous plurality that produces, mediates, and receives photographs also determines an intersection of gazes that emerge from divergent positionings before and behind the camera. To bridge professional with amateur approaches, my performative analysis combines Philippe Dubois’ artistic concept of the ‘photographic act’ with Ariella Azoulay’s critique to reconsider the contingent and civil potentiality of photography by reimagining the ‘event of photography’. A media-critical relation between photography and film ultimately reveals this interplay of gazes to be a meta-aesthetic gesture by the observing medium of film, which self-critically interrogates its own cinematographic modes of representing precarious subjects.

Precarious Sociality, Ethics and Politics: French Documentary Cinema in the Early Twenty-First Century. By Audrey Evrard

This book aims to showcase and analyse a wide range of French social and auteur documentaries from the past two decades that focus on ‘precarious subjects’: people who are in one way or another confronted by the damage inflicted on ‘resources, bodies, and time’ by late-stage capitalism (pp. 107, 13). It is, of course, a book about film, and it is also a book about the effects of globalization on workplaces and workers in metropolitan France. A central contention of the argument is that the work that documentary filmmakers have been doing to chronicle the human consequences of the changing workplace is a praxis of solidarity, of community-building, of ethical resistance. As the book reveals, the filmmakers discussed — consistently engaged on the side of the workers — have not necessarily been working in the same mode as earlier practitioners of militant cinema. Instead, they use an innovative collection of new documentary forms to bear witness, express care, and resist the ‘dissolution, dislocation and disjunction’ that lead to precarious forms of existence (p. 15). This book does not aim to present a general overview of documentary production in France over the past two decades; instead, it offers the lens of precarity as ‘one suggested entry point among many more available’ into a vast and expansive archive (p. 22). It is organized into chapters that share a central thematic concern (vanishing factories; migrant labour in the shipyards and the cleaning industry; filmmakers’ homecomings to post-industrial towns; workplace suffering; and journeys around rural France) as well as some commonalities in documentary approach and praxis. A wide variety of filmmakers, both well-known and emerging, are showcased here. This is one of the book’s important strengths: in addition to providing new takes on a few of the more familiar works, it also offers an initiation to many films that readers will be eager to discover after reading Audrey Evrard’s fulsome descriptions and carefully articulated analyses. Clearly demonstrating a wide-ranging knowledge of French documentary and its history, Evrard effortlessly draws out useful echoes with, and distinctions from, earlier periods and documentary practices, including worker films from the 1930s and militant films from the 1960s through the 1980s. Whether or not readers are persuaded by all of the book’s critical claims, they will likely be compelled by the central thread: these films’ consistent attention to the voices and experiences of individuals from all walks of life, to the pain and shared humanity of their subjects. Of great interest, as well, is the attention to ethics, and particularly the ethics of care in documentaries (also the focus of Ethics of Care in Documentary Filmmaking since 1968, a recent issue of French Screen Studies ed. by Grace An and Catherine Witt (2022)). If occasionally the throughline temporarily seems to digress via its simultaneous engagement with multiple theoretical strands, most of the book reads tightly and fluidly, with a clear focus on its central concerns. Overall, Evrard’s book is a welcome addition to a growing body of English-language scholarship devoted to recent French documentary production.

Politics of hesitance and the formation of ethical subjects through responsible gambling practices.

