Download or read book Precarity written by Shioh Groot and published by Massey University Press. This book was released on 2017-09-01 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leading UK economist Guy Standing has referred to the precariat as a class-in-the-making. The Precariat are our fellow citizens — be they poor, elderly, disabled, homeless, estranged from their cultural communities, refugees, engaged in casual work — who lead lives of uncertainty, dependency, powerlessness, perilousness and insufficiency. They are the outcome of the gradual dismantling of the welfare state and the withering of union representation. They are also the victims of the changing nature of work. This important book moves beyond the world of labour to identify and illustrate other forms of precarity in New Zealand, including the lack of opportunities for cultural expression and the struggle to be safe. It focuses on New Zealand's emerging class, not to further vilify it but rather to place its members' lived experience in plain sight. As the editors say, &‘It is time that all New Zealanders understood the reality of what many of our citizens endure in the struggle to make ends meet and live dignified lives.'

Download or read book The Age of Precarity written by Dario Gentili and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2021-08-10 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Crisis Becomes the Norm: What Can We Do to Demand Change? Crisis dominates the present historical moment. The economy is in crisis, politics in both its past and present forms is in crisis and our own individual lives are in crisis, made vulnerable by the fluctuations of the labor market and by the undoing of social and political ties we inherited from modernity. Yet, traditional views of crises as just temporary setbacks do not seem to hold any longer; this crisis seems permanent, with no way out and no alternatives on the horizon. Reconstructing a political genealogy of the term from the Greek world to today's neoliberalism, this book demonstrates that crisis, understood as a "choice" between revolution and conservation, is a peculiarity of the modern era that does not apply to the present day. However, since its origin, the trope of crisis has proven to be one of the most effective instruments of social discipline and administration. The analytical trajectory followed by this book - which spans from Plato to Hayek, from the juridical and medical science of antiquity to the current technocracy, passing through the "weapons of criticism" of Marx and Gramsci - finally identifies, following Benjamin and Foucault, precariousness as the "form of life" that characterizes crisis understood as an art of government. But we still need to answer the question: "How can we recreate the possibility of political alternatives?"

Download or read book Technoprecarious written by Precarity Lab and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2020-11-24 with total page 123 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An analysis that traces the role of digital technology in multiplying precarity. Technoprecarious advances a new analytic for tracing how precarity unfolds across disparate geographical sites and cultural practices in the digital age. Digital technologies--whether apps like Uber built on flexible labor or platforms like Airbnb that shift accountability to users--have assisted in consolidating the wealth and influence of a small number of players. These platforms have also furthered increasingly insecure conditions of work and life for racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities, women, indigenous people, migrants, and peoples in the global south. At the same time, precarity has become increasingly generalized, expanding to include even the creative class and digital producers themselves.

Download or read book Newswork and Precarity written by Kalyani Chadha and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-12-30 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited collection brings together leading scholars from around the world to discuss the consequences and implications of precarious labor conditions within the modern news industry. In 14 original chapters, contributors address global concerns in journalism across all platforms, based on the assumption that unstable employment conditions affect the extent to which journalists can continue to play their historically crucial role in sustaining democracies. Topics discussed include work conditions for freelancers and entrepreneurial journalists as well as the risks facing conflict reporters, precarity in media start-ups, unionization and other collective efforts, policies regulating journalistic labor around the world, and the impact of hedge fund money on newswork. Drawing on case studies and data from South America, Africa, the United States, Canada, Mexico, the United Kingdom, and continental Europe, the book highlights how media outlets are forcing newsworkers to work harder for less money, and few countries are proactive in alleviating the precarity of journalists. Newswork and Precarity is a valuable addition to an important still-emerging area in journalism studies that will be of interest to both professionals and scholars of journalism, media studies, sociology, and labor history.

