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Phillips, Jon and Petrova, Saska (2021) 'The materiality of precarity: Gender, race and energy infrastructure in urban South Africa.' Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 53 (5). pp. 1031-1050.

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Abstract

Analysis of precarity has offered a critique of labour market experiences and politically induced conditions of work, housing, migration, or essential services. This paper develops an infrastructural politics of precarity by analysing energy as a critical sphere of social and ecological reproduction. We employ precarity to understand how gendered and racialised vulnerability to energy deprivation is induced through political processes. In turn, analysis of energy illustrates socio-material processes of precarity, produced and contested through infrastructure. Our argument is developed through scalar analysis of energy precarity in urban South Africa, a country that complicates a North-South framing of debates on both precarity and energy. We demonstrate how energy precarity can be reproduced or destabilised through: social and material relations of housing, tenure, labour and infrastructure; the formation of gendered and racialized energy subjects; and resistance and everyday practices. We conclude that analysis of infrastructure provides insights on how precarity is contested as a shared condition and on the prospect of systemic change through struggles over distribution and production.

Item Type: Journal Article
Keywords: Precarity, social reproduction, racialization, vulnerability, surplus population
SOAS Departments & Centres: Departments and Subunits > Department of Development Studies
ISSN: 0308518X
DOI (Digital Object Identifier): https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X20986807
Date Deposited: 17 Jan 2022 12:50
URI: https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/id/eprint/36233
Funders: Economic and Social Research Council

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