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.

This section thinks about the relationship between compositional creativity, labour, and money. It outlines how artistic freedom and agency have often been inversely related to stable income, and suggests some ways that composers today might navigate these elements in order to monetise their work.

A current prominent translingualism strand in sociolinguistics has started paying increasing attention to linguistic ‘playfulness’. When language users are involved with translingual practices, they may often be identified through the ‘playfulness’ of their interactions and dialogues (commonly a euphemism for creativity, innovativeness and fluidity), where one’s repertoire is deeply connected with forms of playful exchange to create alternative linguistic lives and identities. Yet, this extensive spectacle of ‘playfulness’ seems to dwell more on conviviality than potential ‘precarity’, overlooking the fact that precarity has arguably always been a condition of human life and norm for most language users, who are deeply embedded in local economies of uncertainty, marginalisation and vulnerabilities. In this chapter, we aim to re-visit two key notions that are core to translingual experiences: ‘precariousness’ and ‘playfulness’. The key implication of this chapter, therefore, is that the next generation of sociolinguists needs to focus more on the precarity of the translingualism trend, not just the playfulness. The two concepts need to be treated with caution, so as not to assume that we understand too easily what is ‘precarious’ or ‘playful’ for whom. In so doing, we re-navigate the jubilant scenes of ‘playfulness’ and move towards the centrality of ‘precariousness’.

While much attention has been paid to the creativity surrounding translingual practice, there has been little focus on the underlying politics behind such practice in periphery or precarious contexts. This chapter explores the political underbelly of translingual practice in the under-researched Muslim world through two case studies in English-medium instruction (EMI) universities in the United Arab Emirates and Bangladesh. Online and offline data are analysed through the lens of critical social inquiry. Ethnographic observations and metapragmatic reflections revealed that translingual practice is a key element of students’ identities with varying ideologies attached. The chapter explores the micro and macro relations influencing ideologies, such as linguistic and symbolic distances between languages, monolingualism, linguistic imperialism, neoliberalism, secularization and sacralization. The chapter specifically investigates how translingual practice problematizes dominant monolingual biases in higher education and monolithic approaches to social, political, and religious realities. The chapter also analyses internalized mainstream monolingual ideologies in some students, leading to feelings of unworthiness and shame over translingual practices. Thus, the chapter sheds light on sociolinguistic complexities of translingual practices in two under-investigated Islamic countries. Suggestions are made as to ways in which the current gap between complex sociolinguistic realities and monolithic policies can be bridged.

In order to explore translinguistic precarity in greater depth, we need to do three things: First, move towards a sufficiently complex understanding of what precarity means (and does not mean). Is it a general condition of our times, a longstanding effect of capitalist exploitation or an emergent property of unequal social relations? Second, we need to think through ways of relating precarity to language. It is not enough to predefine precarious lives in terms of marginalisation, poverty, struggle or discrimination and then to assume that the language used by or towards such speakers is necessarily precarious or produces precarity. We need instead to understand the co-articulation of translingual practices and lived experiences of precarity, asking how one informs the other. So third, it is important to understand the dynamic interactions among material relations, language ideologies and linguistic resources, where precarity may be an emergent feature as much as a pre-condition, of a local assemblage. Drawing on data from our longitudinal metrolingual project we make a case for understanding translanguaging and precarity in relational terms, entangled with family and friendship support structures, contingencies of the local economy, gender norms, cultural and religious practices, and local language policies and possibilities.

Women from circumstances of displacement and precarity are often considered from perspectives of postcolonial subalternity and suffering. Their linguistic versatility is understood as emerging from conditions of hopelessness, poverty and vulnerability. In this chapter, the authors bring vignettes of conversations with southern multilingual women living now in Australia, who at different stages of their lives and despite circumstances of precarity, exhibit ingenuity in survival through dextrous translingual and transknowledging practices. More than this, they demonstrate how their multilinguality is integral to their potential to thrive in hope. In the three small stories offered in this chapter diverse women of Australia – Anangu women from remote central Australia, young displaced women of extraordinary resilience, and women who escaped violent conflict in East Africa – reveal their strategies of self-efficacy in conversations of complicity and trust, and in processes of telling and retelling with the researchers. Mindful of ‘decolonising methodologies’, ‘southern epistemologies’ and ‘epistemic reflexivity’ , the authors recognise their limitations and privileges as researchers in the south, hopeful that in stepping lightly towards spaces that are at times private and at others, public, they can turn the lens towards playful and purposeful southern multilingualisms.

