Bioprecarity: Latinx Migrants, Vulnerability, and Lived Experience, a volume I’m co-editing with Jonathan X. Inda, approaches bioprecarity as a defining condition of undocumented Latinx migration in the twenty-first century.
Drawing on the work of Judith Butler, the contributors to our volume see precarity as designating “that politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support and become differentially exposed to injury, violence and death.” But we emphasize that precarity is not only an embodied process—that is, a process that becomes materialized in and legible on the body; it is also a lived experience, one that impacts life chances, social mobility, worldview, and affective life. The questions animating our collaboration include: which migrants get to live, and who is left to die or not given the opportunity to live or survive? Under what conditions, material and otherwise, are those lives lived, taken away, circumscribed, or denied? And how do migrants, activists, and cultural workers respond to and work to challenge those conditions and reimagine life and living?
Bioprecarity grows out of a research group supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Crossing Latinidades Humanities Research Initiative based at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Our book brings together 15 contributors and is under contract with Duke University Press.