A Genealogy of Precarity: A Toolbox for Rearticulating Fragmented Social Realities in and out of the Workplace

The term precarity has been circulating Europe since the late 1980s and is currently used by social movements to contentiously challenge classical notions of production, reproduction, and citizenship. This paper follows the development of the term among several activist networks in Europe (mainly in Spain) through their engagements with crises of the welfare state, new contractual and working arrangements, migrant labor and mobility, and gender. These social movements' specific conceptual production confronts increasing fragmentation and complexity around the workspace, rearticulating a series of identities, imaginaries, and militant practices in an open-ended process of resignification. This paper shows how precarity evolves as a political toolbox stretching beyond the workplace and national borders, enabling a Deleuzian politics of unfixed alliances.