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Since the late 1990s, the figure of the creative entrepreneur has played an increasingly significant role in the working life of performers and theatre-makers across the UK and Europe. Focusing on the burgeoning economy and ecology of contemporary arts festivals as a key environment for the creation and staging of solo work, this chapter explores the increasing demand for self-employed artists to pursue individualised risk and reward, and to self-exploit. While unjuried events like the Edinburgh Festival Fringe emphasise that they are ‘open to all’, participation requires artists to take on the risk of significant personal debt and embrace often narrowly-drawn industry standards. In this context, ‘free’ fringe festivals – and the work of artist-led groups like Forest Fringe and BUZZCUT – suggest alternative modes of practice in resistance of neoliberal economies.

This chapter explores the critical intersections between ageing, human development, and the life course as precarious forms of life. The first part reviews the literature on global precarity and the endangerment of liveability in relation to ageing populations, with a focus on neoliberal strategies that naturalise and individualise risky life-course trajectories and health crises. The second part examines selected figures of the obese child, unstable adolescent, despairing mid-lifer, and cognitively impaired older adult as examples of crisis-laden personifications of social problems. Data are drawn from historical texts, popular images and professional knowledges. Conclusions revisit the work of Butler and Foucault to raise questions about current models of resilience and the possibilities of resistance and living differently.

The profile of older adults in the Global North is changing rapidly with increasing proportions of foreign-born ageing populations. Despite their demographic significance, very little research has been conducted on the complex and varied experiences of ageing, risk, and insecurity in this group, particularly with regard to significant life course events such as migration. Using the conceptual lens of precarity, this chapter presents a nuanced analysis of risk and vulnerability in the context of ageing and migration. We begin with a brief overview of the key economic, psychosocial, and cultural markers of precarity in older immigrants. Next, we highlight the ‘politics of precarity’ inherent in the larger political economy of immigration and the invisibility of racialized older immigrants in health and social care policies. We conclude with a discussion on the challenges to understanding precarity in the context of migration, and provide suggestions for future research.

This chapter explores the potential for the development of critical approach to care based on the concepts of precarity and precariousness. Applying those concepts at the level of both theory and analysis, it is argued, serves to draw attention to both the socially constructed uncertainties of care provision conditioned by the labour market and corporate practices on the one hand, and the uncertainties of physical ageing and the ontological vulnerabilities that arise from our bodily existence on the other. Uncertainty also confronts those who provide care in either a paid or unpaid/informal capacity. The precarious conditions of work reflect the financial fragility of the economic supports and the changing and unequal markets that increasingly underpin the way care is provided to the increasing numbers of people who live extended lives today.

Neoliberal political economies have emerged across the west over the last 40 years. This development has been driven by several forces including public policy regimes that prioritize privatization of public assets and services, deregulation of the economy, reduced taxes on high incomes and wealth and use of public revenues to bail out corporate entities that are “too big to fail”. This chapter draws on Streeck’s theory of the Consolidation State dominated by corporate priorities. It describes how neoliberal policy priorities, especially privatization, are being implemented in the health and long term care systems in the U.S, and how these are in turn creating the same levels of economic insecurity and precarity in the context of work and retirement over the last 20 plus years.

This introduction introduces the term ‘precariousness’ by contrasting it with the ‘ephemeral’. Precarious practices that explore the ‘almost nothing’ are situated in the context of studies of ‘nothingness’ and empty exhibitions in contemporary art. Such debates focus on the ‘dematerialisation’ of the art object since the 1960s, which will be addressed from a new perspective following Lawrence Alloway’s 1969 definition of ‘an expanding and disappearing’ work of art. Re-readings of the materiality of contemporary art since the 1960s are related to continental debates concerning ‘precarity’ in the 1990s, and traced back to Hannah Arendt’s 1958 remarks on The Human Condition. Two different philosophical books — Vladimir Jankélévitch’s 1957 Le Je-ne-sais-quoi et le presque rien, and Simon Critchley’s 1997 Very little, almost nothing — point to some of the questions and methods raised by the study of precarious practices.

Arendt’s humanist perspective, which is central to this study, is interrogated in this postscript in two ways. Firsty, it is contrasted with the ‘Chinese’ model of thought proposed by François Jullien in his Treatise of Efficacy, in order to account for the importance of Zen Buddhism for many precarious practices, and to analyse the contradictory drives articulated by each perspective. Another critique of humanism, levied by feminists and post-colonial discourses, inflect my remarks concerning the predominance of white, middle-class male artists in this book. The specific politics of precarious practices are outlined through reference to further debates concerning precarity and precariousness.

Nancy refers with some frequency in his writings to abandonment, a condition of being abandoned that comes to characterize many of the larger concepts for which his writings are better known. While the term spans all of Nancy's writings to the present, it comes to a focus in “Abandoned Being” from 1981, a text in which Nancy claims that “abandoned being has already begun to constitute an inevitable condition for our thought,” and that “the ontology that summons us will be an ontology in which abandonment remains the sole predicament of being.” This essay turns on series of ten theses for thinking through the rapport between abandonment and contemporary issues of precarity, a more recent term that has played a decisive role in mass demonstrations against forms of inequality and injustice, the recomposition of capital, transformations in the nature of work and labor, and contemporary forms of social existence. In this sense, the paper addresses the different ways in which Nancy's references to abandonment reconfigure precarity from the historical, political, and sociological frameworks in which it is situated, just as precarity reframes Nancy's references to abandonment from the philosophical lineages in which it is largely understood.

