Academic literature on the topic 'Anti-Precarity politics'

In what ways has migration as a field of scholarship contributed to the discipline of International Relations (IR)? How can migration as a lived experience shed light on international politics as a field of interconnections? And how might migration as a political and analytical force compel IR to confront its privileged subjects? This article addresses these questions by focusing specifically on precarious migration from the Global South to the Global North. It shows how critical scholars refuse the suggestion that such migrations pose a ‘global challenge’ or problem to be resolved, considering instead how contemporary practices of governing migration effectively produce precarity for many people on the move. It also shows how critical works point to longer standing racialised dynamics of colonial violence within which such governing practices are embedded, to emphasise both the limitations of liberal humanitarianism as well as the problematic politics of ‘the human’ that this involves. By building on the insights of anti-racist, indigenous and postcolonial scholarship, critical scholars of migration are well placed to draw attention to the privileging of some subjects over others in the study and practice of international politics. The article argues that engaging IR while rejecting the orthodoxies on which the discipline is built remains critical for such works in order to advance understanding of the silences and violences of contemporary international politics.

This article examines the question of solidarity in light of recent refugees’ and forced migrants’ arrivals on Greek island shores as the first point of entry to the European Union. It focuses on various community solidarity initiatives emerging in 2015 and how they unfolded over time, until replaced by hostility and indifference following the EU–Turkey deal in March 2016. To account for this transformation, the study, carried out between 2016 and 2018, involved ethnographic work, interviews with local populations, activists, teachers and community leaders, and participant observations primarily in Lesbos, as well as Chios, Leros, and Samos. This article also sheds light on how Greece’s severe economic crisis has compounded anti-migration politics and securitization in recent migratory movements. Drawing on Judith Butler’s ideas of embodied vulnerability and intersubjective relationality, the article theorizes how solidarity evolves when border struggles intersect with deservingness, belonging, and refugees’ and forced migrants’ precarity. It concludes by proposing a psychosocial embodied notion of solidarity as a political strategy to counteract the neoliberal predicament that threatens all life with extinction.

How to explain the violent xenophobic attacks in South Africa in recent years? Two militant South African activists, Leonard Gentle and Noor Nieftagodien, interviewed here, analyse the race/class bases for the anti-foreigner violence in terms of the echoes/reverberations of apartheid and the rise of neoliberalism. They argue that remnants of apartheid have endured through the reproduction of racial and tribal categories, which has contributed to the entrenchment of exclusionary nationalist politics and the fragmentation of black unity. South Africa’s specific history of capitalist development, the African National Congress’s embraces of neoliberalism, on the one hand, and rainbowism, on the other, have produced the underlying conditions of precarity and desperation that resulted in the normalisation of xenophobia. The unions, too, have failed to recognise the new shape of the ‘working class’. Gentle and Nieftagodien outline the need to contend with the broader social conditions, the global economic crisis, neoliberalism and the deep inequalities it engenders in order to counteract the rising tide of xenophobia and build working-class unity.

Abstract In the context of twenty-first century global conservatism, where anti-immigrant sentiment is everywhere apparent, the importance of Ishiguro’s writing arguably lies in its on-going challenge to this perspective’s faulty logic and its capacity to reveal the radical violence behind nationalist political attacks on minority and immigrant populations. In this article I explore this challenge explicitly through a politically-oriented reading of The Remains of the Day (1989), highlighting this novel’s joint critique of Thatcherite nationalism and late twentieth century global entrepreneurialism. While this focus obviously represents a response to an earlier socio-political moment, defined by its own unique amalgam of ideological anxieties, nevertheless what emerges most prominently through this reading is the novel’s topical condemnation of cultural essentialism and its attendant hierarchies, concerns which remain of utmost critical significance within the twenty-first century. Thus, by making this assessment explicit, highlighting British conservatism’s devastating psychological and material implications for affected individuals, ranging from repressed and traumatised psychologies to radical economic precarity, this novel can be seen to register Thatcherite prejudice in a poignantly relevant manner. Indeed, the pseudo-respect granted to the ‘genuine old-fashioned English butler’ in this novel might also be seen as comparable to Trump’s pseudo-populism or Brexit nostalgia, both of which likewise ignore the pressing reality of imperialism’s historical violence.

AbstractAs a precondition of belonging, professionalism is often a taken-for-granted feature of being middle-class. Yet ethnographic attention to experiences of work reveals that professional identity can be fragile. Drawing on ethnographic research among nurses in KwaZulu-Natal, this article traces the feelings of precarity about work and the ambivalence that pervades ideas of professionalism. This ambiguity arises partly out of a peculiarly South African story in which histories of professionalism are entwined with the repressive apartheid project of separate development. Many of the professionals working as teachers, nurses, lawyers and administrators today were trained in the former ‘homelands’. Practices of professionalism are entangled with those of clientelism inherited from this earlier period of homeland politics. These local histories combine with wider processes of neoliberalism, as conditions of austerity produce structural shifts towards casualization. The article traces these dynamics in the stories of two nurses and considers what may be at stake politically as middle-class trajectories are threatened. Moving away from a view of the middle classes as either democratic or anti-democratic, feelings of ambivalence about work make questions of political allegiance an ambiguous and fraught matter.