Translingual users recruit diverse linguistic and non-linguistic resources in fluid and playful ways within their daily linguistic and communicative repertoires. In so doing, they are often involved with ‘playful naughtiness’ that is marked by exuberant banter, mockery, jokes, and travesty. Yet this ‘playful naughtiness’ should not necessarily be the main focus of the analysis, as translingual repertoires may also be linked to precarious conditions of life through the multifarious politics of precarious reality. Translingualism can be fundamentally identified through the failing social, political, academic and economic networks that expose language users to varied critically precarious settings. First, translingualism may be linked with precarious working conditions, particularly for south-to-north migrants or international students who are situated in the Anglophone world. Second, in the precarious world of translingualism, one may find a ‘safe space’ with those who share a similar translingual space. The chapter concludes that understanding the social, political, emotional and ideological conditions for translingual precarity, and the effects of these on translingual users’ own subjectivities, social positions, language ideology and policy, is essential.

Much translanguaging and translinguality scholarship focuses on defending and celebrating recognizable forms of language difference – e.g., “Chinglish” – as creativity and agency by the socioeconomically precarious manifesting a micropolitics of resistance. This focus obscures the concrete labour of all utterances, whether deemed conventional or not, by all language users, whether “native” or not, contributing to maintaining and revising language as practice, and, hence, obscures the dependence of dominant culture’s continuity on such labor and, hence, its precarity. Samples from the assigned writing of a bilingual (French/English) student attending a required US undergraduate writing course are shown to exhibit a mix of conventional and unconventional linguistic forms and, more importantly, writerly agency in the writing’s manifestation of criticality toward dominant views of first-year undergraduate writing students as mere recipients of others’ knowledge and its deft deployment of language to produce knowledge. Shifting to a focus on language users’ contribution of their labor to maintaining and revising language and knowledge can bring out the agency of all utterances, the status of criticality and creativity as the norm of language use, the emergent character of language, and, thus, the precarity of dominant culture.

In this Afterword, I provide additional comments on Sender Dovchin, Rhonda Oliver, and Li Wei’s edited book’s central argument, namely that a rather romanticized view of translingualism as the celebration of playfulness despite the precarious conditions of life of translingual users needs to be addressed. The chapters in this book do an interesting reading of precarity in terms of ontology, social practices, and the conditions of inequality in today’s world. To further enrich the response to the critique that translanguaging scholarship ignores the actually existing conditions of precarity and suffering under neoliberalism, I draw on my own experience as an editor of an applied linguistics journal in Brazil and on the (in)securitization of everyday life experienced by interlocutors in my fieldwork in Rio de Janeiro favelas. I conclude that imagining forms of life that do not surrender to or freeze in the face of precarity seems to be an urgent task for sociolinguists.

Nearly three decades since democracy, equitable land reform and redistributive justice continue to elude most South Africans – especially rural women. This chapter argues that traditional leaders’ disproportionate powers account for this failure in ‘traditional areas’. Substantial data and research evidence address (1) how land is a primary site of contestation over traditional leaders’ powers and (un)accountability; (2) how traditional leaders use powers and unaccountability afforded by the apartheid government to stand in the way of democratic governance and economic progress; (3) the citizenship implications of rural people’s subjection to leadership without consultation or choice, and dispossession of ‘informal’, ‘communal’ land rights without consultation or consent, and (4) the direct tie between the impoverished systems of rural democracy and the continued and deepening impoverishment of the people (mostly women) who live in these areas. Analysis of the Itereleng Bakgatla and Ingonyama Trust cases shows how the opportunities and objectives that the Interim Protection of Informal Land Rights Act 31 of 1996 (IPILRA) presents for inclusive land reform remain unrealised.

This chapter investigates the precarious arrangements embedded in the systems and processes of migration management across three different country contexts: the UK, Germany, and Australia. The country comparison shows how precarious workplace/worker and societal arrangements have been woven into the systems of migration management (Paret and Gleeson ; Vosko ). The examination employs an historical methodology to show how approaches to migration management create a racialised precarity in the destination country generally; and more specifically in the destination country labour market where different groups of migrant workers are channelled into and toil in the least favourable areas of the labour market. Accordingly, we shed light on the rules underscoring and the implications of the process of migrant worker acceptance, settlement, and integration in a new land and labour market.