Download or read book Post Industrial Precarity New Ethnographies of Urban Lives in Uncertain Times written by Gillian Evans and published by Vernon Press. This book was released on 2020-01-15 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The United Nations predicts that by the year 2050 almost 70% of the planet’s population will be living in cities. The onus on social scientists is to explain the contemporary challenges posed by the urbanization of the world. A growing body of literature raises the alarm about the precarity of human existence in the uncertain conditions of rapidly transforming contemporary cities. This volume brings together a diverse collection of new ethnographies of precarious lives in various cities of the world. The specific focus on post-industrial cities in the UK allows for a wider consideration of the urban conditions and the political and economic climates which combine to produce extremely precarious living conditions for urban populations elsewhere in the world.The productive consequence of the comparisons and contrasts of various urban contexts, made possible by the volume, is an analytical focus on what it means for humans to live and occupy different subject positions under the advancing conditions of contemporary global capitalism. The volume’s chapters are also united by the shared commitment of early career social science scholars to ethnography as a research method. This gives a common methodological focus to diverse topics of substantive concern located in various cities of the world from Manchester, Newcastle and Salford in the north of England, to Detroit in the USA, Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, Turin in Italy and Beirut in Lebanon. Ethnography, relying as it does on long-term participant observation and in-depth open-ended interviewing, is uniquely valuable as a resource for bringing to life the unpredictable ways in which humans survive and develop forms of resilience among, for example, the ruins of dying cities. Ethnography also enables social scientists to understand and add depth to the surprising stories and apparent contradictions of everyday protest in the face of the increasing privatization of the public good and extreme inequalities of wealth. Ethnographically grounded analyses of urban life are therefore uniquely positioned to explain and critically analyse the new politics of popular resistance as the people who feel ‘left behind’ by society, or expelled from what might be described as the ‘exclusification’ of urban environments, push back against an economy and politics that appears to exist only for the private benefit of an indifferent elite population.

Download or read book Poetics and Precarity written by Myung Mi Kim and published by The University at Buffalo Robert Creeley Lectures in Poetry and Poetics. This book was released on 2018-05-01 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poets and critics address the potential of language to address the increasing level of discord and precarity in the twenty-first century. At a time when wars, acts of terrorism, and ecological degradation have intensified and isolationism, misogyny, and ethnic divisiveness have been given distinctively more powerful voice in public discourse, language itself often seems to have failed. The poets and critics in this book argue that language has the potential to address this increasing level of discord and precarity, and they negotiate ways to understand poetics, or the role of the poetic, in relation to language, the body politic, the human body, breath, the bodies of the natural environment, and the body of form. Poetry makes urgent issues audible and poetics helps to theorize those issues into critical consciousness. Poetry also functions as a cry to protest late capitalist imperialism, misogyny, racism, climate change, and all the debilitating conditions of everyday life. Hubs of concern merge and diverge; precarity takes differently gendered, historied, embodied, geopolitical manifestations. The contributors articulate a poetics that renders what has not yet been crystallized as discourse into fields of force. They also acknowledge the beauties of sound, poetry, and music, and celebrate the power of community, marking the surge of energy that can occur at a particular place at a particular moment. Ultimately, Poetics and Precarity fosters further conversations that will imagine the concerns of poetics as a continuously emerging field.

Download or read book Mothering through Precarity written by Julie A. Wilson and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-09 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Mothering through Precarity Julie A. Wilson and Emily Chivers Yochim explore how working- and middle-class mothers negotiate the difficulties of twenty-first-century mothering through their everyday engagement with digital media. From Facebook and Pinterest to couponing, health, and parenting websites, the women Wilson and Yochim study rely upon online resources and communities for material and emotional support. Feeling responsible for their family's economic security, these women often become "mamapreneurs," running side businesses out of their homes. They also feel the need to provide for their family's happiness, making successful mothering dependent upon economic and emotional labor. Questioning these standards of motherhood, Wilson and Yochim demonstrate that mothers' work is inseparable from digital media as it provides them the means for sustaining their families through such difficulties as health scares, underfunded schools, a weakening social safety net, and job losses.

Download or read book State of Insecurity written by Isabell Lorey and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2015-02-03 with total page 118 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Years of remodelling the welfare state, the rise of technology, and the growing power of neoliberal government apparatuses have established a society of the precarious. In this new reality, productivity is no longer just a matter of labour, but affects the formation of the self, blurring the division between personal and professional lives. Encouraged to believe ourselves flexible and autonomous, we experience a creeping isolation that has both social and political impacts, and serves the purposes of capital accumulation and social control. In State of Insecurity, Isabell Lorey explores the possibilities for organization and resistance under the contemporary status quo, and anticipates the emergence of a new and disobedient self-government of the precarious.

