This chapter investigates why people join pro-oil campaigns. Attending to the case study of Canada’s Energy Citizens (CEC), the chapter argues that the campaign’s early stages relied on personal connections between members as much as fealty to a political cause. The fledgling campaign mobilized staff’s friends and coworkers, who joined as a show of collegial support. These bonds were solidified by shared feelings of precarity, with members believing that their own livelihoods and communities were dependent on the largesse of oil companies. It was the threat of losing their way of life – or more exactly, the perception that their way of life was under attack from environmentalists and legislators –that kept pro-oil campaigners mobilized. Joiners’ enthusiasm for supporting industry was often tempered by feelings of risk, however, as they worried about how becoming the face of Big Oil might affect their employability or personal relationships. Joiners also critiqued CEC’s focus on civility, which they believed undercut the effectiveness of the campaign.

Chapter 4 examines how contemporary poetry plays with the world and necessarily puts its own relation to the world at risk, thereby making visible the fragility and creative potential of the world. I analyse wordplay, translational strategies and ‘drifting’ trajectories in poems by Hong Kongese Sinophone poet Xi Xi, contemporary French poet Valérie Rouzeau, Japanese-Francophone poet Ryōko Sekiguchi, Taiwanese Sinophone poet Hsia Yü and multilingual poet Caroline Bergvall. What makes these poets comparable, I argue, is their shared concerns about the poet’s relation to the world, about translational and translingual poetics, migratory and dispersive trajectories of language, identity and life. I examine how these poets employ ludic poetic language to incorporate and transform risk. A poetics of risk emerges from poetry’s performance of the precarious conditions of contemporary life and ultimately of poetry itself.

While the rest of the book takes the form of a constitutional law text largely based on discussion of theory and court precedent, the prologue provides the lived, empirical day-to-day context out of which the project arose by sharing the stories of the ordinary people on whom the topics discussed have primary bearing. Moreover, given the grounded, ethnographic method from which the prologue’s scene-setting stories draw and the ‘constitutional ethnography’ to be applied more broadly as a methodology throughout the book, the prologue draws inspiration from qualitative scholarship’s emphasis on the need for researchers to state their positionality vis-à-vis the research. The prologue therefore describes the global transdisciplinary approach adopted in and through the book project which primarily builds upon critical Black, Indigenous, postcolonial and decolonial scholarship developed in the Global South and by marginalised communities in the Global North.

The chapter sets out to examine Nairobi as a site of cultural imagination. It argues that since its founding by the British colonialists, Nairobi has featured prominently as a site of “rest” for its many immigrant communities but also for the local Kenyans from its rural hinterlands. The chapter further examines how writers of African fiction have tapped into its rich tapestry, turning it into a powerful archive and a rich source of literary imagination. The chapter shows how Nairobi has become a site where the antinomies of the new nation-state play themselves out, as it gets mobilized by writers of fiction to figure a number of competing cultural and social imaginaries within Kenya and the East African region more broadly. By drawing attention to a set of fictional works on Nairobi, the chapter allows us to literally take a “walk” through the streets of Nairobi and to absorb its full significance as a layered site of archival imagination. It offers a glimpse of Nairobi as a bottomless resource for archive-building – a site of endless potential for literary imagination.

Chapter 2 traces the growing sentimentalization of the Indian ayah in nineteenth-century British imagination. Mrs. Sherwood’s relationship with her Indian maidservants is explored through her voluminous missionary writings, which reveal the role of Christianity in shaping mistress–maid relations in the British Empire. The chapter then explores why, during moments of colonial violence, such as the 1806 Vellore Mutiny and particularly the 1857 Indian Rebellion, the Indian ayah’s fidelity to the white family became so important in British imperial imagination. In British visual and literary culture, particularly in missionary literature, the Indian ayah’s loyalty morally legitimized British colonial rule during the turbulence of Indian rebellions and later Indian anti-colonial nationalism. The period of growing sentimentalization of the ayah, however, was also a period of growing legal precarity for ayahs, with the relaxation of older legal paternalism and the disappearance of earlier gendered legal sympathy towards ayahs. Exploring cases of individual ayahs from legal archives, this chapter argues that the cultural veneration of the ayah’s fidelity concealed the vulnerability of real-life ayahs.

The book concludes with a summary of the domestic and moral labors of the ayah from the mid 1700s to the mid 1900s. The Conclusion explores the transformation of the ayah’s role from a child’s nurse and ladies’ maid in the colonial era to elder-care and patient-care responsibilities in contemporary India. More broadly, the Conclusion traces the nonregulation of domestic labor from colonial capitalism to today’s neoliberal capitalism and its impact on the lives of India’s care workers and domestic workers, who form the largest section of the informal female workforce. Finally, the Conclusion discusses how the increasing gig-ification of domestic labor, the rise of digital platforms and placement agencies, and increased mobility of domestic workers serving elite urban and transnational Indian families, has increased the precarity of South Asian care workers and domestic workers in recent years.

Chapter 5 brings together a range of “voices” of Indian ayahs – ventriloquized voices, epistolary voices, and juridical voices – which provide rich first-person insights into their lives and perspectives. Indian ayahs’ care labor involved entertaining British children with fairy tales, which this chapter uses as an archive of the worldviews of ayahs. This chapter reproduces some rare unpublished handwritten letters from ayahs to their British employers, to let the voices of ayahs speak for themselves. The letters reveal how ayahs cultivated intimate epistolary relationships across imperial hierarchies of race and class. The letters also show how ayahs reiterated the British narrative of their fidelity and cannily deployed their own precarity to appeal to the sentiments of British employers, thereby securing monetary gifts during their old age. Inevitably, only voices that upheld the idealized ayah archetype were preserved by British employers in private archives. Voices of ayahs complaining about financial and sexual abuse, however, survive in the form of petitions and testimonies in official archives, which this chapter uses to provide a different side of ayahs’ experiences.

