This thesis reports on the findings and implications of gendered precarity in the neoliberal labour market for millennial mothers. By considering the unique intersection of precarity, gender, and age, my findings contribute to the literature by adding qualitative evidence to the anecdotal reports of women being restructured, demoted, and let go from their workplaces while on pregnancy/parental leave. Further, this research contributes to the knowledge on the topic of precarious work by reporting on participants’ “sense of precarity” as a result of structural inequalities. The interviews conducted with six millennial women in their 30s reveal the complexity of their experiences as precarious workers and parents. Specifically, feeling vulnerable in the workplace, the impact of major life changes on millennial mothers’ identities, and participants’ responses to perceived motherhood penalty. The thesis concludes with a discussion of the findings in relation to the literature, considers the limitations of the study and offers possibilities for future research, avenues for policy advocacy, and suggestions for social work practice. / Thesis / Master of Social Work (MSW)

The neoliberal university has transformed professors into front-line workers and their students into consumers of higher learning. Research has shown there is a positive correlation between a student’s perception of supportive faculty and the completion of a degree. Professors are expected to support their students and to engage in emotional labour, labour that tends to be invisible and, thus, often unrewarded for faculty members. An online survey of professors - contract, tenure-track and tenure at three southwestern Ontario universities - indicates that many professors perform affective work as they mediate increasing institutional and student demands on their time and emotions. Data, from the survey and semi-structured interviews, highlights how emotional labour is not just about meeting student expectations, but also about dealing with job insecurity and institutional pressure to provide an educational product where the emphasis is on student satisfaction. The result is that many professors experience high levels of stress and burnout. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA) / This study examines the workloads of professors at three Ontario universities. Through the use of an online survey and in-depth interviews, the working conditions of professors are revealed as well as the emotional labour professors perform in order to cope with the intensity of both institutional and student demands. It is hoped that these findings would be useful to faculty associations to better working conditions through contract negotiations and to increase public awareness of the changing and challenging environment of academia.

Yes / This paper uses precarity as a framework to understand the vulnerabilities experienced by those living with or caring for someone living with dementia. Drawing on qualitative interview data from the Improving the Experience of Dementia and Enhancing Active Life (IDEAL) programme, we attend to our participants' reflections on how they manage the condition and the wider circumstances in which this occurs. To interrogate the utility of precarity, we focus on our participants' descriptions of needs and challenges and set these alongside both the wider contexts in which they seek or offer care (formal and informal) and the sets of values attributed to different ways of living with dementia. Building on the work of Portacolone, our analysis identified four interconnected themes: uncertainty; experiences of support and services; independence and personhood; and cumulative pressures and concerns. We develop this analysis by reviewing how our themes reflect, extend, or depart from previously identified markers of precarity and consider the specific ways in which these markers shape the lives of those living with dementia. / ‘Improving the experience of Dementia and Enhancing Active Life: living well with dementia. The IDEAL study’ was funded jointly by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) through grant ES/L001853/2. ESRC is part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). ‘Improving the experience of Dementia and Enhancing Active Life: a longitudinal perspective on living well with dementia. The IDEAL-2 study’ is funded by Alzheimer’s Society, grant number 348, AS-PR2-16-001.

Although Cambodia banned sand exports in 2017, under-regulated sand extraction in rivers across the country continues, driven by demand from rapid urbanization and land reclamation around Phnom Penh. In the last decade, the sand extraction industry has come under intense scrutiny for its role in riverbank erosion and degradation of aquatic ecosystems, with some activists and scholars highlighting how this damages livelihoods and displaces rural Cambodians. At the same time, the sand boom in Cambodia has created a demand for labour, offering opportunities to rural Cambodians who have few other livelihood options in their home provinces. However, the vast majority of wealth from sand extraction does not accrue to sand labourers. Using qualitative data gathered from various sand extraction and transportation sites along the Mekong River in and around Phnom Penh, this thesis reveals new insights into the sand extraction industry. This thesis draws upon sustainable livelihoods approaches to reveal the difficult trade-offs that rural Cambodians must make when leaving their homes to enter the sand extraction industry. The thesis then uses the concept of precarity to show that sand labour in Cambodia is characterized by precarious employment conditions, including work in remote and isolated locations, separation of families when men leave for sand related labour, a lack of formal work contracts or rights, an inability to diversify income sources, and unpredictable cycles of intermittent work. The thesis then follows the approach used in political ecology literature, examining the power relations that help explain why sand labourers have little choice but to pursue precarious livelihoods, while business and government elites amass great wealth from resource extraction in Cambodia. In doing so, this thesis helps to broaden the understanding of the implications of a little understood yet hugely important resource extraction industry.

My dissertation focuses on the articulation of the concepts of precarity —i.e., temporary, affective, creative, immaterial and insecure labor—and community in an overheating system. My site of inquiry is homelessness broadly, but more specifically the labor of panhandling and the identity of “the panhandler.” I recognize that primary theorizations of precarity have located it as a problem of labor and economy. Others have looked at it from the sociological domain. My work looks at precarity as diffuse across social, political, and communal systems, but primarily as an effect of the problem of overheating as it manifests at varying levels of scale. Narrowing the global vision of such instability and insecurity to a local landscape—to streets, corners, traffic, the people who occupy infrastructural liminal zones and whose lives are precariously bound to the forces of speed and heat—reveals the critical nature of elemental metaphors. That is to say, if we might accept the thesis that we are in an epoch in which speed and time subsumes space and place, and if speed is another way of talking about heat, about intensities, then communication in the over-sped, overheated system is in dire straights. Precarity, I argue, is not causally linked to the breakdown in economy or the breakdown in affiliative bonds or networks—it does not precede or presage these shutdowns. Rather it is the shutdown. Precarity may now be viewed as the management and organization of social, political, affective, and communal bonds around economic and affiliative insecurities. I use ethnographic data from institutional meetings, and conversations with the key stakeholders at varying levels of scale, as well as textual analyses of local policies, news coverage, and public responses to those texts in order to understand how precarious communicative conditions affect the structuration of community and politics.