This chapter considers the precarity of graffiti grrlz’ social and subcultural status. Graffiti subculture thrives on social relation; in this economy, aesthetics and peer recognition have value, but who gets to spend or accrue this value through their artistic labor differs based on gender conventions. Graffiti grrlz are vulnerable within this economy because their aesthetics and their bodies (thus, their peer recognition) are valued differently—often, their contributions do not “count.” By way of a comparative analysis of two annual, international all-grrl events—Ladie Killerz (Australia) and Femme Fierce (United Kingdom)—the chapter asks what the public collective performance of feminine identity markers does within spaces where heterosexist male masculinity is the valued convention. Through the strategic public performance of an undervalued gender identity, these “ladiez” and “femmes” claim their subcultural ownership, transform their precarious social belongings, and activate the social and political power of feminist collectivity.

This chapter examines the thematic variety of Guédiguian’s work since the 2000, starting with the dystopian La ville est tranquille. It deepens the analysis of friendship, the non-consanguine family, national identity, and evolutions in economic oppression (mainly the new precariat class). It investigates new directions, such as Guédiguian’s interest in his Armenian identity in Voyage en Arménie. The chapter also investigates some of the longer-term effects of Guédiguian’s basic project.

Peacekeepers now consider “protection of civilians” to be central to their obligations – both morally and, at least since 1999, usually as a matter of their mandate. The concept of “protection” is not as clear as it may seem; some kinds of protection may preserve physical life at the cost of impeding civilians’ abilities to live meaningful lives, or provide short-term safety while interfering with the goal of creating a more secure environment long-term. This is especially so because peace building often requires contact between groups and individuals in conflict, rather than keeping safe distance. Peacekeepers also need to be aware of the ways in which their own actions can make people unsafe, rather than seeing themselves as simply providers of protection from other dangers – particular attention is paid, in this regard, to the problem of sexual abuse and exploitation. This chapter seeks to provide a more sophisticated analysis of protection in terms of vulnerability, the ways in which our abilities to pursue our own lives are both enhanced by, and dependent on, the actions of others.

This chapter widens the scope of inquiry to an emotion that is not ordinarily treated as religious: anger or fury (raudra rasa). Anger, a sentiment often discouraged in religions oriented toward peace and love, can push religious communities to act against injustice and oppression. This chapter considers the role of fury in the ethical struggle for justice by drawing upon Judith Butler’s notion of performed precarity to frame an analysis of both the limiting forces (precarity) and the agency (performance) entailed in Dalit drumming arts. In contrast to the injunction to pacify anger in dominant Hindu and Christian sensibilities, this chapter argues for the religious import of Dalit expressions of fury.

In this chapter we examine in detail minority women’s institutionalised precarity in pre and post crisis France, England and Scotland. Even though minority women experience systemic social and economic inequalities, too often their experiences are erased or devalued by social movement allies and policymakers alike. This is political racelessness enacted through both political discourse and empirical data gathering and analysis. We argue that minority women experience a paradox of misrecognition—they are simultaneously invisible and hypervisible in the constructions of poverty, the crisis and austertiy. Using an intersectional framework, we will demonstrate how minority women, a heterogeneous group, experience systematic discrimination and multidimensional inequalities based on their race, class, gender and legal status. In this chapter we focus specifically on minority women’s experiences in the labour market as access to the labour market and the quality of available work is a key determinant of poverty and inequality. We also explore the particular ways in which minority women are either rendered invisible or hypervisible in key social policies meant to address their routinised inequalities.

The conclusion proposes the need for a more contextualised and a more politicised medical humanities. It also urges a repositioning of the arts and humanities so that they play a more critical, and potentially constitutive, role in relation to the medical. While the volume has been critical of mainstream medical humanities, its continued focus on empathy produces a thread of continuity across the first and second waves of activity in the field. In this sense, the conclusion indicates that, by fostering attunement to a more critically sensitive model of empathy, the medical humanities can move forward in new and surprising directions, as well as remaining grounded in, if differently oriented towards, its founding ethical commitments.

For women who have stopped cutting, the success of interventions against cutting in northern Ghana is also an index of a troubled economy and consequent bodily vulnerability and precarity. Chapter 5, Cutting in Times in Scarcity: Blood Loss and Slow Harm after NGOs, recasts the aftermath of governmental achievements in light of the perspectives of rural women in the Bongo district targeted by NGO and state interventions. Taking their concerns about lack of blood as a starting point, I explore how they problematize harm and make sense of the end of cutting. Cutting is now seen as unworthy of blood loss, and as a critical event that generates a lifelong susceptibility to illness. Cutting had to stop, they say, given how the struggles of the contemporary moment have meant that women can no longer afford to lose blood. Furthermore, while NGOs and the state seek to isolate cutting in a hermetically-sealed world of rural northern Ghanaians who resist change, these women link the end of cutting to national and pan-African concerns and idioms, joining a chorus of voices that criticize national blood shortages and emphasize the associated failures of biopolitical care.

Poverty as measured by material deprivation through lack of economic resources remains absolutely central to understanding the causation and patterning of most aspects of social exclusion and a wide range of social outcomes. Concerns are expressed about the implications of trends to greater inequality, marketization and loss of social cohesion, as well as stagnating living standards and increased precarity in the workplace and housing market. While the multi-dimensional perspective combining poverty and social exclusion is shown to be of value the emerging behavioural agenda around poverty requires critical challenge.