Chapter 10 approaches recent research on birth and infancy through a crisis-oriented framework. Birth and infancy are processes of transformations involving caregivers, kin, community, and the state. These take place in sociocultural and ecological contexts, which are many times also changing and adapting to known and unpredictable situations and possibilities. After introducing crisis as a pertinent concept for the study of birth and infancy beyond normative developmental frameworks, the authors describe works on notions of personhood, self, and attachments as processes involving lifecycle and non-lifecycle crises. The chapter approaches crises as disruptions that take place at different levels and temporalities, which are intrinsic to the understanding of birth and infancy contextually, highlighting long-term critical events that permeate societies and are intertwined with policy trends. The final section examines the crises of infancy, including attachment processes entangled in higher-order social crises, such as among socially and economically oppressed populations living with conditions of extreme precarity.

This chapter delves into the multifaceted dimensions of aging and senescence, given the rapidly aging global population. While aging research traditionally centered on frailty and illness, contemporary discourse emphasizes the concept of “aging well” and preserving one’s youthful vigor. Anthropological studies adopt a comparative lens, recognizing the contextual variations in what constitutes “successful aging.” This chapter underscores the role of local cultural understandings in shaping individual experiences of aging and decline. Care emerges as a central theme, intricately woven within political, economic, and social power dynamics. Sakti’s research, with a focus on contexts of involuntary migration and mobility, sheds light on the challenges faced by older individuals navigating displacement and loss in a post-conflict setting. The Timor-Leste case reveals how older individuals reconstruct their lives amidst upheaval, intertwining notions of care, interdependence, and ancestral connections. This exploration challenges conventional notions of aging well, emphasizing the interconnectedness of individual and collective well-being within broader social and cultural contexts.

Extractive activities in central Russian peatlands gradually declined in the late Soviet period, a change which reflected the reorientation of the country’s energy system toward Siberian fossil fuels as well as a shift in the cultural perceptions of peatlands, as scientists began to recognize the value of intact wetlands and a wider public expressed concerns about their loss. The Soviet collapse and subsequent economic crisis made the end of extraction an unsettling experience. Many regions were gradually cut off from the resources and services that had sustained them for several decades. Communities experienced high outmigration and social marginalization, while abandoned peat extraction sites became serious fire hazards. Tracing the decline of extraction and its legacies, this chapter demonstrates that, instead of recovery, the end of extraction brought new forms of social and environmental precarity. While peat’s role as a fuel has shrunk dramatically in the past decades, the legacies of its extraction and use are bound to remain.

The history of Russia’s peatlands is closely entangled with the environmental issues of our time. Although most peat extraction in central Russia ceased decades ago, the legacy of this history is ongoing. Drainage and industrial exploitation have turned peatlands from carbon sinks into powerful carbon emitters. Recognizing how this issue is rooted in a larger history of economic growth adds depth to our understanding of the current planetary predicament. Even though Russia may not soon become an ally in efforts to cure degraded peatlands, writing their history constitutes an important step in addressing the ecological amnesia surrounding these ecosystems and in developing more caring relationships with them.

Displacement owing to climate change is quickly outpacing conflict, political oppression, and other sociopolitical forces from which people flee the states in which they habitually reside. However, at present, most ongoing state-based programs to admit displaced persons explicitly address themselves to people displaced by conflict and human rights abuses. One notable exception is Temporary Protected Status (TPS) in the US. Nationals of countries experiencing “natural disasters” can be designated for TPS while in the US. Recipients often renew these twelve- to eighteen-month visas for many years, meanwhile putting down roots in the US and forming mixed status families. Such relief is episodic, insofar as it treats natural disasters as discrete and unpredictable events, and discretionary, insofar as it depends on the judgment of the United States Attorney General. This chapter raises questions about whether such an approach is a good model for future programs that will be needed to support people seeking refuge from uninhabitable or inhospitable environments.

This chapter explores the connection between informality, migration, and precarity and how urban villages are formed in China. It discusses the contribution of the book and the fieldwork methods and introduces the readers to the structure of the book.

Violence that enters the lives of precarious subjects exists in the form of insurgency, rebellion, and even roguery. The chapter opens with a reading of two texts: Michael Peel’s A Swamp Full of Dollars, about a real-life journalist with a penchant for literary devices, and Helon Habila’s Oil on Water, about a fictional journalist with social realist proclivities. By employing literary devices charged with concealed violence, both texts reveal that precarity breeds insurgent violence. Each treats Delta militancy as a metaphor – a symptom of inequalities crystallized into insurgency – and traces other absent metaphors, including naturalized violence, that are laden with militancy: area boys, urban gangs, and precarious ecologies. This is followed by a reading of the “subterranean violence” in Tony Nwaka’s Lords of the Creek: rather than addressing the root cause of insurgency, Nwaka’s novel reveals how the oil fraternity and power elites manufacture a false sense of emergency to crush militants. Thus, the real emergency concealed under the second order of diegesis implodes into insurgent violence. The play of the militant tropes in the three texts is complemented by the “routine violence” in Tiny Sunbirds Far Away, where militancy becomes a response to violent disruption of the daily routines of Delta populations.