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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:
- Wednesday 22 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 Wednesday 22 July, 2020, -Paper short abstract:
This paper analyses the life conditions and experiences of Palestinians in Lebanon, and more specifically those living in refugee camps. It aims to understand how Palestinians in camps navigate precariousness, and how they strategize their present and future in uncertain and constraint contexts.
Paper long abstract:
This paper will analyze the life conditions and experiences of Palestinians in Lebanon, and more specifically those living in refugee camps. The history of Palestinians in Lebanon is that of an experienced and transmitted violence, precariousness and uncertainty. Since their forced exile from historical Palestine in 1948, Palestinians have gone through other political violence, such as during the Lebanese Civil war (1975-1990) that caused huge human and material damage and massive displacements, especially in camps. Moreover, camps suffer today from very bad material conditions and lack of basic services (water, electricity…). Furthermore, Palestinian refugees in Lebanon are deprived of several fundamental rights, in terms of employment, social security, education or ownership.
This paper aims to understand how Palestinians in camps navigate precariousness, and how they strategize their present and future in uncertain and constraint contexts. We will see how precariousness and discrimination have produced a narrative in people's everyday life, and how they affect people's aspirations and the way they perceive and conceive their future.
The study is based on an extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Palestinian camps in Lebanon and on an ongoing research on the trajectories of young people in Lebanon, including in particular Palestinians, from education into employment.
Paper short abstract:
The paper shows the links between the concept of Otherness and the temporariness of housing solutions in Rome through an ethnographic research inside a squat, within which migrants and Italians are spatializing their cultural values in an abandoned building in order to create a model of coexistence.
Paper long abstract:
The paper describes the relationships between Otherness and housing policies for low-income people in the city of Rome. It argues that the common point between the two issues lies in the chronicization of an emergency approach, which has led as a consequence a paradoxical "stable housing precariousness" for all those who are perceived as "Others".
Since public housing was born in Rome, it has immediately been related also to migration and it has gradually constructed a cultural configuration of housing as a "social award"; for all those economically and socially disadvantaged categories, policies have always been designed in the name of temporariness and with a little access to basic urban services.
Nonetheless, Rome has also a long counter-story of the squatting for housing, which today guarantees a permanent housing situation (however precarious) to all those who are in housing emergency. These movements are now characterized by the co-existence of migrants and Italians and, for this reason, they are reshaping the historical purposes of the roman struggle over housing in trying to transform the individual right to a house into a more comprehensive right to inhabit the city for everyone. This contribution will focus these aspects through a case study, a squat called Spin Time Labs inside which squatters are carrying on a moral economy (Fassin, 2009) made of a shared system of values, in order to perceive housing not as an ultimate prize but as a right that must be earned through the struggle and the internal collaboration.
Paper short abstract:
This paper discusses the role of a revolutionary hope in dealing with the experiences of violence, precarity, and uncertainty among Turkey's Kurdish and left-wing activists and critical thinkers in two interconnected contexts: Turkey under an authoritarian regime and political refugeehood in Greece.
Paper long abstract:
Since 2015, war and political violence in Turkey have re-escalated and the oppression of dissident thinkers and activists has increased. In the face of brutal state violence, political and economic insecurity, and chronic uncertainty, shared feelings of helplessness, rage, fear, depression, and ambiguous hope/hopelessness have spread among the urban (pro-) Kurdish critics of the regime. Many of them sought ways to leave Turkey or were forced into political exile. The same European migration policies of containment of unwanted migrants/refugees in the margins of Europe on the one hand exacerbate precarity in Turkey by silencing the ongoing violence, and on the other entrap migrants/refugees in a situation of protracted transitionality and existential waiting in uncertainty in Greece. Hence, the lives of those who flee Turkey and end up in Greece continue to be profoundly precarious. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with politicized (pro-) Kurdish young people in Istanbul in 2016-17 and with Kurdish and left-wing political refugees from Turkey in Athens in 2018-19, this paper brings forth the connections and continuities in the affective aspects of the lived experiences of precariousness between the two contexts in the margins of Europe. Building on the existing anthropological literature on hope, it discusses the particular kind of revolutionary hope, present in the Kurdish/Turkish left-wing circles in Istanbul and Athens. Bounded with the notion and lived practices of "comradeship" (yoldaşlık), the revolutionary hope proved to be integral to these people's material and emotional survival in the precarious conditions in Turkey and Greece.
Paper short abstract:
This paper investigates conditions and dynamics of transformation of precarity in a part of service sector, that is, hospitality sector - precisely, kafana (taverns with live folk music) in Serbia from a gendered perspective.
Paper long abstract:
This paper investigates conditions and dynamics of transformation of precariousness in a part of service sector, that is, hospitality sector - precisely, kafana (taverns with live folk music) in Serbia from a gendered perspective. Based on the ethnographic fieldwork and narrative interviews with male and female kafana musicians in Belgrade, Šabac and surrounding, it aims to show that transformations of socio-economic paradigm had profound consequences for the workers in this sector as well, gender regimes included. However, as opposed to factory workers who are most often at the focus of postsocialist studies, life and work arrangements of these workers in socialist times corresponded to what we nowadays call precarious as well. Namely, music market and hospitality sectors were pioneers in establishing market relations, or introducing capitalism, in socialist Yugoslavia, and life-work arrangements of musicians were flexible in socialism too, so for them socio-economic changes of the last decades are not necessarily discontinuous. Rather than discussing whether precariousness was an inherent feature of some life-work arrangements in socialism as well, a consequence of transformations towards "market socialism", or a capitalist intrusion, I will explore which temporalities shape the narratives of these workers, and if these temporalities correspond to the milestones that scholars usually identify as crucial points of postsocialist transformation. I will also tackle the affective background of their narratives and experiences, that they usually express through songs they perform at work on customers' demand, and how the modification of the customers' affects meets their own.