Flexible fathers and precarious mothers

Seminar summary

The contribution is drawn from a narrative research of life stories aimed at exploring the decision-making processes around work–life of the new generations of parents experiencing precarious working conditions in Italy. More specifically, through an intersectional sensitive approach, the seminar aims to shed light on intersecting inequalities along the life course stages of precarious workers, and on the intricate links between precarious work and social reproduction, which have been scarcely explored so far.
The analysis shows that in an apparently very homogeneous group of precarious workers, in terms of education as well as working, family and living conditions, the lived experiences can be significantly diverse, and different (but also recurring) things happen at the various intersections of categories (e.g. gender and migrant status) along the time frames of the life course.
This work makes a twofold contribution to the literature. First, it contributes to labour insecurity studies by analysing, through an intersectional sensitive lens, how the social process of precarisation is embedded in multiple asymmetries contributing to their perpetuation, even in new ways, grounding the analysis in the forms of social reproduction upon which the current mode of capitalist production is founded. Secondly, by investigating individuals’ life stories, it shows how precarisation can be studied as a retrospective/prospective temporal process over the worker's lifetime, a very little explored area which allows us to see precariousness in its ‘productive form’.

How to attend this seminar

This seminar is free to attend with no need to register in advance.

We welcome you to join us online on Wednesday 13 December at 2pm.

Speaker bio

Dr Anna Carreri

Anna Carreri is Assistant Professor (tenure track) in Sociology of Work and Organization at the University of Verona, Italy. At the same University she is scientific coordinator and co-founder of the Research Centre RE-WOrk: REsearching for REmaking Work and Organizing. She is also affiliated with the School of Social Sciences, Hasselt University, Belgium. She published on precariousness and work-life issues, work and gender inequalities, digitalisation and quality of working life, in journals such as Frontiers in Sociology: Work, Employment and Organizations, Current Sociology, Community, Work and Family. She is currently conducting empirical research on gender inequalities in academic careers, and the quality of working life in relation to ‘new’ forms of work and organizing enabled by technology. Anna is also intrigued by new qualitative methodological issues on which she wrote for example in ephemera. Theory & politics in organization, and she is currently editing a book with Michela Cozza and Barbara Poggio for Routledge entitled “Ethics of Engagement in Research Practices: Response-ability in Organisation and Management” (2024 forthcoming).