This article provides a narrative response to a precariousness labour situation. The question it attempts to answer is: how does one cope with the precariousness and injustices of contemporary employment without becoming pessimistic or hopeless? The piece, based on the author’s personal experience, argues that we can tell and write our career narrative and with that influence our response. "This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Reinekke Lengelle, Narrative Self-rescue: A Poetic Response to a Precarious Labour Crisis, New Horizons in Adult Education and Human Resource Development, 28 (1), 46-49, which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.1002/nha3.20130. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/reinekke-lengelle-phd-767a4322/
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I am proud to present the preface I wrote for Silvio Lorusso’s book, which came out in November 2018, in Italian, published by Krisis Publishing in Brescia, Italy. Here is the link if you want to know more about this title and order it. This is critical design theory at its best–Made in Europe. The text is loosely based on earlier postings on his Entreprecariat blog, which is part of this website.
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Although lifetime employment was once commonplace, the situation has changed dramatically over the last century. The group of precarious workers has increased, and with it, the size of the precariat. Although there is a body of research on how precarious workers perceive the effect of their precarity on their social, psychological, and economic well-being, there is no research on the needs of precarious workers. In this article, we report the findings of an exploratory study about precarious worker’s needs. The findings show that the precariat has a diversity of needs, ranging from the need for a higher income to the need for a change in the discourse on self-reliance. Most of the needs are targeted toward the government and are not only related to labor. This is, however, contradictory to the ideology of downsizing the welfare state, in which governments focus on creating more temporary or steppingstone jobs. The needs show that the measures orientated toward the labor market are insufficient because they meet only a marginal part of the needs of the precariat.
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A comparative study of the effects of the pandemic across six countries, including The UK, Australia, Belgium, Cyprus, Ireland and The Netherlands. The authors outline 21 design principles for mobile learning, which is hoped will help us respond effectively in the uncertain present, and plan systematically for an unpredictable, post-pandemic future. This paper is based on the emergency changes we have had to make in the European DEIMP Project (2017-2020), “Designing and Evaluating Innovative Mobile Pedagogies” (DEIMP). DEIMP is undertaken by a transnational consortium comprising partner institutions and schools from the participating countries.
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The propagandization of a Net Generation adds nothing to our understanding of the digital behaviour of young people. Indeed, it is becoming increasingly obvious that the whole concept of a Net Generation rests on incorrect assumptions. Hence, arguments based on a Net Generation are not only irrelevant and misleading but precarious as well. Precarious in the sense that they are mobilized as a decisive means of engineering change, not least in education policy. Only when we stop thinking in terms of the Net Generation can we form a more astute vision of when the deployment of digital learning aids will have a realistic chance of success.
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From the fast-food industry to the sharing economy, precarious work has become the norm in contemporary capitalism, like the anti-globalization movement predicted it would. This book describes how the precariat came into being under neoliberalism and how it has radicalized in response to crisis and austerity. It investigates the political economy of precarity and the historical sociology of the precariat, and discusses movements of precarious youth against oligopoly and oligarchy in Europe, America, and East Asia. Foti covers the three fundamental dates of recent history: the financial crisis of 2008, the political revolutions of 2011, and the national-populist backlash of 2016, to present his class theory of the precariat and the ideology of left-populist movements. Building a theory of capitalist crisis to understand the aftermath of the Great Recession, he outlines political scenarios where the precariat can successfully fight for emancipation, and reverse inequality and environmental destruction. Written by the activist who put precarity on the map of radical thinking, this is the first work proposing a complete theory of the precariat in its actuality and potentiality.
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What does it mean to be precarious, and who self-identifies as part of the precariat? Is it a political position? And if so, how can precariats start to organize themselves? In this first episode of the Zero Infinite podcast we discuss precarity, anti-austerity and work through interviews with Alex Foti, Baruch Gottlieb and Henry Warwick. How did the precariat arise, and who exactly is part of the precariat? The second half of the episode is a homage to the work of the late Mark Fisher. We listen to audio clips from his talk at the INC event MyCreativity in 2014, in which he analyzed the nature of neoliberalism and its consequences for individual wellbeing. What influence does a social system have on mental health, and how can this responsibility become clear?
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This is the first episode of Art in Permacrisis, a podcast on the organization of art workers in the face of the ever-growing stack of crises. How can artists make a living without selling their souls? Can we imagine and practice a sustainable art economy beyond precarity? How should we transform the circulation of artworks, the curriculum of art and design academies, the exhibition programs of museums, and the organization of collectives and unions? We invite speakers with combined backgrounds in art, theory, and organizing to share their insights.For this episode, we are welcoming Kuba Szreder. Kuba is a lecturer in art theory at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw and a freelance curator. He co-founded the Free/Slow University of Warsaw and the Office for Postartistic Practices. The main topic of our conversation is Kuba’s book ABC of the Projectariat: Living and Working in a Precarious Art World.
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In recent years, the importance of sustaining social innovation initiatives, onceinitiated, has gained increasing attention and, in particular, the role that design(ers) can play in this process. However, both the academic study and the practice of design and social innovation are currently lacking sufficient insight into how initiatives are sustained outside of experimental or academic settings and rarely move beyond the involvement of designers and/or researchers. The paper shares experiences from practitioners from Asia-Pacific that are operating in the real world, highlighting their precarious working conditions. The significance of building and maintaining healthy social relations in essential in this context, as these enable the weaving of a strong social fabric around the initiatives that will provide necessarily shelter and to endure long after the practitioners’ involvement. Therefore, facilitating the creation of meaningful social relations should be the key objective for design, instead of designing artefacts.
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