1st Edition
Precarity Activism Youth and Social Change in Southern Europe
Activist networks throughout Europe developed the concept of precarity at the turn of the 21st century. Retail chain employees, freelancers, cultural workers, caregivers, and university adjuncts alike, including those labelled natives or migrants, identified and organized under the umbrella notion of precarity. Based on personal involvement and a thorough engagement with their textual and graphic production, this ethnography tells the story of precarity activism as it was born and evolved in Southern Europe, tracing its theoretical legacy. Highlighting the currency of their proposals for social change, this empirically detailed appraisal recapitulates activist debates over the prospects of flexible labor markets, as they are entangled with questions of gender and citizenship. The book's analysis offers insight into how their visionary notions of sustainable (labor) futures speak directly to the tensions of the platform economy.
This genealogy of a grassroots political concept will be of use for postgraduate students and scholars interested in Anthropology, Cultural Studies, Geography, Sociology and Political Theory. It will appeal to interdisciplinary fields engaging processes of collective action, knowledge production and so-called subaltern populations, such as Social Movements Studies, Gender Studies, Critical Race and Migration Studies, Dis/Ability Studies and Labor Studies. This book will further attract those concerned with changes in production, reproduction, and mobility under platform capitalism as it furthers consolidates precarity as the new normal.
Introduction: Precarious Thought
Section I. Changing Cultures of Labor
1. Flexible Employment or Garbage Gigs?
2. Towards a Contentious Precarity Pride
Section II. Shifting Infrastructures of Care
3. Feminist Drifts: Mapping uncertain lives
4. Care Strikes and Care-tizenship? Expanding the Precarious Glossary
Section III. Permanent Practices of Mobility
5. Mobility at the Core of Precarity: Nativi e Migranti Unite!
6. Platform Precarities: Organizing among the Pric-Mig-Gig
Conclusion: A Living Archive for Possible Futures
Biography
Maribel Casas-Cortés is a Ramón y Cajal Research Fellow at the Sociology Department of Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain. She is currently leading a national research project on food-delivery platforms. PhD in Anthropology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, she has published in journals such as Current Anthropology, Anthropological Quarterly, Citizenship Studies, Antipode or Politics.
"A “powerful disposition of survival”: this is the other side of precarity, Maribel Casas-Cortés writes, which at the same time, allows for a multitude of diverse subjects to confront and to resist it. This book is a celebration of that disposition. Without ever obscuring the structural violence of precarity, Casas-Cortés charts the manifold ways in which it becomes the ground for social movements and struggles that foreshadow new ways to inhabit our common world."
Sandro Mezzadra, University of Bologna, Italy, author of The Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor
"Through the notion of "precarious thought” this important and timely book contributes to a much needed knowledge turn in the way the literature thinks of and studies social movements. Based on years of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork especially in Spain and the US the book offers a powerful and original take on precarity as a concept from the ground up. The book convincingly argues for the need to engage with precarity activists as knowledge producers in their own right. For anyone engaged in the struggle for a better future, scholars and activists alike, this is an essential reading."
Martin Bak Jørgensen, Aalborg University, Denmark, editor of Politics of Precarity: Migrant Conditions, Struggles and Experiences
"We are bound to an age of vulnerability, anxiety and drift characterized by labour insecurity, the waning of care and welfare structures, as well as the bulwarking of borders and stigmatization of migration. An age of precarity thrice over. Or are we? In this stunning book, Maribel Casas-Cortés dives deep into the history of autonomous, labour, feminist and migrant struggles in Southern Europe since the 1970s, to show us how activist movements grappled with the triple axis of precarity by rearticulating the grammars of political alliance and the joys of connective transformations. Precarity Activism is that most necessary “conspirator” for our times: a living archive, as Italian autonomists used to say, for “respiring together”."
Alberto Corsín Jiménez, Spanish National Research Council, coauthor of Free Culture and the City: Hackers, Commoners, and Neighbors in Madrid
“In this important book, Maribel Casas-Cortés does justice to a robust and diverse body of critical analysis and theorizing about neoliberal precarity. This study recuperates the rich subterranean history of activist theorizations of precarity as they have emerged from the experiences and struggles of those who have been compelled to live under radical uncertainties. This book is a vital demonstration that the most urgent theoretical insights into our most pressing contemporary conditions arise from the predicaments and struggles of everyday life. It is a dazzling testament to the irrepressible critical intellect and insubordinate imagination of everyday people challenged to do extraordinary things.”
Nicholas de Genova, Chair of the Department of Comparative Cultural Studies, University of Houston, USA
“Casas-Cortés’ wonderful book demonstrates how much we have to learn from the theoretical work that is done collectively in social movements. The activist knowledges she mobilizes cast in a new light the current conditions of precarity and the struggles against them.”
Michael Hardt, Duke University, author of The Subversive Seventies
"A totally different and challenging concept of precarity emerges from this long-term ethnography of activist knowledges, based in their writings, social performances and image productions. Beyond the various processes of neoliberal dispossession, Precarity Activism underscores the creative drive put forward by grassroots initiatives that open the way to alternative futures.This is a magnificent work about the power and value of precarious thought, politically and academically."
Susana Narotzky, Universitat de Barcelona, editor of Grassroots Economics: Living with Austerity in Southern Europe
