This plateau explores how the precarious is constructed, represented, and transformed through communicative processes. Drawing on Jesús Martín-Barbero’s concept of cultural mediation, it examines how imaginaries of the precarious circulate across local, national, and transnational levels, shaped through the interaction of media, literature, art, and everyday cultural practices.
The plateau engages with forms of symbolic representations as well as the emotional, ethical, and aesthetic dimensions that play into the production of precarity of precarity. Particular attention is paid to the fact that in the Global South, making precarity visible can carry political or physical risks for those who challenge dominant regimes that control what can be said, shown, or changed. This is so because, mediating precarity holds transformative potential: by reclaiming one’s voice and narrating lived experiences, individuals and communities can break through imposed silences and rebuild their own agency.

Plateau 2 explores how the precarious is mobilized as a symbolic, material, or political resource in contexts of social conflict, by state actors or elites, but also by a wide network of actors such as social movements, NGOs, activists, and local power brokers. Plateau 2 addresses principally the dialectics between politics of precarity and its contestation. While institutional politics of precarity use precarisation as a means of political subjugation, figurations of the precarious can also play an important role in contesting these politics of precarity by transformative politics from below. One of the crucial research questions for Plateau 2 is thus how transformative potential may emerge in contexts where politics of precarity consists in mining the very grounds from which to build resistance. Against this theoretical backdrop, we want to look, in accordance with our subject-centred approach, into the experience of everyday conditions within these struggles and the ways in which social subjects imagine or put to practice forms of contestation albeit in self-precarising ways.

Plateau 3 explores the role of figurations of the precarious in social and cultural struggles over urban space. It engages with current debates in urban and precarity studies, especially in the context of mega-urbanisation in the Global South, where dense populations, extreme diversity, inequality, and insecurity intensify precarious experiences. The (mega)urban spaces of the Global South are of particular interest for studying dynamics of precarisation as they constitute spaces of entanglement in which Western urbanisation, as a by-product of colonial expansionism, co-exists with both autochthonous forms of organising social proximity and a wealth of emerging practices for living with instability, modes of operating, or rhythms of endurance (Simone 2018, 2019). To approach these urban dynamics from a subject-centred perspective, Plateau 3 adopts the concept of (multi)territoriality (Haesbaert 2013) —including processes of de- and reterritorialisation—as a way to understand space relationally, dynamically, and concretely. The Plateau seeks to encompass the interplay of everyday practices, institutional politics, forms of civic agency and cultural production. It thus involves two levels of figuration: the complex social dynamics that produce precarious living conditions and can be investigated at different geographic scales, on the one hand, and, on the other, imaginations of the urban (Amin / Thrift 2002) that play a central role in how populations relate to their cities and how they locate the precarious.

Plateau 4 will contribute to an ongoing reflection in Environmental Humanities and Social Sciences on “ecoprecarity” (Nayar 2019) in the sense of both the precarious lives that humans lead in the process and event of ecological disaster, and the increasing precarious state of the environment itself as a result of human interventions. The main focus is on how to understand ecological change and social impact in ways that transcend Western anthropocentrism and that draw upon ecologies of knowledges from the Global South. Against the backdrop of debates about the end of the Anthropocene or Capitaloscene, Plateau 4 aims to engage in a broad interdisciplinary dialogue that involves sustainability research and ethics, political science, ecocriticism in literary and cultural studies, global economic history, environmental justice and the right of nature. The plateau will engage with local accounts of how globalised extractivism, neocolonial economies and land grabbing are experienced and contested in the Global South. It will pay particular attention to political ecologies and alternative ontological landscapes from the realm of indigenous and autochthonous cultures that imagine and practice post-extractivist economies and life forms. Because of the complex forms of translocal economical entanglements that produce ecoprecarity in the Global South, particular heed will be given to embed local case studies into the larger framework of transnational interconnectedness.

Thinking precarity from a subject-oriented perspective necessarily includes focusing on the bodily dimensions that come into play in dynamics of precarisation in diverse and complementary ways. Plateau 5 conceives of the body as an arena of social and cultural struggle. The bodies of people in situations of precarity expose them to various and unequal forms of precarisation but, at the same time, may open paths to resilience, resistance, and embodied agency.
We will concentrate in the first funding phase on the question of how bodies are precarised because of gender, gender identity, or sexuality. Our main focus will be on how actors develop social and cultural resources to negotiate, cope with, and overcome the impairments imposed upon them by different forms of gendered violence in a broad sense—for example, physical violence against women or LGBTQ+ individuals, as well as structural violence in the form of limited access to health care or reproductive self-determination.