About the Network

This international network is dedicated to challenging a major phenomenon of our times: precarity and precariousness. Working in the social sciences and humanities its members refer to concepts of precarity (a political condition, the consequence of uneven power relations under globalization) and precariousness (the inherent state of vulnerability and marginality resulting from the differential distribution of resources), attributing these conditions and states to structural inequality, lack of agency, reduced access to rights and capabilities, and social exclusion. Under scrutiny is the systemic social and economic deprivation of populations in the Global South caused by political neglect or corruption and catalyzing an unparalleled exodus of refugees. There is planetary precarity due to environmental degradation and the crisis of global warming; and recently the new precariat, the subclass whose precaritization appears in aspects of the gig economy, such as zero hours contracts embraced by remittance workers and manifesting in radical economic marginality such as homelessness and soup kitchens. And finally as the pandemic has starkly shown, there is precarity due to lack of access to the internet and its resources: this constitutes the new illiteracy of the 21st century.

The network has benefited from cross-institutional collaborations and inspirational leadership beginning with the Pro-Chancellor of Sri Ramswaroop Memorial University, Lucknow, Mrs Pooja Agarwal, where the network was founded at ‘The New India’ International Conference. There has been generous institutional support from the University of Córdoba, Spain where the network’s first major conference, ‘Precarity, Populism and Post-Truth Politics’ was held in February 2018, Auro University, Gujerat, India where the ‘Challenging Precarity’ conference (February 2019), was supported generously by the then Vice-Chancellor Avidhesh Singh (who has since sadly passed away) , and Tor Vergata, University of Rome, in the ‘Precarious Lives: Uncertain Futures’ conference held in January 2020

Founded in 2017, the network has been presciently placed to address the global crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic, one of such enormous impact and consequence that it can be considered as marking a new threshold in all discourses on precarity. Early on in the time of maximum lockdown, in May 2020, Om Dwivedi, the network’s Deputy Chair, convened a virtual conference, ‘Imagining the Post-Coronavirus World’, hosted by Auro University.