I-Site ULNE - Appel à projets "Co-tutelles de thèse 2020 - Université du Kent"

Titre du projet de co-tutelle : Experiences, resistance, and resilience to social precarity

Directeur de thèse (Université de Lille) : Bernadette Tillard (Pr, Clersé UMR 8019) et José Caldéron (MCF, Clersé UMR 8019)

Directeur de thèse (Université du Kent) : Albena Azmanova (Associate Professor of Political and Social Thought, Brussels school of international studies, University of Kent)

Doctorant : Jaime Aznar Erasun

Durée : 2020/21 à 2023/24

Résumé : 

One of the great paradoxes that scholars from many fields have attempted to understand is the astonishing resilience of the system of capitalist social relations to survive despite itself (Fleming 2015; Hall, Massey, & Rustin 2015; D. Harvey 2007). Perhaps even more paradoxical, is the fact not only that capitalism has survived despite its devastating crises as if it were on its deathbed, but that it actively reproduces and lives vigorously as it takes different ‘mutant’ forms (Callison & Manfredi 2020). As this research intends to argue, this could have to do, among many factors, with the impossibility or unlikeliness of engaging in social practices that effectively question the systemic logics under which capitalism operates and thus falling into practices that are not simply insufficient to alleviate capitalist forms of domination, but that may in fact exacerbate them. Thus, considering the puzzle this research seeks to scrutinize, three important dimensions have been identified which relate to and help explain some elements of the paradoxes at hand. The first is the political economy under which the conditions of possibility of widespread precarity - the social question of our times - may take place. Second, an understanding of what resistance and resilience mean and what forms they may take in the face of the contemporary capitalism and widespread precarity. Third, looking at the practices that people enact when experiencing precarity will necessarily lead to diving into the literature explaining social practices and how these social practices are constructed. Going through some of the relevant critical literature and performing field work pertaining to these fields will help provide a theoretical framework from which to envision the way capitalism as a social system and its contradictions generate social harm to different strata of people and in turn how people experience this harm as well as what is done about it.