The makeshift city Vasudevan, Alexander
Progress in human geography,
06/2015, Letnik:
39, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
This paper introduces a set of analytical frames that explore the possibilities of conceiving, researching and writing a global geography of squatting. The paper argues that it is possible to detect, ...in the most tenuous of urban settings, ways of thinking about and living urban life that have the potential to reanimate the city as a key site of geographical inquiry. The paper develops a modest theory of ‘urban combats’ to account for the complexity and provisionality of squatting as an informal set of practices, as a makeshift approach to housing and as a precarious form of inhabiting the city.
The clinical identification of frailty is increasingly thought to be important in countries with ageing populations. Understanding how older people labelled as frail make sense of this categorisation ...is therefore important. A number of recent studies have reported negative perceptions of the term among older people themselves. Building on this, we focus on how and why those assessed to be frail make sense of frailty as they do. We draw on a discourse analysis of situated interviews with 30 older people accessing emergency care in an English NHS hospital. Three interpretive repertoire pairs (Frailty is a bodily issue / frailty is about mind-set; Frailty is a negative experience / frailty is an inevitable experience; I'm not frail / I feel frail), identified across the participants' talk, are outlined and discussed in relation to discourses of the fourth age and precarity. We conclude that frailty is often seen in terms what others have referred to as ‘real’ old age and is linked to discourses of dependence and precarity.
•Older people determined to be clinically frail often resist the term frailty.•Older people determined to be clinically frail in this study drew on three interpretive repertoire pairs to make sense of the term and experience ‘frailty’•The shared narrative of the fourth age as ‘real’ old age is associated with a precarious and unwanted identity.
This article addresses the question of how to understand the relation among precarity, differential inclusion, and citizenship status with regard to Syrian refugees in Turkey. Turkey has become host ...to over 2.7 million Syrian refugees who live in government-run refugee camps and urban centres. Drawing on critical citizenship and migration studies literature, the paper emphasises the Turkish government's central legal and policy frameworks that provide Syrians with some citizenship rights while simultaneously regulating their status and situating them in a position of limbo. Syrians are not only making claims to citizenship rights but they are also negotiating their access to social services, humanitarian assistance, and employment in different ways. The analysis stresses that Syrian refugees in Turkey continue to be part of the multiple pathways to precarity, differential inclusion, and negotiated citizenship rights.
Abstract Family arrangements are crucial to people's abilities to meet the high demands of professional careers; but most scholarship has examined stable, highly remunerated professions. To ...understand the relationship between career and family within the increasing number of precarious professions, we analyse interviews with 102 journalists. We discover two broad types of career‐work practices these professionals employ to engage family in their careers: career‐family positioning (i.e., crafting a narrative of how career and family relate) and career‐family resourcing (i.e., generating resources from family for career or vice‐versa). Together, these practices touch more family members – spouses, children, parents, siblings, and extended family members – and involve a wider range of resources than documented in stable fields. By piecing together variations of these practices, professionals construct career strategies that address their difficult context in different ways. Two strategies largely accept the demands and precarity, by prioritizing career and drawing on family , or prioritizing career and forgoing family. A third, prioritizing family over career, involves defying the demands. Gender does not clearly influence which career strategy people pursue. These findings advance scholarship on career and family in the professions, social‐symbolic work, and contribute to careers research more broadly.
The paper unravels the ‘reinvisiblisation’ of the Indian migrant labours, who underwent mass exodus because of the lockdown imposed during the COVID-19 pandemic that brought to light their ...‘invisibility’ to Indian planners and policymakers. The research qualitatively analyses the selected incidents to elucidate upon their precarious experiences unique to the pandemic. It employs the Foucauldian theoretical framework of docile bodies to understand the workings of biopower in disciplining the body of migrant labours to maintain their docility and utility even amidst the pandemic. The study further employs Judith Butler’s concept of precarious lives to delineate how migrant workers and labours were exposed to violence, injury, and death on their way back home. The research lays bare the attempts of the disciplinary regime to render them docile in the guise of assistance and ‘inclusive’ policy changes and concludes by suggesting serious changes in policy measures and alternatives to avoid such crises in the future.
The key to any type of curbing and eventual remodelling of capitalism lies in collective organisation, and especially the organisation of labour. Capitalism cannot be understood as static or as a ...universal form; rather, in its constant development in search of profits and continuous capital accumulation, it evolves to circumvent the resistance that the system meets. The grounds that were secured in the creation of the Swedish welfare state, and which we have been losing since the 1990s, are related to a general decline in participation in different organisations but especially to the decline of membership levels and organisation in large and strong trade unions. Just as capitalism is a continuous process, the movements that seek to remodel it also need to be continuously evolving. While the Swedish trade union confederation (LO) is having trouble recruiting members across the board, the trade unions are having the hardest time with some of the more precarious workers in the Swedish labour market. The failure to organise these workers, who have only very slender opportunities to exercise their rights, is not only a problem for workers that come to Sweden but is also central to the strength of the entirety of trade unions in Sweden.
