Re-imagineering the Common in Precarious Times

Abstract

The paper explores movements for social transformation in precarious times of austerity, dispossessed commons and narrow nationalism; movements counterpoised to an exhausted neoliberalism on the one hand, and a neoconservative xenophobic populism on the other. Applying ‘rainbow coalition’ as generic concept it points at contours of a globally extended countermovement for social transformation, traversing ‘race’, class and gender, driven by reimaginings of the commons and indicating how they could be repossessed and democratically ruled; that is ‘reimagineered’). A multisited enquiry explores how actors express their claims as activist citizens under varying conditions and constellations, and if/how discourses and practices from different locations and at different scales inform each other. It interrogates whether there may be an actual equivalence of outlook, objective and strategy of ostensibly homologous contending movements which develop under varying local, national and regional circumstances in contemporary communities riveted by schisms of class, ‘race’/ethnicity and gender, occupied by the ‘migration’ issue and challenged by popular demands for social sustainability. The paper contributes to social theory by linking questions posed by critics of ‘post-politics’ concerning contingences of pluralist democracy and revitalised politics of civil society, to precarity studies focused on globalisation and the changing conditions of citizenship, labour and livelihoods.