Precarity Activism

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.