Dedication
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements

Foreword by Anne Allison

Living with Precariousness
Christina Lee and Susan Leong

Part I: Precarious Conditions
1. Banal Precariousness
Susan Leong

2. A Life for a Voice: The Work of Journalist James W. Foley through the Eyes of his Family
Diane Foley

3. Teaching for Buoyancy in the Pre-carious Present for an Evitable Future
Julian C. H. Lee, Anna Branford, Sam Carroll-Bell, Aya Ono and Kaye Quek

4. ‘Will there be a day that I say I am an equal human being?’ Living with the Compounding Precarity of Seeking Asylum in Australia
Salem Askari and Caroline Fleay

Part II: Precarious Spaces
5. Haunted Futures: (Making) Home in the Ghost City of Ordos Kangbashi Christina Lee

6. Upgrading Downsizing: Tiny Houses as a Response to Precarity
Madeleine Esch

7. Thinking Climate Through Precarity
Ben Beitler

8. Precarity in a Time of Fire and Pandemic
Julie Macken and Sonia M. Tascón

Part III: Precarious Bodies
9. The Road to Asylum
Alice Driver

10. Grieve-able Lives: Precarity in Residential Aged Care
Helen Fordham

11. The Precarious Lives of Slavery Survivors
Alicia Rana and Kevin Bales

12. 216 Westbound: A Topography of Latent Fear
Shona Illingworth, John Tulloch and Caterina Albano

13. Precarious States: Small Explosions in the Time of COVID-19
Alexandra Halkias

List of Contributors

Bibliography

Index

Promotional Information

A multidisciplinary anthology which explores the lived experience of precariousness; from everyday uncertainties that impact the individual to national crises that have destabilizing global impacts.

About the Author

Christina Lee is a Senior Lecturer in English and Cultural Studies at Curtin University, Australia. She is the author of Screening Generation X: The Politics and Popular Memory of Youth in Contemporary Cinema (2010), and editor of books including Spectral Spaces and Hauntings: The Affects of Absence (2017) and Violating Time: History, Memory, and Nostalgia in Cinema (2012).

Susan Leong is Honorary Senior Fellow at Edith Cowan University, Australia. She is the author of Global Internet Governance: Influences from Malaysia and Singapore (2020), China’s Digital Presence in the Asia-Pacific: Culture, Technology and Platforms (2020), and New Media and the Nation in Malaysia: Malaysianet (2014).

Reviews

Represents a significant contribution to the study of precarity ... the dedication of the book’s authors to depicting the visceral nature of precariousness in this volume is invaluable.
*Exertions*

Why is a sense of precariousness so widespread today across diverse situations and ways of life? The collective achievement of this inspiring and beautiful book is to show how a common experience connects people facing different states of vulnerability – from mortal danger in conflict journalism or asylum seeking, to chronic risk in aged care homes and grinding worry about employment and housing – and how they still create strategies for living.
*Professor Meaghan Morris, The University of Sydney*

The human condition has always been precarious. New technological developments and global communications bombard us with daily warnings about the perils we live with: nuclear weapons, debilitating systems and irrational hatreds. This timely book is a measured assessment of where we are at, and could be heading. A warning: It is not all bad news.
*The Hon. Michael Kirby AC CMG, Past President of the International Commission of Jurists and Co-Chair of the IBA Human Rights Council*

As the effects of neoliberal bio-exploitation unfold, precariousness spreads all over planetary life. Today’s generation of humans are walking as aliens in a world that grows every day more unknown. This book outlines a multi-dimensional picture of the precarization of global life. A much needed phenomenological attempt to map the ongoing disintegration of modern social civilization.
*Dr Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, author of After the Future*

Our times are marked by extraordinary socio-cultural, environmental, technological and political upheaval and uncertainty. As a consequence, more than ever we need to critically understand our shared sense of vulnerability, to respond to these disturbing times with clarity, acuity and insight. Readers of this book will be enthralled and heartened to learn that we are not alone in this endeavour. We are all inter-connected by our shared experience of living with precariousness; and this is a solidarity of human agency and spirit that can only make us stronger and wiser.
*Emeritus Professor Baden Offord AO, Curtin University*