Invited by “Ardeth” editors, this short text set out to comment the Burn-Out, “Ardeth” Issue #08, in order to critically reflect on it and bring up the notion of precariousness as an ontological ...condition to complement the understanding of exhaustion. My intention is to reclaim the centrality of exhaustion as generative term and attempting to rectify what I perceived to be reading the whole issue, the refusal to couple the pandemic affective perception of burn-out with the abyss of the anthropogenic condition or the incapacity to move beyond the singular (intended as disciplinary as well as personal) to the planetary (intended as multiplicity and geographical). To achieve this I would suggest, passing to Mbembe, Agamben and Berardi, a return to Deleuze’s work suggesting to reframe it with the question of life, its protection as the central feature of the architectural and urban debate.
This article takes a multidisciplinary approach, highlighting the diversity of approaches to the phenomenon of poverty. A first review discusses the interest and limits of approaches to poverty based ...on the figure of the marginalized, with a focus on income thresholds. A second group of studies takes a closer look at the living conditions of people in precarious situations, emphasizing the importance of the notions of “reste à vivre” and “permanent social insecurity”. A third, and more recent, reading emphasizes the emergence in the Anthropocene era of a new form of poverty, based on the notion of vulnerability and symbolized by the figure of the “migrant” or “climate refugee”.
After decades of scholarly optimism that the immigration reforms that swept across the Global North in the postwar era had ushered in a new age of non-discriminatory migration policy, recent ...scholarship has challenged this narrative. This Special Issue offers an empirical and normative contribution to this critical turn in migration studies by examining the multiple ways in which immigration and citizenship policy continues to create hierarchies among migrants that mirror the intersection of non-meritocratic attributes of social group membership. We show that access to territory and citizenship is governed by highly differentiated legal distinctions that closely map onto social identities such as gender, race/ethnicity, nationality, religion, and class. This introduction maps two important and interrelated developments in the literature which this issue engages. First, the 'politics of belonging' remains shaped by the intersection of multiple axes of inclusion and exclusion that are (re)produced by immigration and citizenship policy. Second, whereas legal precarity has long been associated with undocumented and temporary immigration status, over the past two decades precarity has penetrated all immigration status, including those that have long been understood as secure. The article concludes with an overview of the Special Issue's individual contributions and identifies some remaining research needs.
What do you mean, ‘resilient’? Hodgson, Dave; McDonald, Jenni L.; Hosken, David J.
Trends in ecology & evolution (Amsterdam),
09/2015, Volume:
30, Issue:
9
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
In a world beset by environmental disasters and anthropogenic disturbances, resilience might be the key to the persistence of natural systems. Yet, the ‘measurement’ of resilience is hampered by the ...multiple (and often conflicting) processes that yield the response of systems to insult. We recommend the simultaneous consideration of ‘resistance’ and ‘recovery’ as measurable components that together represent resilience.
La lutte contre la solitude est devenue un véritable enjeu de santé publique pour la population en général comme pour les personnes âgées, pour lesquelles l’isolement social entraîne la perte ...d’autonomie. Même si la solitude ne touche qu’une partie de la population, des événements tels que la canicule de 2003 en France ont révélé, dans l’opinion publique, la vulnérabilité de nombreuses personnes âgées face à la solitude. Le sentiment de solitude est à distinguer de l’isolement avec lequel il est souvent confondu. L’isolement ou l’exclusion peuvent néanmoins être à l’origine ou favoriser le sentiment de solitude, tout comme la précarité et les inégalités qui en découlent. Nous proposons d’interroger ce sentiment de solitude au regard des inégalités sociales et matérielles. Cette réflexion s’appuie sur la vague 6 de l’enquête européenne Share ( Survey on health, ageing and retirement in Europe ) menée auprès de personnes âgées de 50 ans ou plus. Il s’agit d’une analyse des indicateurs de précarité sociale et matérielle qui recensent les ressentis et les conditions de vie des personnes interrogées. À partir de statistiques descriptives et de régressions logistiques, notre étude tentera de mettre en lien le sentiment de solitude selon trois axes : la précarité économique et matérielle, la précarité sociale et relationnelle, ainsi que la fragilité-précarité.
In the Social Factory? Gill, Rosalind; Pratt, Andy
Theory, culture & society,
12/2008, Volume:
25, Issue:
7-8
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
This article introduces a special section concerned with precariousness and cultural work. Its aim is to bring into dialogue three bodies of ideas — the work of the autonomous Marxist `Italian ...laboratory'; activist writings about precariousness and precarity; and the emerging empirical scholarship concerned with the distinctive features of cultural work, at a moment when artists, designers and (new) media workers have taken centre stage as a supposed `creative class' of model entrepreneurs. The article is divided into three sections. It starts by introducing the ideas of the autonomous Marxist tradition, highlighting arguments about the autonomy of labour, informational capitalism and the `factory without walls', as well as key concepts such as multitude and immaterial labour. The impact of these ideas and of Operaismo politics more generally on the precarity movement is then considered in the second section, discussing some of the issues that have animated debate both within and outside this movement, which has often treated cultural workers as exemplifying the experiences of a new `precariat'. In the third and final section we turn to the empirical literature about cultural work, pointing to its main features before bringing it into debate with the ideas already discussed. Several points of overlap and critique are elaborated — focusing in particular on issues of affect, temporality, subjectivity and solidarity.
Coworking spaces have been established in great numbers around the globe over the past 10 years. Previous studies on coworking spaces argue that these spaces are designed to enable serendipitous ...encounters. Here we introduce the concept of an economy of encounters, arguing that both intended and unintended encounters have become a form of production in the knowledge-based new economy. This paper draws upon the critical analysis of three case studies of different coworking settings − two open coworking spaces and a corporate coworking office. Following Deleuze and Guattari, we see coworking spaces as affectual assemblages that create affects that push knowledge workers in flow and motion to enable the formation of new kinds of heterogeneous and constantly changing work communities, where serendipitous encounters become a force of production. We argue that this commodification of a social phenomenon, i.e. the intentional use of affectual assemblages of people, objects and ideas to create serendipitous opportunities, ignores the precariousness of contemporary work.
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