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Years of remodelling the welfare state, the rise of technology, and the growing power of neoliberal government apparatuses have established a society of the precarious. In this new reality, productivity is no longer just a matter of labour, but affects the formation of the self, blurring the division between personal and professional lives. Encouraged to believe ourselves flexible and autonomous, we experience a creeping isolation that has both social and political impacts, and serves the purposes of capital accumulation and social control. In State of Insecurity, Isabell Lorey explores the possibilities for organization and resistance under the contemporary status quo, and anticipates the emergence of a new and disobedient self-government of the precarious.
“Presentist democracy is without a people and without nation. Rather than regimes of borders and migration, its borders are sexism and racism, homo- and transphobia, colonialism and extractivism.” In the midst of the crises and threats to liberal democracy, Isabell Lorey develops a democracy in the present tense; one which breaks open political certainties and linear concepts of progress and growth. Her queer feminist political theory formulates a fundamental critique of masculinist concepts of the people, representation, institutions, and the multitude. In doing so, she unfolds an original concept of a presentist democracy based on care and interrelatedness, on the irreducibility of responsibilities—one which cannot be conceived of without social movements’ past struggles and current practices.
This volume in the Political Theory and Contemporary Philosophy series examines one of the most important topics in contemporary political theory: how to conceptualize the relationship between the one and the many. The essays discuss how to reconcile multiple ontologies without subsuming them to a totalitarian unity. While one school of thought (Deleuze, Negri) seeks to create a new ontology based on the many instead of the one, (which, politically, is close to anarchy), another proposes to understand the "one" as the "ultra-one" of the event (Badiou). In this groundbreaking work, leading thinkers explore these debates and offer alternative concepts. Building on Jean-Luc Nancy's essay who proposes an ontology of "singular plurality," contributors aim to synthesize the one and the many and suggest different ways of forming collectives, beyond the dominant representative political forms. An original and challenging work, Politics of the One addresses new possible ways of bringing people together, integrating philosophy with theoretical and practical problems of politics.
This book explains how the 20th century labor standard regime, forged by the International Labor Organization, cast the woman worker as a special type of worker, but a century later, previously excluded home-based workers placed caring labor at the center of debates over the future of work amid new precarity.
Once considered a stepchild of social theory, legal criticism has recently received a great deal of attention, perpetuating what has always been an ambivalent relationship. On the one hand, law is praised for being a cultural achievement, on the other, it is criticized for being an instrument of state oppression. Legal criticism's strategies to deal with this ambivalence differ greatly. While some seek to transcend the institution of law altogether, others advocate a transformation of the form of law or try to employ strategies to change the content of law, deconstruct its basis, or invent rights. By presenting a variety of approaches to legal criticism, What's Legit? highlights transitions and exhibits irreconcilable differences of these approaches. Ultimately, What's Legit? broadens debates that are all too often conducted only within the boundaries of separate theoretical currents.
The condition of precariousness not only provides insights into a segment of the world of work or of a particular subject group, but is also a standpoint for an overview of the condition of the social on a global scale. Because precariousness is multidimensional and polysemantic, it traverses contemporary society and multiple contexts, from industrial to class, gender, family relations as well as political participation, citizenship and migration. This book maps the differences and similarities in the ways precariousness and insecurity in employment and beyond unfold and are subjectively experienced in regions and sectors that are confronted with different labour histories, legislations and ...
Autoethnography is an ideal method to study the ‘feminist I’. Through personal stories, the author reflects on how feminists negotiate agency and the effect this has on one's political sensibilities. Speaking about oneself transforms into stories of political responsibility - a key issue for feminists who function as cultural mediators.
Shannon Jackson explores a range of disciplinary, institutional, and political puzzles that engage the social and aesthetic practice of performance in this collection of twenty essential essays spanning her career. Back Stages starts by considering the historical connection between performance practice and movements of social reform, while later writings analyze disciplinary debates on the place of performance in higher education and within the contemporary field of socially engaged art, tracking fraught and allied relationships to literary studies, art history, visual culture, theater, social theory, and critical theory. At a time of increased aesthetic experimentation and political debate ...
An inside look at women graffiti artists around the world Since the dawn of Hip Hop graffiti writing on the streets of Philadelphia and New York City in the late 1960s, writers have anonymously inscribed their tag names on trains, buildings, and bridges. Passersby are left to imagine who the author might be, and, despite the artists’ anonymity, graffiti subculture is seen as a “boys club,” where the presence of the graffiti girl is almost unimaginable. In Graffiti Grrlz, Jessica Nydia Pabón-Colón interrupts this stereotype and introduces us to the world of women graffiti artists. Drawing on the lives of over 100 women in 23 countries, Pabón-Colón argues that graffiti art is an unre...
Are displaced and emigrated academics “at risk” or “in reserve”? Are political oppression of dissident scholars and economic precarization of academic workforce separate phenomena, or two sides of the same coin? Can the pervasive precariousness in its various forms foster a conversation on shared sensibilities? And, can traumatic experiences like exile and loss eventually lead to a revival of agency? Based on the author’s own experiences and on in-depth interviews with the exiled Peace Academics, At the Margins of Academia offers a broad approach to the challenge of academic labor precarity and the growing academic migration from Turkey to European academic labor markets. It provides a detailed analysis of the systemic background of precariousness and the socio-emotional expressions of being kept in reserve, in conjunction with the antinomies of exile.