‘There’s no such word,’ said my husband. Well, he has been wrong before. For him precarity doesn’t exist; he admits precariousness. Yet precarity is now in vogue among campaigners. Precariousness is used by non-specialists.
It is laughable to see how precarity has become grist for the academic mill. Among recent books on precarity are: Contesting Precarity in Japan (2020); Queer Precarities in and out of Higher Education (2020); In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love: Precarity, Power, Communities, (2022); Migrant Academics’ Narratives of Precarity and Resilience (2023); and last month Precarity in European Film.

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