The conditions under which people labour in mental health research affect how and what knowledge is produced – and who benefits or doesn't from involvement in health research systems. There has been, ...however, little sustained investigation of the uneven modalities of labour exploitation across what are increasingly financialised systems of mental health research. This theoretical paper advances conceptual and empirical investigations of labour in health research – outlining how material precarity and epistemic precarity often go hand in hand, and largely drawing on examples from the UK. The intertwining of labour relations and epistemic cultures can be understood by bringing together insights from two bodies of knowledge not commonly in contact with one another – survivor/service user research and critical research on universities and academic labour. The article addresses how mental health research makes significant use of the labour of (i) contract researchers (many of whom work on precarious and exploitative contracts); (ii) lay contributors (through ‘patient and public involvement’); and (iii) research participants (where the conditions underpinning participation in various kinds of research increasingly blur the distinction between volunteering, and ‘gig’ work). Labour relations affect, and are affected by, efforts to change epistemic cultures and reduce epistemic inequalities, and epistemic and material precarity make efforts to improve research culture much more difficult. Those experiencing both material and epistemic precarity in health research systems need to be at the heart of efforts to combat both.
•Labour conditions in mental health research affect how and what knowledge is produced.•Health research systems frequently rely on exploited labour.•Material and epistemic precarity frequently go hand in hand in mental health research.•Improving research cultures in mental health research demands addressing labour relations.•Those experiencing material/epistemic precarity should be core to improvement efforts.
The critical platform studies literature has built a compelling picture of how techniques like worker (mis)classification, algorithmic management and workforce atomisation lie at the heart of how ...‘work on-demand via apps’ actively restructure labour. Much of this emerging scholarship identifies that platform workforces are predominantly comprised of migrant and racially minoritised workers. However, few studies theorise migration and race as structuring logics of the platform model and the precarity it engenders. This paper addresses this gap by exploring how the platform economy – specifically work on-demand via apps – both shapes and is shaped by historically contingent contexts of racialisation, and their constitutive processes such as embodiment and immigration policy/rhetoric. Beyond identifying the over-representation of racial minorities in the platform economy, it argues that processes of racialisation have been crucial at every stage of the platform economy's rise to dominance, and therefore constitutes a key organising principle of platform capitalism – hence the term ‘racial platform capitalism’. In doing so, this paper draws on the racial capitalism literature, to situate key platform techniques such as worker (mis)classification and algorithmic management as forms of racial practice, deployed to (re-)organise surplus urban labour-power following the 2008 financial crisis. This framework will be explored through an ethnographic study of Uber's rise in London. Through this, the paper demonstrates a co-constitutive relationship, where the conditions of minoritised workers in a global city like London post-2008, and the political economy of platform companies can be said to have co-produced one another.
Nos últimos anos, a precariedade tem sofrido um aumento entre os mais diversos setores económico-produtivos. A universidade é um dos exemplos mais evidentes de como este fenómeno não se restringe a ...empregos com uma formação reduzida. A partir da recensão comparativa de duas obras recentemente publicadas, O Ensino Superior e Desenvolvimento, de José Ferreira Gomes, e Nós Somos os Rankings! Precariedade, Reflexividade e Acção Social na Academia Neoliberalizada, de Ana Ferreira, o objetivo deste ensaio reside na análise, por um lado, da relação entre a reconfiguração estrutural das instituições de ensino superior e o aumento da precariedade nesta área e, por outro, dos seus impactos na condição socioprofissional de quem dedica as suas vidas ao trabalho académico.
In recent years, precarity has increased across a wide range of economic and productive sectors. The university is one of the clearest examples of how this phenomenon is not restricted to jobs with reduced education. Based on the critical review of two recently published works, O Ensino Superior e Desenvolvimento, by José Ferreira Gomes, and Nós Somos os Rankings! Precariedade, Reflexividade e Acção Social na Academia Neoliberalizada, by Ana Ferreira, the aim of this essay is to analyse, on the one hand, the relationship between the structural reconfiguration of higher education institutions and the increase in precarity in this area and, on the other, its impacts on the socio-professional condition of those who dedicate their lives to academic work.
RESUMEN La postergación de la maternidad es una de las transformaciones más importantes de la reproducción en Chile. Sin embargo, existen pocos estudios empíricos que aborden la fertilidad tardía. A ...través del análisis de las Bases de Datos de Nacimientos (1980-2018) del INE y de 24 entrevistas en profundidad semiestructuradas (2016-2017), este artículo caracteriza las tendencias y narrativas de la postergación de la maternidad en la sociedad chilena. Los hallazgos demuestran que el aumento de la edad promedio de transición a la maternidad es una tendencia demográfica sostenida en los últimos 40 años que se ha intensificado. aumentando de 23,1 a 26,1 años en la última década. Si bien esta tendencia ha sido ampliamente interpretada como consecuencias de transformaciones culturales asociadas a una mayor autonomía de las mujeres, los hallazgos sugieren que, en un contexto caracterizado por la precariedad de las condiciones sociales para tener y criar hijos, la postergación de la maternidad emerge también como una táctica reproductiva que entrega soluciones biográficas a contradicciones sistémicas.
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