Project Description

Precarious Lives, Uncertain Futures

Organized in partnership with Auro University (Surat, India), and with “Challenging Precarity: A Global Network”, this three-day international event sets out to continue the fruitful exchange of debates, ideas and best practices, that began in Lucknow, during “The Cultures of New India” conference hosted at Shri Ramswaroop Memorial University (2017), and continued in Cordoba (“Precarity, Populism and Post-Truth Politics” Conference) in 2018, and in Surat (“Challenging Precarity” Conference) in 2019.

While the previous conferences were focused on manifestations of precarity in the Global South, where certain populations are dispossessed and deprived due to systemic and sustained neglect, ‘Precarious Lives, Uncertain Futures’ is mainly concerned with changes in politics and society, which are reflected in the global mobilization of labour force and the new blurred frontiers of class and belonging.

Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:

  • Precarity and forms of political secessionism
  • The casualization of workforces and the new informal labour market
  • Migration, refugees and xenophobia
  • The glamorization of precarity
  • Precarity and social classes
  • The cultural aspects of precarity
  • The precaritization of academia
  • The challenge to precarity of literature and the visual arts
  • Populism and the rise of right wing movements
  • New modes and formats in representing precarity
  • Migrant /refugee narratives of citizenship
  • The language and discourses of precarity
  • Precarity and the (mass and social) media
  • Precarity and education
  • The precarity of women’s reproductive rights (surrogate motherhood, abortion debates)
  • Precarity and ageing
  • Precarity and dispossession
  • Self-precaritization and life style choices
  • Planetary precarity: climate change and environmental degradation
  • Alternative futures, beyond precarity