http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9390-4022
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ABSTRACT
A series of activist efforts across Europe have been organizing under the umbrella concept of precarity, with a long trajectory of movements facing flexibilization policies, austerity programs and migratory restrictions. The rise of precarity activism in Spain has worked at the intersections of increasing vulnerability and mobility producing a prolific body of activist literature and rich repertoire of strategies. This paper explores how alternative concepts of citizenship have developed within debates among precarity organizing prior to and after the financial crisis in Europe. Concretely, feminist precarity collectives in Spain came up with the play-on-words of ‘Care-tizenship’ to evoke a different notion of political belonging with updated collective rights. The original Spanish term is arguably the result of a typo: an accidental switching of the order of vowels in the word ciudadanía resulted in cuidadanía, which totally changed the root word: from city to care. Caretizenship suggests a community of practice forged by ties of caring relationships, mutually attending to basic needs in a context of increasing vulnerability among local, migrant and emigrant populations. While far from a working institution, this activist theorization provides a ‘horizon’ to work toward constituting an opening of political imagination.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Sebastian Cobarrubias, Liz Mason-Deese and Martin Bak Jørgensen for helpful feedback to previous versions of this paper.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. The author developed a genealogy of precarity pointing how the notion opens up from its original meaning linked to labor, reaching to issues of knowledge production, life styles, mobility, housing and health. See: Casas-Cortés 2014.
2. The author first addressed this tension in her participation to an edited volume on the intersection on precarity and resistance. See Casas-Cortés and Cobarrubias 2017: 170–183.
3. This point was made in a Citizenship Studies article I reviewed under a blind review process. At the time of writing, the article was still in the review process and I am unable to cite the author directly.
4. https://caringlabor.wordpress.com/2010/12/14/precarias-a-la-deriva-precarious-lexicon/ (Last accessed 31 July 2018). This is one example of precarious lexicon. Still, the whole glossary of mostly invented terms is yet to be compiled in its entirety. Those vocabulary words are geared to grasp and cope with the deep transformation afoot, naming and criticizing multiple instances of neoliberal flex-exploitation and dispossession of the commons. They also envision political possibilities within and beyond flexible policies, austerity programs and restrictive migratory policies. The author further elaborates those in her book manuscript in process for press submission.
5. Doctoral dissertation fieldwork (2007–2008) founded by the US Anthropology Wenner-Gren Foundation, and post-doctoral research (2009–2011) founded by the National Science Foundation.
6. On the ‘trans-European’ character of precarity organizing, notice how the main day of action of these movements, Euro Mayday, while starting in Milan in 2001, was eventually celebrated in over 20 cities across Europe. Also notice how activist publications on precarity count with contributions by organizers from different countries, for instance see the following issues: ‘Precariat’ in the Vienna-based online journal Transversal (2004); ‘Precarity’ in the Dutch Green Pepper Magazine (2004); and ‘Precarity Reader’ in the British journal Mute (2004/2005).
7. Agency is a key topic in the discussion around precarity in the articles of Citizenship Studies 2016 Issue 20, n.3–4. Paret and Gleeson (2016: 277–294) introduce the tripartite framework of precarity–migration–agency nexus focusing on analyzing different migrant experiences and how their efforts of politicization in the midst of precarious conditions. While my paper intersects with these problematics, I engage a different case of activism: one which self-identifies as a ‘precarity movement’, making precarity its own political motto and identity, and one which not only involves migrants, but one whose participants are mobilizing under their different national affiliations as locals, migrants and emigrants.
8. See ‘Oficinas de Derechos Sociales: Experiences of Political Enunciation and Organisation in Times of Precarity’ (2008) available at http://eipcp.net/transversal/0508/lopezetal/en.
9. The term and notion of ‘care’ has increasingly become central to the discourse of precarity-feminist movements in Spain and resonating in other European countries as well as Latin America. In fact, demands over ‘care’ were the main protagonist during the 2018 International Women’s Day celebration. On 8 April, slogans and signs all over Spanish cities were calling for a ‘care strike’, ‘a social reorganization of care’ and ‘caring rights’, all around the more abstract notion of new kind of rights under a desired regime of ‘caretizenship’. See https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-43324406.
10. The name makes reference to the historic network in the US that organized to help enslaved Africans escape from bondage to freedom. http://www.ferrocarrilclandestino.net/.
11. The Frassanito network was an activist initiative based on numerous European countries including Spain. This text is entitled ‘Euromayday and Freedom of Movement’. Available at: http://precariousunderstanding.blogsome.com/2007/01/05/euromayday-and-freedom-of-movement/#more-45 (accessed 24 October 2017).
12. Frassanito Network. 2006. ‘We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us. Movements and Struggles of Migration in and around Europe’. Text distributed in European Social Forum in Athens.
13. En Transito. 2004. ‘Migrantes y precarios. Señales de un devenir común’. Available: http://www.sindominio.net/metabolik/alephandria/txt/casa_iniciativas_migrates_y_precarios.pdf (accessed 8 May 2017).
14. First, they were called Offices of Social Rights and Precarity Agencies. They started to spring up in the late 2000s in different Spanish cities as the product of years of precarity struggles attempting to create organizational forms outside of traditional union organizing.
15. The text is available in English ‘A very Careful Strike’ at: http://www.commoner.org.uk/11deriva.pdf.
16. Banco de España. 2014. Boletín Económico. Madrid.
17. See note 3.
18. Bridgit Anderson, Nandita Sharma and Cynthia Wright argue that rethinking migration as human activity leads to a deep questioning of the territorializing of people’s subjectivities and as in nationalism: ‘No Borders politics rejects notions of citizenship and statehood, and clarifies the centrality of borders to capitalism’. This discussion is further developed as a book chapter ‘“We are all foreigners”: No Borders as a Practical Political Project’ in Nyers and Rygiel (Citation2012).