On the Edge: Genealogies and Futures of Precarity
External activity | Jovanka Popova’s presentation at the conference “On the Edge: Genealogies and Futures of Precarity” | CEU University Budapest | 3 – 4 June, 2016.
The emergence of ‘precarity’ as a ‘worldwide symptom of neoliberalism’ signals both a socio-economic condition and an ontological experience under the global regime of late capitalism. In the current political moment, precarity has come to designate a shift away from job security, an erosion of social belonging, and a loss of well-being for a neoliberalized citizenry, whose daily lives are increasingly marked by economic instability, uncertain futures, risky livelihoods, and a perceived dependence on the political will of elite actors. Such precarious shifts, furthermore, are deeply embedded in an intersectional hierarchization that signifies some bodies as more precarious and less grievable, with relating differentiations in social positions of insecurity.