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- Convenors:
-
Antónia Pedroso de Lima
(ISCTE-IUL CRIA)
Maria Claudia Coelho (Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro)
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- Discussant:
-
Heike Drotbohm
(University of Mainz)
- Formats:
- Panels
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 21 July, -
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
Short Abstract:
Pushing further the analysis on the effects of precarity the panel address processes of recreating ways of living and worldviews in diverse ethnographyc contexts of precariousness and through different analytical dimensions.
Long Abstract:
This panel aims to address the processes of recreating ways of living and worldviews in diverse contexts of precariousness. To push further the analysis on the effects of precarity we need to compare cases both from Europe and other countries and of different social, political and/or economic grounds: a) government policies guided by austeritarian guidelines; b) contexts of consistent and constant precariousness; and c) lived experiences of varied forms of dispossession and their emotional expressions.
Contexts of this nature have a particular heuristic value as they mismatch hegemonic and stable forms of thinking, acting, feeling and, especially, of planing for the future. These misadjustments are the basis for the development of a wide range of strategies to deal with the experience of precariousness, strategies that make more visible the lost way of life of the affected contexts.
We welcome papers that analyze the current alterations in discourses, practices and emotions to analyse the transformative effects of precariousness exploring the following questions: a) what strategies are deployd to deal with precarity, deprivation and insecurity, from the point of view of increasing solidarity and the dispute for scarce resources? b) How do people explain to themselves the causes of deprivation, from the point of view of the articulation between individual agency and macroeconomic causality? c) What are the emotions aroused by these contexts in relation to time (past, present and future): hope, fear, anxiety, nostalgia, resignation, resilience, indignation or others?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 21 July, 2020, -Paper short abstract:
This paper analyzes strategies employed in dealing with precariousness in contexts of crisis. Its focus is on the articulation between emotions and moralities in the process of choosing ways to face deprivation experiences.
Paper long abstract:
This paper analyzes strategies employed in dealing with precariousness in contexts of crisis. Its focus is on the articulation between emotions and moralities in the process of choosing ways to face deprivation experiences. Research takes on a comparative approach, addressing strategies adopted in dealing with contexts of macroeconomic crisis - the Portuguese case during austerity policies - and in dealing with contexts of institutional crisis - the Brazilian case of public servants at Rio de Janeiro in 2016-2017. Its theoretical outline combines insights from the anthropology of emotions, gift-giving analysis and economic anthropology. The methodology employed is the in-depth interview, approaching issues such as: a) understanding of possible causes of the situation of precariousness, emphasizing interviewee perception about his/hers own responsibility for it; b) strategies deployed to face deprivation (indebtedness, costs reduction, search for new sources of income); and c) emotional grammars which guide/are elicited by these strategies, such as indignation, shame, hope, anguish, anger, etc.
Paper short abstract:
Focussing on practices and attitudes of young adults, this paper explores how both material needs and moral values ascribed to work contribute to perpetuating labour exploitation. Yet, enduring experiences of precarity also bear an unruly potential to question the normativity of paid work.
Paper long abstract:
Over the past decade, the precarisation of employment in Spain has accelerated and intensified and has complicated the access to living wages, employment-based social security, and a 'middle-class lifestyle' for many people. This paper examines the shifting forms and meanings of work in (post-)crisis Spain through the experiences and narratives of highly educated young adults in Barcelona. Besides their continuous struggles to make ends meet, they are also challenged to find ways of adapting to, and moving within, a social environment where socially inculcated normative expectations of work and life are no longer (fully) accessible to them. I show that in a context of increasing employment precariousness, paid work does not lose its importance when it comes to attributing social value and personal autonomy to the individual. Despite the exploitative and degrading working conditions, gainful employment still remains the principal and preferred means of livelihood of my research participants. At the same time, however, the precarious situation in the labour market stimulates them to challenge socially inculcated values and taken-for-granted aspirations. Learning to live with permanent uncertainty, for them, not only means to subject themselves to the adverse structural conditions, but also to learn how to refuse being constantly afraid of an uncertain future. I explore their deliberate efforts to withstand feelings of constant anxiety as a potential starting point for questioning the normativity of paid work and for decentring wage labour as both a central institution and a core moral value of contemporary societies.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines how rapid changes in the political-economy (austerity) ánd long-term realignments of social hierarchies (individualization) change caring, increase fears of abandonment, and bolster familialism.