The election of Donald Trump in 2016 signaled a definite shift in the global spread of a new nationalist, populist, racist, political Right. This sweeping trend was fuelled and is sustained by social media’s vast networks that disseminate (mis)information and efface the subject’s body by mediating reality through digital interfaces. Intensified right-wing news media and politics mutate the socio-semiotics of digital networks, rendering affective slogans that destabilize language and inform user subjectivity. Facebook re-posts and 4chan memes re-articulate refrains chanted at rallies, such as “Stop the steal,” intensifying their affective resonance and causing them to speak in and through subjects, rather than being spoken by them, engendering incorporeal transformations on bodies in the sociopolitical field. Stripped of semantic meaning and referential reality, these slogans operate through affect to produce collective phantasies that channel users’ unchecked desires. These slogans affectively interpellate users by pulling apart their individuation, weaving them into endless threads, sites, and networks that amplify and spread fascistic imaginaries of a Great America under Trump, the God-Emperor. Slogans’ affects and their resulting phantasies function as coefficients of digital networks’ innumerable connections, exponentially proliferating and catalyzing microfascisms via ever-multiplying rhizomatic connections – a sociopolitical recalibration of the Ro formula models these affective transmissions, a calculation otherwise used to measure a disease’s potential transmission among a vulnerable population. The affective intensification and spread of right-wing discourses were a prelude to the Covid-19 pandemic and function in tandem. As economic shutdowns and stay-at-home orders augment financial precarity and digitize quotidian life, media networks intensify the spread of (mis)information among susceptible users, leading to anti-mask protests, political rallies, and unsafe work environments that, in turn, increase Covid-19 cases. Right-wing media’s affective, digital contagion and the Covid-19 pandemic produce a feedback loop of transmission, mutually amplifying their Ro values as both mutate and spread.

- Describing the emergence of a prized labor market in sectors that policymakers designate as the creative industries, the article considers several features of cognitive work and its sector policies. The second half of the article examines the case for a cross-class coalition of the sort proposed by the anti-precarity movement.

During the earliest waves of the COVID-19 pandemic, much media and public discourse focused on the effects of increasing precarity on already vulnerable populations. As in-person work added a layer of viral risk and unemployment drastically exacerbated economic precariousness, the category of ‘essential worker’ gained new prominence in these conversations. In this paper, we focus on the complicated relationship between two groups of workers depicted as marginalised and exploited to different degrees during COVID-19: trafficked persons and anti-trafficking service providers. Though media coverage did not conflate these groups, it applied a capacious understanding of precarious labour and structural inequalities that encapsulated different types of essential work. We draw on media produced by frontline anti-trafficking and sex workers’ rights organisations between March and May 2020. Even with renewed attention to macro-level harms, many publications still emphasised individualism over collectivity. This emphasis on singular organisational representatives—frontline workers—as heroic rescuers mirrored larger, normative anti-trafficking discourses. At the point at which the ‘new normal’ was nowhere in sight, COVID-19 served as a flashpoint to reconsider current intervention strategies and instead emphasise a critique of precarious labour along multiple vectors.

This paper examines a youth oral history project conducted by/with/for immigrant youth of color and educators. Designed as a longitudinal five year project of critical participatory action research and youth oral histories, we sought initially to document generational experiences of schooling inequity, aggressive policing, housing precarity and immigration struggles. As a research collective we then confronted and chose to interrogate how COVID19, uprisings and activism, and remote learning affect youth of color. In our analysis we “discovered” the power of culturally responsive and sustaining education as a framework to cultivate critical consciousness and civic engagement. With an epistemic commitment to “no research on us without us,” decolonizing methodologies and research for social action, we review in this article our theoretical frameworks, epistemic commitments, methodologies, our ethical praxis and our evidence-based activism, as we explore the intimate details of critical participation as core to anti-racist developmental science.

Abstract Legal status and associated rights to access state services become even more important at times of crises like the Covid-19 pandemic. By reviewing legal amendments, central government and municipalities’ policies and policymakers’ statements, this article examines the example of Turkey, which is home to around 4 million undocumented migrants, asylum seekers and refugees. The Turkish state-provided Covid-19 treatment in the ‘emergency’ scope of healthcare for all residents irrespective of their legal status. However, structural problems left undocumented migrants and refugees faced with three significant obstacles. These obstacles were the requirement to test positive for Covid-19; the requirement to access primary healthcare to be referred to hospitals and to reside in the city of registration to access that primary healthcare; and the fear of losing employment, being evicted from housing or being deported by the authorities. Additionally, growing political uncertainty and a deteriorating economic situation have contributed to growing anti-migrant movements in the country. Not only have undocumented migrants and refugees had limited access to public health provisions, but they were also at greater risk of being considered to be a threat to public health and public security. The article concludes by showing that legal precarity brings even more vulnerability at times of crisis and by suggesting future areas of research.

