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This vignette begins with a scene from a reader’s theatre play, written by the author about her research experience. The author’s creative reflection through her own storytelling provides a poignant description of the tensions and complex questions that arise from conducting research that can put both researcher and respondents in a place of insecurity and even violence. The play and following reflection poses questions about vicarious traumatization, resilience, whose voices are heard or suppressed, and what level of insecurity is acceptable to community participants and to researchers.

Over the last 15 years, frailty has emerged as one of the most powerful constructs in gerontology, geriatrics, and health care delivery. Yet the dominant portrayal and response to frailty tends to mask that frailty is experienced by older people and is historically situated. This chapter suggests that the lens of precarity can be used to focus on the risks and insecurities experienced by older people and convey complex understandings of need in late life. It outlines key lines of thinking with regards to frailty and sketches emerging work on precarity with regards to aging. It then points to two angles to reconsider ‘frailty’ in late life: the politics of frailty, and vulnerability as a means to resituate the response to ‘frail’ subjects. It follows this by outlining the contributions that can be made through an analysis of precarity and concludes with suggestions for theoretical and methodological development.

This chapter focuses on the effects of deepening housing insecurity and the relationship between structure and agency as those who could not keep up with rent payments attempted to downsize within a declining social housing sector. Building on the work of Wacquant and employing Foucauldian conceptualisations, this chapter adopts a more theoretical analytic framework to question how and in what ways the retrenchment of welfare abets the ‘reengineering of the state’. The Bedroom Tax policy provides a lens through which to view this process. This chapter examines how increased housing vulnerability impacts on participants, acting to responsibilise them and make them accountable for their own housing provision.

A key plank of Galbraith’s argument concerning the impact of affluence on contemporary society was the claim that the age-old problem of economic insecurity had all but disappeared as a factor in most people’s lives, especially in the America of his day. Developments since he wrote – particularly since the 1970s – have fatally undermined this bold position, at both the micro level of household and firm and the macro level of the economy at large. This chapter outlines the Galbraithian argument and then analyses the way recent developments have systematically undermined or reversed the forces he pointed to as driving the change to universal security. This discussion allows us to focus on the genesis and outcomes of the continuing trend to greater insecurity that characterizes the twenty-first century looking forward.

The section begins with Adrian Sinfield's exploration of ‘what unemployment means’. In 1981, when Sinfield's book of this title was first published, the UK was in the early stages of a massive political and economic transformation. Three decades and two recessions later, as the chapter demonstrates, we see some differences but many similarities in the patterns and impact of unemployment. The current recession may be regarded as a problem of ‘growth’ rather than industrial restructuring, but, as Sinfield argues, the trend towards insecurity has its roots in the latter and the political project pursued during that formative period. Consequently, most of the social divisions of unemployment apparent in the 1980s endure today: divisions of ethnicity, regional impact, the cumulative effects of limited opportunities to acquire skills and the preponderance of low pay remain obvious. As the chapter concludes, the long-term effects on society of persistent and high unemployment are grave, all the more so when combined with a curtailment of social protection and a politics of division.

Since the early years of the twentieth century, the Persian Gulf has been viewed as a strategically vital waterway, both for the global economy in general and for the continued prosperity of advanced economies in particular. In the process, the region has become an arena for the emergence of multiple and often overlapping security challenges, many of them indigenous to the area and many imported from abroad. Up until the 2011 Arab uprisings, most of these security challenges revolved around territorial, political, and military competitions and conflicts within and between actors from the region itself and from the outside. While threats and challenges to human security were also present, they were often overshadowed by more immediate and more tangible threats to territorial sovereignty and those posed by various forms of political and military competition between state actors.

This chapter focuses on quotidian technologies of exclusion against migrants who identify as gay, lesbian, and bisexual. Drawing on interviews, newspapers, ordinances and bills, novels, and field notes, the chapter underscore how forms of exclusion, violence, and insecurity can undergird and even define belonging in the context of return. I also examine how Peruvian migrant groups outside Peru may reinforce exclusionary practices. I suggest that LGB individuals may find themselves in the difficult position of accepting violence against them--homophobic practices, jokes, and discrimination--in order to be at home with their families, in their homeland, and within immigrant communities, which leads to exclusion and rightlessness in everyday life.

The impact of the U.S. security concerns is not only seen in political and spatial restrictions on public space or inscribed in militarized borders, but also in the increasing penetration of the private realm of home. This domestication of security concerns through the architecture, urban design and management of private residential communities addresses homeowners’ sense of social and financial insecurity through socioeconomic segregation, controlled physical environments and racist discourses. These securitization practices, the securityscapes that are a result of architectural and social infrastructures and how they work can be uncovered through an ethnographic analysis of housing regimes and the affective, discursive and bodily practices that make up and regulate home life.