Instead of harm prevention and risk related to gambling products, responsible gambling discourse emphasizes the importance of voluntary measures. From the point of view of governmentality, the responsible gambling practices produce, rely on, and call forth subjectivities. The aim of the study is to find out what kind of subjects are being produced through the responsible gambling practices of four Nordic state-owned gambling companies. As the companies are state-owned and operate on different types of markets, there are reasons to suspect that the companies could endorse different versions of the figure of responsible gambler. Previous research indicates that responsible gambling practices typically presuppose or aim to produce a self-governing subject making informed choices. Less attention has been given to detailed analyses of the heterogeneous factors contributing to the ethical subject formation. Moreover, there is a growing body of literature indicating, that along with the use of detailed behavioral data (big data), new forms of governmentality, that are highly relevant from the point of view of subject formation, are emerging. The responsible gambling practices are analyzed along Michel Foucault's four aspects of ethics. First, there is ethical substance, the problematic aspect of the self that is taken as the target of the ethical work. Second, the subject needs to have a certain relation to social norms and moral codes. Third, ethical work is needed to mold the problematic aspect of the self. Fourth, the aim of the ethical work is a certain mode of being or relationship to oneself. The analyzed material consists of the annual reports of the companies between 2019 and 2021. The results show that the figure of subject making informed voluntary choices is deeply embedded in the responsible gambling practices of the companies. The companies entice the gamblers to think about themselves and to act upon themselves as subjects capable of self-control. Hesitancy to intervene characterizes the activities of the companies, even if all the companies collect and use detailed behavioral data. The inclusion of the precarious subject of gambling harm would allow the companies to do much more to prevent gambling harm.

Refugee life, refugee space: Ankara as a bottom‐up alternative

AbstractDuring research conducted in the summer of 2020, I observed the advanced marginality of the refugees in Ankara, Turkey. While some authors have examined this precarity, and some others have examined how refugees have begun to live in a spatially distinct section of certain cities, the combination of these two phenomena demands further investigation. If the underpinning truly is spatial as claimed by Lefebvre (The production of space. Oxford and Cambridge: Blackwell, 1991), then the precarious subject and the precarious space co‐produce each other. What this paper intends to do is to combine space and precarity using the observations of Wacquant (Urban poverty and the underclass: a reader. Oxford and Cambridge: Blackwell, 1996, Urban Studies, 2016, 53, 1077) in his various analyses on the ghetto in France and the United States. In Wacquant's work, we can begin to see a spatial conception of precarity, and we can further extend this to the point that as space is a production and its subjects are also a co‐constitution of that space. Nevertheless, Sampson (Ethnic &amp; Racial Studies, 2014, 37, 1732) points out a certain state centrism in Wacquant's analysis. Building upon this, as well as the work of Roy (International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2011, 35, 223 and Territories of poverty: rethinking north and south. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015), we can offer the refugee neighbourhood in Ankara as an example of “bottom‐up” agency, alternative to Wacquant's original state‐centric analysis. In the course of this paper, this possibility of a “bottom‐up” refugee solidarity and related refugee space will be analysed.

Conceptualizing “Vulnerability” in the European Legal Space: Mixed Migration Flows and Human Trafficking as a Test

The article discusses the role of “vulnerability” in the legal and political discourse of today's Europe as a dual-mode dispositive. On the one hand, “vulnerability” allows the legal formalism to incorporate the precarious subjects that the traditional language of “rights” risks to exclude. Compared with the human rights language, “vulnerability” better articulates the relationship between legal categories and rapidly changing social and ecological landscapes. The “vulnerability language” captures intersectionality. On the other hand, however, through examples taken from the EU normative production on irregular and mixed migrations, with a focus on refugee “screening” and reception and on managing identification and referral procedures of persons victims of human trafficking, this article shows that the assignment of an individual to a “vulnerable group” has the effect not only of expanding and intensifying their protection under normative human rights regimes, but also of accentuating some risks already inherent in human rights discourse, namely paternalism and essentialism. Paradoxically, a possible outcome can be fragmentation of rights protection frameworks, and exclusion. Vulnerable migrants may have to face additional challenges stemming from their inability (coupled with objective difficulty) to decodify communications and instructions concerning their status. Divergent ways of conceiving vulnerability, depending on subjective assessments, public policy standards, the legal framework, and the political agenda on welfare, contribute to neutralizing the potentially emancipatory impact of the vulnerability language.

Impact of an economic revitalization programme on export and employment generation: a case study of One District One Product Programme in Uttar Pradesh, India

PurposeThe aim of this paper is to discuss the role of the economic revitalization programme, One District One Product (ODOP) implemented in the state of Uttar Pradesh of India in 2018, examine its strategy, and analyze its impact on employment generation, export promotion and economic growth of the state from 2018 to 2020.Design/methodology/approachAlong with extensive literature, this paper uses case study approach for discussion. Arguments and facts are based on secondary data comprising of research by scholars, international agencies, government publications, websites, news reports, etc.FindingsThis paper presents positive impact of the systematically crafted ODOP programme. Nevertheless, for desired success, it signifies the inevitability of active participation and engagement of public that has always been a precarious subject in the literature of public administration and governance.OriginalityThis paper offers a guiding live example for other states/countries to successfully implement ODOP programme which is a transformational step for realizing the true potential of each district. Strategies like ODOP may serve as an agent of change and be of immense help to governments in solving the problems of economic inequalities and regional imbalances.