Cette recherche analyse la précarité comme un concept clé pour comprendre les conditions de travail et les réalités sociales dans le capitalisme tardif, en se concentrant sur les secteurs du travail domestique et de soins, ainsi que sur le secteur bancaire en Espagne. Elle examine comment l'économie politique actuelle a engendré des expériences de précarité qui, bien qu'en expansion et de plus en plus intenses, varient entre ces secteurs. Elle explore également comment les différents groupes sociaux, soumis à des exigences productives distinctes, affrontent et contestent cette précarité. L'étude recueille les témoignages des travailleurs précarisés, en soulignant comment ils sont contraints d'assumer des responsabilités personnelles écrasantes face à une vulnérabilité socio-économique générée politiquement. La thèse met en parallèle les conditions des travailleurs domestiques et de soins - marquées par des salaires bas, une instabilité professionnelle et des emplois fragmentés - avec celles, plus régulées mais tout aussi précaires, du secteur bancaire, où les travailleurs sont confrontés à des stratégies d'entreprises visant à maximiser les profits via la réduction des coûts salariaux, l'automatisation et la restructuration. Grâce à une combinaison de théorie critique et de recherche empirique, l'étude s'appuie sur une analyse marxiste pour éclairer les expériences matérielles et subjectives de la précarité. Elle contribue également aux débats sur les contradictions du capitalisme, le travail et la reproduction sociale, en examinant si ces conditions précaires ouvrent des perspectives d'émancipation. En fin de compte, la recherche souligne que, bien que la précarité touche l'ensemble des travailleurs, elle est particulièrement aiguë dans les secteurs les plus vulnérables, tels que le travail domestique et de soins, où les emplois, malgré leur importance, sont dévalorisés. De plus, elle révèle comment les conditions précaires dans ces secteurs servent à soutenir l'exploitation dans les marchés concentrés, créant ainsi une hiérarchie de précarité soutenue politiquement et économiquement
This dissertation explores precarity as a central concept for understanding contemporary labor and social conditions in late capitalism, focusing on Spain's domestic and care sector and banking sector. It examines how the contemporary political economy has generated expanding and more intense, yet differing experiences of precarity across these sectors and explores how each social group, subjected to different productive requirements navigates and contests precarity. This research has aimed to empirically gather the experiences of precaritized workers, and highlights how workers are forced to bear overwhelming personal responsibilities in the face of politically generated socio economic vulnerability. The thesis contrasts the conditions of domestic and care workers, marked by low wages, job instability, and fragmented employment, with the more regulated and stable employment yet precarious experiences in banking, where workers face corporate strategies aimed at maximizing profit through labor cost reduction, automation, and restructuring. Through a combination of critical theory and empirical research, this study draws on Marxist analysis to shed light on the material and subjective experiences of precarity. It also contributes to broader discussions on capitalism's contradictions, labor, and social reproduction, exploring whether these precarious conditions offer space for emancipatory action. The research highlights that while precarity affects all workers, it is most acute in marginalized sectors like domestic and care work, where workers are undervalued despite being essential. This research also reveals how precarious conditions in low-wage sectors underpin exploitation in concentrated markets, creating a hierarchical structure of precarity that is politically and economically sustained

This chapter examines the ethico-political dimensions of (Christian and charitable) compassion in Nathanael West’s novella Miss Lonelyhearts, published in the darkest year of the Great Depression (1933). While West did not explicitly write his radical leftist convictions into his satirical fiction, this chapter argues that Miss Lonelyhearts stages a conflict between absent yet massively needed political responses to socio-economic precarity and an intratextual world whose ‘superrealist’ absurdity revolves around the compassionate, male advice columnist Miss Lonelyhearts being held ethically responsible for alleviating the material causes of his correspondents’ acute vulnerability. The columnist reacts repeatedly to their suffering with aversion and violence, and this chapter traces an anti-capitalist textual politics in West’s unparalleled representation of fraught relations where negative emotions triggering repulsion clash violently with compassion as a positive affect sustaining desire, attraction and love – that is, the realm of intimacy. Enlisting concepts such as Eva Illouz’s ‘cold intimacy’, Lauren Berlant’s ‘cruel optimism’ and Sianne Ngai’s ‘ugly feelings’, it reads the text’s refusal of compassion and intimacy as a radical rejection of an enduring predicament: an affective-political regime of resilience by which capitalism uses intimate relations and positive emotions to prevent class conflict and socio-economic equality.

The Proud Boys is a far-right, anti-immigrant, all-male group who have been known to use violence against left-wing opponents. The group describes themselves as “Western chauvinists,” by which they mean “men who refuse to apologise for creating the modern world”. The group, which is the new face of far-right extremism, one that recruits through shared precarity and male grievances promotes and engages in political violence.