Download or read book The Quantified Self in Precarity written by Phoebe V. Moore and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-11 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Humans are accustomed to being tool bearers, but what happens when machines become tool bearers, calculating human labour via the use of big data and people analytics by metrics? The Quantified Self in Precarity highlights how, whether it be in insecure ‘gig’ work or office work, such digitalisation is not an inevitable process – nor is it one that necessarily improves working conditions. Indeed, through unique research and empirical data, Moore demonstrates how workplace quantification leads to high turnover rates, workplace rationalisation and worker stress and anxiety, with these issues linked to increased rates of subjective and objective precarity. Scientific management asked us to be efficient. Now, we are asked to be agile. But what does this mean for the everyday lives we lead? With a fresh perspective on how technology and the use of technology for management and self-management changes the ‘quantified’, precarious workplace today, The Quantified Self in Precarity will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students interested in fields such as Science and Technology, Organisation Management, Sociology and Politics.

Download or read book Care Ethics in the Age of Precarity written by Maurice Hamington and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2021-11-30 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How care can resist the stifling force of the neoliberal paradigm In a world brimming with tremendous wealth and resources, too many are suffering the oppression of precarious existences—and with no adequate relief from free market–driven institutions. Care Ethics in the Age of Precarity assembles an international group of interdisciplinary scholars to explore the question of care theory as a response to market-driven capitalism, addressing the relationship of three of the most compelling social and political subjects today: care, precarity, and neoliberalism. While care theory often centers on questions of individual actions and choices, this collection instead connects theory to the contemporary political moment and public sphere. The contributors address the link between neoliberal values—such as individualism, productive exchange, and the free market—and the pervasive state of precarity and vulnerability in which so many find themselves. From disability studies and medical ethics to natural-disaster responses and the posthuman, examples from Māori, Dutch, and Japanese politics to the COVID-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement, this collection presents illuminating new ways of considering precarity in our world. Care Ethics in the Age of Precarity offers a hopeful tone in the growing valorization of care, demonstrating the need for an innovative approach to precarity within entrenched systems of oppression and a change in priorities around the basic needs of humanity. Contributors: Andries Baart, U Medical Center Utrecht, Tilburg U, and Catholic Theological U Utrecht, the Netherlands; Vrinda Dalmiya, U of Hawaii, Mānoa; Emilie Dionne, U Laval; Maggie FitzGerald, U of Saskatchewan; Sacha Ghandeharian, Carleton U; Eva Feder Kittay, Stony Brook U/SUNY; Carlo Leget, U of Humanistic Studies in Utrecht, the Netherlands; Sarah Clark Miller, Penn State U; Luigina Mortari, U of Verona; Yayo Okano, Doshisha U, Kyoto, Japan; Elena Pulcini, U of Florence.

Download or read book Precarious Life written by Judith Butler and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2020-10-13 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In her most impassioned and personal book to date, Judith Butler responds in this profound appraisal of post-9/11 America to the current US policies to wage perpetual war, and calls for a deeper understanding of how mourning and violence might instead inspire solidarity and a quest for global justice.

Download or read book Capitalism on Edge written by Albena Azmanova and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2020-01-14 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The wake of the financial crisis has inspired hopes for dramatic change and stirred visions of capitalism’s terminal collapse. Yet capitalism is not on its deathbed, utopia is not in our future, and revolution is not in the cards. In Capitalism on Edge, Albena Azmanova demonstrates that radical progressive change is still attainable, but it must come from an unexpected direction. Azmanova’s new critique of capitalism focuses on the competitive pursuit of profit rather than on forms of ownership and patterns of wealth distribution. She contends that neoliberal capitalism has mutated into a new form—precarity capitalism—marked by the emergence of a precarious multitude. Widespread economic insecurity ails the 99 percent across differences in income, education, and professional occupation; it is the underlying cause of such diverse hardships as work-related stress and chronic unemployment. In response, Azmanova calls for forging a broad alliance of strange bedfellows whose discontent would challenge not only capitalism’s unfair outcomes but also the drive for profit at its core. To achieve this synthesis, progressive forces need to go beyond the old ideological certitudes of, on the left, fighting inequality and, on the right, increasing competition. Azmanova details reforms that would enable a dramatic transformation of the current system without a revolutionary break. An iconoclastic critique of left orthodoxy, Capitalism on Edge confronts the intellectual and political impasses of our time to discern a new path of emancipation.