Republican Citizens, Precarious Subjects: Representations of Work in Post-Fordist France. By Jeremy F. Lane

<i>Republican Citizens, Precarious Subjects: Representations of Work in Post-Fordist France</i>. By Jeremy F. Lane

Theatre practitioners as unionists: art workers in post-independence Zimbabwe’s theatre sector (1980 – 1999)

ABSTRACT This article attempts to frame and examine the structuring of labour struggles from the precarious subject position of theatre workers, without isolating these struggles into the occupational sector of the creative industries in the Zimbabwean context between 1980 and 1999. In this article, I frame theatre practitioners as ‘art – workers’ and collectives such as the NTO and ZACT as mobilising and organising agencies operating within the postcolonial Zimbabwean theatre industry. On the one hand, the NTO controlled and administered purpose-built theatres, provided funding as well as organised affiliates into a unity. On the other hand, ZACT organised multi-racial Zimbabwean theatre groups into a collective, providing and mobilising financial and organisational support towards the creation of a ‘national theatre’ narrative. Deploying resource mobilisation and rational choice theories, this paper submits that NTO and ZACT mobilized and coordinated their stakeholders towards addressing the precarious work conditions in the sector. This paper argues while attempts, through theatre associations, have been undertaken to organise the creative sector, this paper submits that the precarious nature of the work, employer-employee non-distinction, lack of legal rights knowledge and fierce inter-and intra-organisational competition complicates the process of re-mobilising and organising creatives in Zimbabwe

Fracturing the Historical Continuity on Truth: Jotiba Phule in the Quest for Personhood of Shudras

Anti-caste traditions in India work to understand and examine the idea of personhood which the majority in India is deprived of by virtue of being born in the lower rungs of the caste hierarchy. This paper examines the historical continuity in Brahminism and the rupture Jotiba Phule presents to it through his art and activism which serves to disturb the regular flow of singular continuity of what is perceived as history and historiography. Jotiba’s quest is for finding the essence / personhood of, what Butler calls, a ‘precarious subject’ and recognizing that precarious subject – the Shudra, as a subject of history. But the personhood of this precarious subject is never a complete personhood. Therefore, Jotiba attempts to unveil the path towards achieving complete personhood which is embedded in reaffirming the lost or concealed truth – by discontinuing the historical flow of the social structure of caste and establishing a new subject rising out of crisis in social structure in history. I have chosen two works from Jotiba’s works as new methodological tools for history writing and historical criticism, and made hermeneutical and phenomenological readings of the both. The works are his poem Kulambin (a peasant woman), and the Satyashodhak (truth-seeker) marriage as the public performance of protest- as they are both - the essential and the mundane to his life, which exemplifies the truth Jotiba followed and established an organization Satyashodhak Samaj (Society of Truth Seekers) as a testament to it.

Autobiography

In this email exchange, Jean-Christophe Menu inveighs against the deterioration of comics autobiography into a formulaic ‘genre’. Fabrice Neaud maintains that the autobiographical enterprise is necessarily a dangerous undertaking in which a precarious subject comes into being, unlike the ‘proximate’ autobiography featuring a ready-made persona in search of peer approval. He employs a Darwinist evolutionary metaphor to demonstrate the colonisation of the ecological niche that houses comics autobiography by an ‘autobiography-lite’ better adapted to the market. He details the criticisms that have been made of his work (‘egotistical’, or formally over-conservative) and laments the tendency to equate artless scribbles with ‘sincerity’. Menu regrets that a distanced and selective portrayal of family life can be read as invasive of privacy, with devastating legal consequences.

