240545 SE Scrutinizing Precarity - Anthropological Perspectives on a Ubiquitous Concept (P4) (2022S)

In recent decades, ‘precarity’ has become a ubiquitous term in everyday language and a popular concept in social research. Yet precarity is used in very different ways. Is precarity an objective condition or a subjective experience? Is it a recent phenomenon or an inherent feature of capitalism? Is precarity a class relation or an ontological condition of vulnerability? What modes of governing does precarity produce or enforce? By addressing these and other questions, in this short course we explore the analytical potentialities of this concept for anthropological research.
Precarity has first emerged as a scientific term describing the effects of the so-called neoliberal shift toward volatile employment relations, dismantling of social security institutions, fragile social inclusion, growing insecurity, and the frustration of collective identities and aspirations of formerly stable working classes. On the first day, we will discuss literature that departs from such a ‘post-Fordist’ perspective on precarity. On the second day, we engage in different strands of critique on such a Western, white-androcentric bias of precarity research and theory and discuss how our understanding of conditions and experiences of precarity changes when we explore it from a global-historical and intersectional perspective.