Paper long abstract:
The Brazilian constitution of 1988 states that health is a right of every individual but the constitutional right to health contrasts sharply with everyday reality. Biehl (2013) argued that abandonment and dehumanization are central mechanisms through which the neoliberal Brazilian government fails to care. When analyzing Global Care Chains, Nguyen, Zavoretti and Tronto (2017) found that neoliberalism increased precarity ánd gave rise to familialism; a highly gendered ethics that holds the family responsible for caring. This paper builds on these notions of abandonment and familialism to analyse the everyday struggles over healthcare in Brasília. Neoliberalism, the economic crisis and austerity measures strengthened fears of abandonment that seem to underlie a political discourse that calls for the restoration of the caring and 'traditional' family. But fears about being abandoned and the ideology of familialism might also have other causes such as realigning social relationships and hierarchies. During the past decades, individualization, urbanization, and emancipation put, often highly unequal, care arrangements into the balance. During that same period, life expectancy increased rapidly and put a strain on precarious care arrangements. How can one best examine the consequence of these changes for precariousness and caring? The underlying theoretical challenge is to examine fears of abandonment and the ideology of familialism in light of both rapid and strongly felt political-economic changes (crisis, austerity), as well as longer term, and therefore less manifest, realignments of social relations and hierarchies (individualization, emancipation)?
Paper short abstract:
On the basis of an etnographic research in Barcelona about everyday life of construction workers during the crisis, I will focus on how austerity affects the relationship between emotional states and conceptions of injustice. The paper will ground emotions in the field of political economy.
Paper long abstract:
This communication is based on an ethnographic research in Barcelona carried out in different everyday life contexts of construction workers during the crisis period. I will focus on how austerity affects the relationship between two dimensions: emotional states and conceptions of injustice. Since the real estate bubble burst in 2007, construction workers have been suffering an extended period of precariousness resulting in emotional disorders. In describing their feelings, construction workers use expressions more or less similar to biomedical discourse, such as stress, to feel sick to the stomach, to be fucked, anxiety, to be irritated, depression, feeling of choking, to be absent, etcetera. Simultaneously, these workers analyze their own material situation through conceptions of injustice, which tends towards a class critique. They point out politicians, bankers and big businessmen as people who controlled all and are the real beneficiaries of the bubble and the crisis. Although workers' conceptions of injustice normally include systemic denounces when speaking about employment, labor conditions or redistribution, this is blurred when they express emotional states. Therefore, it is common to find a gap between conceptions of material precariousness as a systemic injustice and the feeling of discomfort that are read as an individual problem. Following the studies of Ong (1987) and Scheper Hughes (1997), this gap accentuates when the informants use biomedical frameworks to express their emotions. Precisely this gap allows this paper to ground emotions in the field of political economy (Abu-Lughod and Lutz, 1990).
Paper short abstract:
As financial difficulties increased in Portugal as a result of 2011 socioeconomic crisis, in this paper I wish to describe how feelings and emotions prompted family concerted agency to solve day to daily life in a Lisbon peripheral semi rural context.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper I wish to describe a particular way to address long standing precarity in a Portuguese context. In 2014 Portuguese government undertook a bundle of measures arising from the political economic arrangement established with TROIKA, a body composed by International Monetary Fund, European Central Bank and European Commission. This measures aimed to balancing budget deficit which was strongly affected by 2007/08 global financial crisis. These measures took several forms mainly in the social domain, mostly cuts in social benefits, wages and pensions, and facilitation of unemployment. In general terms, austerity resulted in a drastic loss of family budgets which forced families to rearrange their lives, rethinking and reframing their present and future, forcing them to deal with daily needs that seemed to be covered till then. David's family had to cope with the long standing scarcity of family resources, in that time exacerbated by the shrinking of family revenue. This family had to redesign the ways of solve needs and reconstruct the idea of personal agency as the mainly structure that would be helpful for them to "get by". Despite scarcity and deprivation of material and intellectual assets were already part of their life, insecurity took new symbolic shapes as difficulties become more evident in their livingness. I wish to explore and offer analytic material to analyse in greater detail how macroeconomic and historic contexts frames feelings and emotions, that triggers harsh mechanism to solve needs in a sociocultural context strongly boosted by national political solidarity paradigm.