This dissertation centres on Montevideo’s political and moral economy of discards as experienced through the lives and labour of waste-pickers around Uruguay’s largest landfill, Felipe Cardoso. These workers are known as clasificadores [classifiers] in recognition of their role separating whatever can be recovered from the waste stream from that which cannot. Conducted from a base next to the landfill as a resident of the COVIFU housing cooperative, 12 months of continuous fieldwork and several subsequent visits consisted principally of participant observation conducted with neighbours who worked the waste stream at nearby dumps, recycling plants, and informal yards. The thesis builds on post-human discard studies by recognising the agentive role of the non-human in consecrating materials not only as waste, but also as a ‘commons’. A central idea is that Montevideo’s waste stream is comparable to the historic English commons in several key regards. These include the manner in which disputes over property status centre on use/ access rather than exchange/ ownership; the customary rights which are claimed by vulnerable subjects; and the provision of a refuge from wage labour. A central disciplinary contribution is forged by combining a renewed ethnographic interest in the commons with a historical perspective and the insights of the anthropology of infrastructure, kinship, and materiality. The commons that emerges is neither romantic nor post-capitalist but a vital, temporarily de-commodified space that thrives in the shadow of municipal infrastructure. The thesis is structured by the relationship between Montevideo’s waste commons and its attempted enclosure. Chapter two weaves ethnography of private and public sector waste managers with the history of municipal waste disposal in the city. It pinpoints technologies of containment and elimination as integral to a policy of ‘hygienic enclosure’ deemed necessary to limit waste’s capacity for hygienic and aesthetic chaos as part of attempts to grasp an ever-elusive infrastructural modernity. Chapter three moves from enclosure to the commons. It draws on ethnography conducted at the Felipe Cardoso landfill and explores waste-picker resistance to attempted hygienic enclosure before turning to historical comparison with the English commons. Chapter four narrows in on two material encounters – with melted ice-cream and plastic potatoes – that draw attention to the ways that particular materialities and affordances of what clasificadores call requeche (leftovers) prefigure both their emplacement in the waste stream and their extraction from it. Clasificador praxis is also shown to disturb the boundaries of the landfill as well as those separating subjects from objects and rural from urban commons. Chapter five returns to infrastructure, demonstrating how waste sustains relations of care while also being ‘reversed’ by the social infrastructure of clasificador kin-based labour. The final chapter draws on ethnography conducted at Montevideo’s Aries recycling plant, arguing that recent government waste policy blends clasificadores’ value-based approach to the waste-stream with a Catholic orientation towards the accompaniment of the poor. In privileging jobs for clasificadores, the state maintains a link between waste and vulnerability but encloses only a small fraction of waste-pickers in hygienic plants while dispossessing many more.

In the age of growing precarity and ongoing crises of longstanding political institutions, disaffection and disillusionment have become the norm in the millennial experience in Canada. What kind of humour arises in response to this condition? This project combines in-person and digital ethnography, with in-depth, semi-structured interviews to explore the connections between millennial humour and the making of generational political sensibilities. In response to the increasingly hollow political discourse, my millennial interlocutors—a self-selected group of young, Anglophone Canadians who come together in digital spaces dedicated to leftist politics— seek out internet humour that looks and feels authentic, and that resonates with their lived experience. However, as that humour often focuses on issues such as rising inequality, economic precarity, and environmental disaster, the content that resonates most, often feels “too real,” “gutting” and perhaps paradoxically—unfunny.

This thesis is an investigation into migration, identity and labour among South Asian immigrant women in the Greater Toronto Area. It is an ethnographic exploration of how South Asian migrant’s relationship with precarity and how it informs the process of subjectification when faced with the realities of downward mobility. I focus on the practices and narrative repertoire that aid the relationship between labour and the making of the self. This inquiry has implications for the study of migration and expands on previous conceptualization in the literature on precarity. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

No / Using a critical political economy approach and the concept of labour precarity, the international dive tourism industry in Sabah, Malaysia and its workers’ vulnerabilities are interrogated. Fieldwork data highlights dive tourism’s socio-economic impacts and the precarity of labour within the international tourism sector and also critiques it as a development strategy for a peripheral region. The paper challenges the optimistic views of labour precarity found in the existing political economy literature. Rather than identifying labour empowerment, evidence demonstrates significant worker vulnerability, uncertainty, and contingency – especially among ethnic minorities – resulting from Malaysia’s state-led rentier economy. / British Countil PMI2 (R18)

Yes / Polish migration to the UK post European Union enlargement has been studied extensively but limited attention has been paid to women and their gendered mobility. In this paper, I argue that it is key to turn attention to women migrants as those who are often responsible for reproductive labour and who raise future generations of workers and citizens. This is pivotal to consider in light of ageing European societies and the need for workers and Brexit. Arguably, precarity is characteristic of contemporary life. This applies to the post-Brexit-vote UK and the uncertainty linked to the future after 2019. Precarity is inevitably characteristic of many migrants’ lives often punctuated by a lack of job security which is linked to limited material and psychological well-being. For women migrants, this state of affairs is further compounded by their attachment to the private sphere which often constitutes a barrier to their engagement in the paid labour market on the same footing as men. This paper draws on qualitative primary data gathered from 32 Polish women migrants who were initially interviewed in 2012/2013 and subsequently some of them were re-interviewed in 2016/2017. / The University of Salford, the Jagiellonian Polish Research Centre in London and the Fran Trust.