Precarity and Social Contract

This group seeks to explore the problem of precarity within the contemporary world. Precarity here is meant to refer to the increasing contingency, instability, and uncertainty of labor and social reproduction in late modernity. By specifying precarity within the contemporary world, the working group aims specifically to explore precarity beyond what is usually its Western European frame of reference and the disintegration of Western European Keynesian state economic planning. Rather than understand precarity asa new “state of exception” in reference to this frame, the working group wants to explore precarity through a much wider geographical lens and to reposition what has happened to labor and social reproduction in the global north in the post-Cold War context in light of a much more widespread condition of life. In order to focus these discussions, we propose that precarity be situated in light of questions of social contract, and notably at a time when the very conditions of social contract are undergoing profound transformation.

Coordinated by:

[from left to right]: Philip Armstrong (Comparative Studies), Mat Coleman (Geography), and Shannon Winnubst (Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies)