Precarious Places: Social, Cultural and Economic Aspects of Uncertainty and Anxiety in Everyday Life(Prekarisierung und soziale Entkopplung – transdisziplinäre Studien)

The book offers a cross-disciplinary perspective on various aspects of precariousness in contemporary culture and society, concentrating on the topographical aspects of sources and causes of uncertainty and anxiety. Precariousness and precarity are themselves provisional and uncertain categories, though ones inviting to rethinking the scopes of precarity and precariousness from the perspective of locality and of places involved in their otherwise global range. The recent years have shown some ways in which precarity has changed its status and has become a strongly debated area not only in economic and political disputes, but also in philosophical debates and various fields of research related to cultural studies. The articles included in the volume address the spatial scope of anxieties and uncertainties involving numerous men and women affected by the several decades of the neoliberal insistence on various kinds of flexibility which, in turn, has put in motion numerous new mechanisms of exclusion and marginalization. Apart from this, a historical view on the making of precarious places is also offered in the pages of the book.

Table of Contents:
Introduction.- A Banality of Evil: Precarity as the Offspring of Individualism.- Artists’ Precarity in the Context of their Social Integration.- Socioanalysis beyond borders: fieldwork in a social world in crisis.- Training for Work at the Margins of the Projective City.- Placelessness and Precarity. Mobility of Labor in Quasi-Utopian Spaces.- The Social and Political Implications of the Precariat. A Backlash or a Transformation of the Post Fordism formation?- Warsaw: Precarious Spaces, Precarious Memories.- On the Uses of Precarity. Knowledge, Innovation and Academic Labor in Precarious Times.- Start Ups, Social Networking and Self-Tracking – The Neoliberal Freedom of the Entrepreneurial Self in the Digital Age.- Revisiting Territories of Relegation: Class, Ethnicity and State in the Making of Advanced Marginality.

About the Author :
Dr. Tadeusz Rachwał is Professor at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Warsaw, Poland.Dr. Rolf Hepp is professor for Sociology at the FU Berlin, Germany.Dr. David Kergel is Lector at the University Siegen, Germany.