With Sylvanna M. Falcón, Steven C. McKay, Juan Poblete, and Felicity Amaya Schaeffer, I’m co-editor of Precarity and Belonging: Labor, Migration, and Noncitizenship (Rutgers University Press, 2021).
Precarity refers to an overwhelming and persistent condition of unpredictability, instability, and insecurity, especially as related to employment, housing, health care, and immigration status. The gig worker, the uninsured, the pension-less, and the undocumented — all can comprise what Guy Standing calls the precariat, the people for whom precarity is a driving force.
Precarity and Belonging looks at mobility through space and society — for example, across international and socioeconomic lines. Our volume examines how the movement of people and their incorporation, marginalization, and exclusion have challenged older notions of citizenship and alienage. We bring precarity and mobility together to explore the points of contact and friction, and, thus, the spaces for a possible politics of commonality, between citizens and noncitizens.
Precarity and Belonging stems from Borders and Belonging, a series of events on human migration that I convened in the spring of 2016 when I was director of UC Santa Cruz’s Chicano Latino Research Center (now the Dolores Huerta Research Center for the Americas), and Non-citizenship, UCSC’s first Andrew W. Mellon Foundation John E. Sawyer Seminar on the Comparative Study of Cultures.
Precarity and Belonging brings together the following 23 contributors: Leisy Abrego, Bridget Anderson, Susan Bibler Coutin, Nicholas De Genova, Tsering Wangmo Dhompa, Sylvanna M. Falcón, Adrián Félix, Véronique Fortin, Shannon Gleeson, Tanya Golash-Boza, Alejandro Grimson, Krittiya Kantachote, Claudia M. López, Steven C. McKay, Emily Mitchell-Eaton, Marcel Paret, Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, Juan Poblete, Catherine S. Ramírez, Felicity Amaya Schaeffer, Alejandro Villalpando, Lewis Watts, and Biao Xiang.
Related Materials
- Check out the virtual Precarity and Belonging book launch.
- Read a clear, pithy distillation of Precarity and Belonging from the UC Santa Cruz Newscenter.
- Watch a brief video in which I describe Precarity and Belonging in a nutshell.
- See more photos by Lewis Watts in the program for Rethinking Migration, the May 6-7, 2016 conference that helped inspire Precarity and Belonging.