Download or read book Precarity and Ageing written by Grenier, Amanda and published by Policy Press. This book was released on 2021-07-14 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited collection develops an exciting new approach to understanding the changing cultural, economic and social circumstances facing different groups of older people.

Download or read book Precarity within the Digital Age written by Birte Heidkamp and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-07-11 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book deals with precarity within the digital age and focuses on media change and social insecurity. Change arising from digital developments takes place on micro-, meso- and meta-levels and have always social implications. Concepts such as Social Media, eHealth and Digital Capitalism, Informational Capitalism and Social Exclusion, Digital Globalization and Motility frame the social dynamics and implications of changes in digital media. These changes evoke a double precarity or stable unstability: Social practices throughout the diverse societal fields are questioned through the media change which leads to a digital age. The ongoing media change requires new social practices – what evokes precarity as an ongoing insecurity how to face the `new digital world ́.As a socio-economic phenomenon and effect of neoliberal policy precarity changes life planning and self-narrations of the affected individuals. Precarity and neoliberal subjection-processes manifest in the digital age and are performatively re-produced by the way new media are used.

Download or read book Precarity More Than a Challenge of Social Security written by Peter Herrmann and published by BoD – Books on Demand. This book was released on 2011 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The present book gathers edited contributions from a conference which had been held end of 2010 in Ankara, Turkey. This event brought together scientists and trade unionists from several EU- and non EU-countries, exploring one of the major, though frequently underestimated challenges of societal integrity. This continuing debate of the experts of the European S.U.P.I.-Network focussed in particular on the more fundamental issues of precarity. As much as precarity is a matter of socio-individual concern, having severe repercussions on the life of an increasing number of people, it is moreover a development that fundamentally challenges. It questions many of the values claimed by enlightenment and capitalist revolutions as universal, including solidarity, mutual support and equality - though they are formally still claimed as valid; and moreover these developments are part of structural changes that easily fissure the contemporary mode of production. Does this mean the end of society? Or could it be a take-off for another renaissance?

Download or read book Caring in Times of Precarity written by Chow Yiu Fai and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-12-14 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Caring in Times of Precarity draws together two key cultural observations: the increase in those living a single life, and the growing attraction of creative careers. Straddling this historical juncture, the book focuses on one particular group of ‘precariat’: single women in Shanghai in various forms of creative (self-)employment. While negotiating their share of the uncanny creative work ethos, these women also find themselves interpellated as shengnü (‘left-over women’) in a society configured by a mix of Confucian values, heterosexual ideals, and global images of womanhood. Following these women’s professional, social and intimate lives, the book refuses to see their singlehood and creative labour as problematic, and them as victims. It departs from dominant thinking on precarity, which foregrounds and critiques the contemporary need to be flexible, mobile, and spontaneous to the extent of (self-)exploitation, accepting insecurity. The book seeks to understand– empirically and specifically–women’s everyday struggles and pleasures. It highlights the up-close, everyday embodied, affective, and subjective experience in a particular Chinese city, with broader, global resonances well beyond China. Exploring the limits of the politics of precarity, the book proposes an ethics of care.

Download or read book Faces of Precarity written by Joseph Choonara and published by Policy Press. This book was released on 2022-08-08 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The words ‘precarity’ and ‘precariousness’ are widely used when discussing work, social conditions and experiences. However, there is no consensus on their meaning or how best to use them to explore social changes. This book shows how scholars have mapped out these notions, offering substantive analyses of issues such as the relationships between precariousness, debt, migration, health and workers’ mobilizations, and how these relationships have changed in the context of COVID-19. Bringing together an international group of authors from diverse fields, this book offers a distinctive critical perspective on the processes of precarization, focusing in particular on the European context. The Introduction, Chapters 3 and 8, and the Afterword are available Open Access via OAPEN under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.