Renegotiating Precarity

Renegotiating Precarity

Wages are stagnating and rents are rising. Work is not only hard to find, but increasingly exploitative and insecure. People are forced to take on more jobs and loans just to get by. Privatization has turned entire cities into playgrounds for financial speculation, as social support systems have been withdrawn under the banner of austerity politics. In short, precarity has become a generalized condition.

As a discipline that intersects with almost every aspect of life, architecture provides a context in which we can gauge the neoliberal regime of perpetual debt and unremitting labor. The symposium organized by the Critical, Curatorial and Conceptual Practices program, Renegotiating Precaracity, will explore the causes and symptoms of precarity through specific structures like the home, the office, and the jobsite. One of its aims is to examine the effects of the always and never changing economic order on the way we live and work, while maintaining a focus on the role of architecture within it. However, precarity is not intended to be viewed as a fixed or given set of conditions, but as a field of struggle that continually has to be renegotiated. The other aim of the conference is, therefore, the identification of possible alternatives and sites of resistance.

Precarity and Work
Peggy Deamer, Practice, Professions, and Precarity?
Andrew Ross, Is Working for Nothing Still a High-Growth Sector?

Precarity and Architecture
Lindsey Wikstrom, Living at Work
Laura Diamond, Remittances and the Spaces of Nepali Migration
Douglas Spencer, Investments and Returns: Detroit and Late Fordism

Precarity and Struggle
George Caffentzis, The Art of the Deal versus the Sanctity of the Contract: Capital’s Precarious Life
Silvia Federici, Precarity: A Feminist Viewpoint

Moderated by Felicity D. Scott, Mark Wasiuta, and Manuel Shvartzberg.

Organized by the Critical, Curatorial, and Conceptual Practices Program class of 2019.
Free and open to the public.