This chapter introduces the book. It begins by repeating the mantra-like statements favoured by British politicians that ‘work is the best route out of poverty’, counter-posing these with brief statements from research participants about the realities of ‘in-work poverty’. The first part of the chapter summarises the thrust of the books descriptions and its overall arguments. This is followed by a description of the layout of the book, chapter by chapter, with discussion of the main findings and arguments contained in each. This chapter introduces the book. It begins by repeating the mantra-like statements favoured by British politicians that ‘work is the best route out of poverty’, counter-posing these with brief statements from research participants about the realities of ‘in-work poverty’. The first part of the chapter summarises the thrust of the books descriptions and its overall arguments. This is followed by a description of the layout of the book, chapter by chapter, with discussion of the main findings and arguments contained in each. This chapter introduces the book. It begins by repeating the mantra-like statements favoured by British politicians that ‘work is the best route out of poverty’, counter-posing these with brief statements from research participants about the realities of ‘in-work poverty’. The first part of the chapter summarises the thrust of the books descriptions and its overall arguments. This is followed by a description of the layout of the book, chapter by chapter, with discussion of the main findings and arguments contained in each. This chapter introduces the book. It begins by repeating the mantra-like statements favoured by British politicians that ‘work is the best route out of poverty’, counter-posing these with brief statements from research participants about the realities of ‘in-work poverty’. The first part of the chapter summarises the thrust of the books descriptions and its overall arguments. This is followed by a description of the layout of the book, chapter by chapter, with discussion of the main findings and arguments contained in each.

This chapter sets out the general theoretical and empirical terrain of the book, drawing attention to continuities and discontinuities both in the provision of welfare as an attempt to tackle or at least contain poverty and in the shape and nature of employment in the UK. It defines some of the key terms we use in this book. The chapter highlights the recent turn in research to understanding the dynamics of poverty and it also explains the broader research programme in which the study was located. The chapter also contends with some important, contemporary myths about the demand for and supply of labour. The chapter highlights the broad landscape of changing employment and welfare conditions. The chapters which follow, in the middle of the book, paint a finer portrait of the consequences and reality of these changes as they are lived by people in low-pay, no-pay Britain.

This chapter examines fifty years of poverty measurement, in particular the development of deprivation-based measures from Townsend’s definition of being ‘excluded from ordinary patterns’ of behaviour through Mack and Lansley’s idea of ‘socially-perceived necessities’ to wider frameworks based around Sen’s concept of ‘capabilities’. It argues that these developments have contributed to a widespread acceptance that poverty is relative, with what is seen as inadequate living standards changing as society changes. The chapter charts trends in deprivation and income poverty, and their growing divergence. While both measures reflected the sharp rise income inequality in the 1980s, in this millennium deprivation-based measures have continued to rise while relative income poverty has stabilised. This indicates that deprivation measures better reflect the adverse impact of stagnating wages, rising insecurity and declining public provision. The chapter concludes that poverty research needs to be firmly positioned within wider debates about growing economic and social inequalities.

Loic Wacquant responds to the various contributions earlier in the book reiterating the central aspects of his argument regarding the shift from punitive welfare, to workfare to prisonfare in the USA – a process he is also able to detect in aspects of European public policy. He also poses a question about a seeming lack of dialogue between social welfare policy researchers and criminologists given that disciplinary social welfare and the penalisation of insecurity are core aspects of the ‘neo-liberal turn’.

This chapter explores contemporary debate around security and citizenship, situating our understanding of each within these. It argues that both are, fundamentally, experiences rooted in everyday life, rather than abstract or formal statuses or conditions. The chapter concludes by discussing the methodology underpinning the book’s empirical research.

This chapter analyses the impact of anti-terrorism powers on public experiences of security within the UK. The chapter begins by reiterating the widespread public scepticism toward these powers identified in Chapter 3. A major factor within this scepticism, it argues, was the pervasive view that security has not been enhanced by recent initiatives in this area. Indeed, some individuals – primarily from ethnic minority communities – believed that their security has been directly diminished by the introduction of new anti-terrorism powers. To fully understand this scepticism, however, requires a deeper engagement with public understandings of security, and differences between these. To do this, the chapter begins by exploring public articulations of security threats before introducing six distinct ways that participants in this research discussed the concept of security. Here, security was linked to notions of survival, belonging, hospitality, equality, freedom and insecurity, respectively.

This chapter discusses the rise of non-standard forms of employment since the 1980s. The authors describe how non-standard employment produces economic vulnerability in a variety of ways: low and irregular earnings, underemployment, frequent unemployment or unstable labour market participation. They note that non-standard arrangements particularly affect women workers as a whole and also disproportionately touch racial/ethnic minorities, primarily African-American workers and Hispanics. The authors emphasise the importance of a rights-based approach to employment to combat these trends.

This chapter explores some of the complexities around economies of compassion and the politics of security in local spaces. On one hand, the emergence of migrant shelters demonstrates the ways local actors challenge the state and advocate for migrant rights through the creation of spaces of refuge. Yet at the same time, humanitarian aid shelters become points of contestation in local communities where migrants are feared as racialized and gendered others. The dynamics between priests, shelter workers, and local residents put into relief the ways moral imaginaries of charity, inclusion and justice are shaped by everyday economic and social realities of safety and security.

Chapter 6 addresses female employees’ struggles to keep their positions with the federal government. The number and percentage of women in the federal labor force grew fairly steadily throughout the 1860s, but insecurity and volatility characterized the federal civil service. During the Civil War and immediate postwar period, departments coped with unpredictable workloads through unsystematic, non-uniform, rapid expansions and contractions of their workforces resulting in short employment periods. At the same time, the press of new applicants was unrelenting. Because much of the basic work women did could be adequately done with relatively little training, some supervisors saw female employees as interchangeable. This atmosphere of uncertainty discouraged collective action and forced female federal employees to utilize aggressive strategies to retain and regain the positions they had become reliant upon. In their attempts to remain employed, women demonstrated strength and self-confidence that seemed to have been gained through their federal employment.