Labour geography 1: Towards a geography of precarity?

This progress report examines the relationship between continued growth in the sub-field of labour geography, especially in research on migration, and the concept of precarity. An increasingly dominant frame in critical studies of labour and the employment relation, and resonant in the political sphere within (and now beyond) Europe, precarity has seen slower uptake by geographers. However, research on migrant labour and emerging work on technological change, flexibilization, restructuring and insecurity is employing precarity as a multi-dimensional conceptual framework. In this sense, I argue that the distinction between notions of precarity grounded in political economy and those grounded in political philosophy is increasingly - and productively - blurred. As I illustrate, this blurring is apparent in labour geography's ongoing and deepening engagement with precarity, yet our distinctive contribution to a spatialized theorization of precarity remains, I argue, an open question.