Precarious Urban Worlds: The Everyday, Workplace and City Flashcards
How might we understand ‘precarity’?
As both a general societal malaise and a more specific underlying structure emerging from neoliberalism.
(Waite, 2009)
1) Economic conditions
- increase in zero-hour contracts
- the gig economy
- ‘illegitimate work’ e.g. drug dealing, prostitution
- seasonal work
2) Condition of social life’
- normalisation of psychic uncertainty and anxiety amongst worker-citizens no long guaranteed full employment or a secure home
Precariousness is intersectional, it is unequal and uneven.
How does Butler (2004) conceptualise precarity?
Butler questions which lives we deem valuable in the context of grief. How grievable is a life? If not, then there is precarity to that life - is it worth living?
e.g. Palestinian lives/trans lives/black lives in USA/homeless lives. -> similar to Foucault ‘make live and let die’.
Explain Berlant’s ‘cruel optimism’.
There is a narrative put forward by the state which claims there are opportunities available, but the responsibility is on the individual to get those opportunities.
Berlant argues they don’t really exist.
How do people learn to live with precarity?
Not so much learning to lie with precarity but rather disciplined into living with it. A neoliberal narrative creates ‘naturalised’ attachment to meritocratic hope.
How is precarity stigmatised?
Huge amount of stigmatisation experienced by people who claim benefits; portrayed as ‘lazy’ and ‘taking advantage’ of taxpayers, as well as of homeless.