Autobiography

In this email exchange, Jean-Christophe Menu inveighs against the deterioration of comics autobiography into a formulaic ‘genre’. Fabrice Neaud maintains that the autobiographical enterprise is necessarily a dangerous undertaking in which a precarious subject comes into being, unlike the ‘proximate’ autobiography featuring a ready-made persona in search of peer approval. He employs a Darwinist evolutionary metaphor to demonstrate the colonisation of the ecological niche that houses comics autobiography by an ‘autobiography-lite’ better adapted to the market. He details the criticisms that have been made of his work (‘egotistical’, or formally over-conservative) and laments the tendency to equate artless scribbles with ‘sincerity’. Menu regrets that a distanced and selective portrayal of family life can be read as invasive of privacy, with devastating legal consequences.

The curse and the chora

Referring to the work of Julia Kristeva, this article seeks to perform a comparative analysis between Cordelia Chase (Charisma Carpenter), as she appears within the remit of Joss Whedon and David Greenwalts’s Angel (1999–2004), and Vanessa Ives (Eva Green) in John Logan’s Penny Dreadful (2014–2016). Taking each character as a case study, this article seeks to elucidate the precarious subject positions of central female leads in a team/ensemble horror television series in order to assess whether or not and how the portrayal and characterisation thereof has changed over two decades. To do so, this article employs a theoretical framing that examines the question of agency and power by assessing both characters as what I will call “Choraic conduits”. As such, both characters’ relation, manipulation of/by, and mediation of the supernatural as envisaged and presented in their respective diegetic worlds are analysed in themselves and comparatively against one another. Key concerns here are the questions and problems surrounding each character’s agency over her powers and the supernatural/spiritual realm(s) from which they emerge, as well as the psycho-physical and symbolic consequences of not only the possession of their respective powers, but the micro and macroscopic consequences of how they are used in their respective diegetic worlds.

Recherche en psychologie et réflexion éthique sur la demande de consentement

ContextAny research activity requires a request for consent from the participating subjects, when personal data are studied. Some texts question consent and its methods of application in clinical psychology, and highlight the potentially harmful effects of such a request depending on the therapeutic relationship and its transference/countertransference issues. In the context of a research with migrants, undocumented, extremely vulnerable individuals, the specific issues and methods of requesting consent do not yet seem to have been investigated. ObjectivesThis text attempts to define the ethical dilemmas raised by a request for consent with migrant, vulnerable and precarious subjects. It aims to bring out clinical and theoretical elements which would make it possible to think of an ethical position for the psychologist, capable of satisfying both the requirements of the researcher and those of the clinician, requirements which are sometimes contradictory and in conflict. MethodThe proposed ethical reflection is based on a theoretical corpus from the field of psychoanalysis as well as the field of philosophy, in an attempt to address the complexity of the ethical issue raised. This ethical reflection explores the fundamental concepts of good, evil, and desire, proposed by Spinoza and taken up by J. Lacan and H. Arendt. This text considers E. Levinas’ writings about the face, incarnation of otherness, to propose an answer in terms of ethics of responsibility. ResultsAny ethical discussion involves a choice. The choice made regarding the inclusion or non-inclusion of a research participant, as well as the choice made of the form and timing of the request for consent, are considered, case by case, depending on transference/countertransference considerations (dependence, domination/submission, fear, testimony, responsibility). It is also necessary to take into account the socio-political aspects linked to the particular clinic of migrants in very precarious situations. ConclusionTo break the silence surrounding the human problems resulting from the exile, the exclusion and the precariousness, the request for consent is considered in its social context and at the heart of the practice of the psychologist who speaks up for places for dissenting freedoms but does not forget to ensure care, listening, and discretion. An ethical positioning of the clinician-researcher therefore requires adjusting the conditions for obtaining the request for consent, sometimes even renouncing it as well as renouncing the clinical material, on a case-by-case basis, taking into account the specificities of the transference/countertransference issues of the clinic studied. This positioning requires considering the conflicts raised by the confrontation between the requirements of a clinical listening position, considered from the feminine side, receptivity, discretion, and care, and those of a researcher position. More phallic, made up of revolt and responsibility, “speaking” and active.