ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how the debate about the precarious may contribute to an understanding of contested and contesting subjectivities of the Global South. In the first section, we address a series of canonical approaches to the precarious, precarity, precarisation, and precariousness that have been challenged because of the underlying presuppositions on subject formation on which they are based. In the second section, we develop a theoretical-methodological toolbox for studying the precarious based on various subject-centred research traditions in the humanities and social sciences that use figurations as a relational and processual framework for social and cultural analysis. In the third section, we use a re-reading of Mbembe’s work as a figuration-based approach to political imagination from a Southern perspective to provide insights into possible ways of constructing a commons based on figurations of the precarious.
