Crisis seems to have become the normalized condition in which we live our lives and make sense of the world around us. Each new iteration of this condition, caused by wars, natural disasters, and recently the Covid-19 pandemic, further cement our perception that crisis has become permanent. This perception is further fueled by neoliberal globalization that builds on what Naomi Klein conceptualized as disaster capitalism. Governments that adopt neoliberal economic policies, Klein notes, tend to exploit crises to introduce structural adjustment plans during times when populations are too beaten down to mount an efficient opposition. By doing so, neoliberalism intensifies our sense of crisis as it grinds down our sense of security. Whereas theories of neoliberalism focus on the role of the economy in generating conditions of precarity, in recent years, scholars also started examining the social lives and cultures of this condition. Furthermore, they began exploring how conditions of precarity give us hope and galvanize our desire to reform our lives, reach out to others, and build new communities. This course will introduce students to theories and ethnographies of precarity, as well as works that analyze transformations in the ways we participate in the political domain to fight locally specific conditions of precarity. We will read texts by Isabell Lorey, Guy Standing, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Sarah Ahmed, Elizabeth Povinelli, Dewa Woodly, and Susan Buck-Morss, among others. The course will be divided into three units that will build on each other. These include Theories of Precarity, Ethnographies of Precarity, and Theories and Ethnographies of Precarity Politics.
Number of Credits
3
Gabriella Lukacs