Everyday Insecurities
This working group is concerned with understanding how seemingly mundane aspects of everyday life are shaped by social structures, political institutions, and social divisions; and how individuals negotiate and challenge their daily insecurities through their actions.
With such an interest everyday practices, we recognise insecurity through the empirical exploration of different material and cultural domains of daily life, such as: food; trade; work; and social relations. We believe that starting from such micro empirical practices enables us to critically engage with broader analytical frames, theorisations and abstract accounts of ‘systemic logics’, while revealing sophisticated regimes of practice that are often defined by heterogeneities. In this way, we ask questions about the ways that daily actions are performed so creating opportunities and insecurities in accessing resources necessary for social, material, and cultural fulfilment. Examples of empirical areas guiding our investigation of everyday insecurities include: food an eating; gender, work and labour; informality; embedded knowledge and personhood; community building; daily mobilities; leisure, and how they all interact with, negotiate and challenge insecurities. These are all understood to be shaped by broader processes of global environmental change, which places questions of transition, transformation, and the inequalities and insecurities arising from such processes at the heart of the work of this research group at a local, regional, and global scale.
Current Projects:
‘Strategies of resistance and resilience to food insecurity and environmental change: the informal trading of food in the Caribbean’. Funded by the University of Bristol’s Cabot Institute.
‘Food Insecurity at the Time of Climate Change: Sharing and Learning from Bottom-up Responses in the Caribbean Region’ Arts & Humanities Research Council - Grant Ref: AH/T004355/1.