This chapter presents case studies of female janitorial workers, working on a contractual basis, in a public sector organization in Pakistan where the typical employment format is full-time and permanent. Drawing on these cases, the chapter seeks answers to three interrelated research aims: (1) to study the gendered aspect of precarious work in Pakistani organizations, (2) to identify the intersectionality of gender, social class and religion in relation to precarious work, and (3) and to understand the various dimensions of precarity in specific reference to the intersectionality of gender, social class and religion. The findings offer insights into conceptualizing precarious employment and present a taxonomy that divides precarity into three distinct categories: (1) precarity in terms of job security and continuance of employment, (2) precarity in terms of financial stability, and (3) systematic precarity that affects certain groups more than the others. Findings reveal that these categories have distinct effects on different categories of individuals.

This chapter explores the gendered biopolitics of the COVID-19 pandemic through an analysis of the UK’s marketized higher education sector. Theoretically, we combine feminist political economy with labour market segmentation theory to develop a novel meso-level biopolitical analysis. We use this framework to compare how major labour market institutions – employers, the trade union, and the Government – responded to the pandemic. The analysis reveals that, as a consequence of the actions and interactions of these labour market institutions, different segments of the higher education labour market experienced the pandemic precarities in different ways, resulting in gendered outcomes. The analysis extends our understanding of the genesis of gendered pandemic precarities within the marketized employment system studied.

The chapter explores the experience of late career self-employment. We adopt an intersectional perspective to theorise the precarity experienced by older self-employed women and provide insights into the societal and organizational structures and norms that shape ageing in employment and everyday life. We illustrate our arguments through three biographical cases of older self-employed women in the United Kingdom. Finally, we discuss the implications of age, gender, and self-employment and conclude with a call for inclusive policy to tackle precarity in self-employment.

The meteoric growth of the platform economy, its economic underpinnings as well as the accompanying human practices, have provoked academic debates as well as shone a light on its praxis. In this gig economy, the conditions of work have significantly changed from what used to be relatively stable markets, moored self- and work identities, with predictable technological cycles, established jobs in which individuals were ‘tied’ into roles and their organisations-of-employ, sufficient income during work and non-work periods, and with substantive protections through employment rights and social protection – also known as the standard employment relationship (SER). The gig economy has introduced efficiencies in engaging customer segments and supply chains, however its non-standard forms of employment (NSFE) which includes part-time, temporary, and zero-hour contracts and dependent self-employment, has brought with it: low pay, insufficient and variable hours, short-term contracts, and limited social protection rights (Rubery, Grimshaw, Keizer & Johnson, ). The majority of employees, migrants and foreigners, remain dependent on in-country structures to grant them SER rights – in many countries, though, they do not have the power to engage with those structures and no way to build on and improve their rights. The emerging story of the gig economy divides scholars, particularly in relation to the distribution of the economic and social benefits of this ‘new economy’, as well as international relations (IR) scholars in that race and indigeneity, and its intersections, have been missing in many of the debates. The challenge remains to upend the coloniality and neoliberal nature of work, and create a more democratic and inclusive labour market, in which more of the economic benefits are fairly distributed among those who participate in the gig economy and not just for indigenous citizens exclusively.

This chapter presents three empirical studies on disabled individuals who use their disability strategically as they navigate the labour market. In our first case, we reveal that disabled employees in France reflect on factors on societal, organizational, and individual levels. More specifically, they determine whether the quota system can be used to their own advantage, decreasing their precarious position in the labour market. In the second case study, we draw on 257 qualitative surveys with individuals with mental health conditions in a variety of countries and outline how these individuals make their career choices. More specifically, we show how they self-select into sectors in which the characteristics related to their mental illness can be turned into an advantage. The third case presented highlights that disabled individuals use social comparison based on the characteristics of their disability when determining how they compare with other disabled workers. When they feel their disability characteristics are less stigmatizing than that of others, they tend to use this strategically, enhancing their own employability, securing less precarious employment. Through these three cases, we show the inequalities that exist within the population of disabled workers. More specifically, individuals with a disability in countries with less constraining disability legislation and individuals whose disability is more stigmatizing in nature are more likely to end up in employment that is characterized by low wages, few career development opportunities, little autonomy, and unstable or hazardous working conditions. Practical implications and avenues for future research are provided.