Reading Time: 10 minutes
This piece belongs to A Human Geography of the Self, a series that reads my own life through the concepts geographers use to understand how people and places make one another. It draws on my doctoral and master’s work on contract academic labour, and on the original concepts I have developed through that research.
“No creature in the tidepool is precarious alone. Neither, I have come to believe, are we.”
In Loreto, at the lowest tides, the Sea of Cortez pulls back and leaves a world exposed in the rock. I spent many mornings crouched over those tidepools, watching. A hermit crab depends on a shell another creature has left behind. A small fish shelters in the shade of an anemone that could also sting it. Every life in that basin is held by other lives, fed by them, endangered by them, impossible without them. Pull one thread and the whole pool shifts. No creature in the tidepool is precarious alone. Neither, I have come to believe, are we.
I have spent nineteen years inside the precarity of contract academic work, and for most of those years I understood my insecurity as a private misfortune, a personal weather system I had to survive on my own. The tidepool taught me otherwise, and so did human geography. Insecurity, it turns out, behaves like an ecology. It is relational, distributed across linked lives, and profoundly uneven. In my own scholarship I have come to call this interconnected precarity (the idea that no person’s insecurity stands alone, that our vulnerabilities are bound together in a web, the way the lives in a tidepool are bound). This post is about that web, about who it holds and who it sacrifices, and about why seeing precarity as an ecology changes everything.
Precariousness Is the Water We Live In
The philosopher Judith Butler gave this its deepest grounding. As Grenier, Lloyd, and Phillipson (2017) discuss, Butler argues that our lives have always been defined by precariousness, a state founded on an interdependent web of social support and obligation, so that to live at all is to live socially, with one’s life always in some sense held in the hands of others (Grenier et al., 2017). Butler’s (2004) insight is that exposure is the human condition rather than a personal failure. We are sustained by the very same networks of care, work, and belonging that can also leave us exposed. There is no sealed, self-sufficient self. There is only the tidepool.
Grenier and colleagues (2017) take this somewhere that matters to me. They draw attention to a precariousness that is inherently shared, yet unequally experienced, so that while insecurity is part of every human life, certain lives are far more susceptible to its hazards than others (Grenier et al., 2017). They argue that the honest response is one grounded in an acknowledgement of the fragility and limitation that affect all human lives, and in inclusive forms of belonging built upon that shared condition (Grenier et al., 2017). This is the first turn of the ecological view. Once I understood my own precarity as part of a shared human interdependence rather than a personal flaw, the shame began to lift, and something more useful took its place, which was a sense of common cause.
The Web Is Uneven
If precariousness is shared, precarity itself is distributed with brutal unevenness, and geographers have mapped exactly how. Burridge and Gill (2017), studying asylum seekers cut off from legal aid across an uneven British landscape, draw on Butler to insist on what they call differential exposure (the way some populations are far more exposed to harm than others through political and spatial arrangements rather than through chance). They show that precarity is spatially uneven, that where a person stands, their legal status, and their access to resources all shape how exposed they are, and they caution that the concept of precarity becomes hollow the moment it flattens or erases these differences (Burridge & Gill, 2017). An ecology has niches, and some niches are far more dangerous than others. The tidepool is no democracy.
Then comes the insight that reorganized my whole understanding, and it came from a geographer writing about property. Blomley (2020) argues that precariousness is socially distributed in a very particular way: the security of the privileged to hold land and shelter is produced through, and actually depends upon, the production of precarity for others (Blomley, 2020). He calls this precarious property and shows that the comfortable image of the private castle, the sealed home that protects its owner from all dependency, is an illusion, because all security in land remains relational and revocable, and one person’s stable ground is built on another’s lack of it (Blomley, 2020). As a settler scholar, Blomley (2020) turns this lens on himself, acknowledging that his own access to land rests on the dispossession of Indigenous peoples, so that his security and their precarity are the same arrangement seen from two sides (Blomley, 2020).
This is the second concept I have developed in my own work, which I call asymmetrical precarity (the recognition that the web of insecurity is tilted, that some are made secure precisely by the insecurity of others). The tenured position and the contract position are not merely neighbours in an ecosystem. They are linked. The flexibility, the cost savings, and the security of the institution are produced through the disposability of people like me. My precarity was never simply my bad luck. It was someone else’s stability, viewed from underneath.
The Time Tax and the Cost of Staying Afloat
Living in an asymmetrical ecology extracts something from those who occupy its exposed niches, a cost that rarely appears on any ledger. I have come to name one form of it the time tax (the unpaid hours the precarious must spend simply staying afloat, reapplying, reproving their worth, managing an insecurity that the secure never have to think about). The hermit crab spends energy the anemone does not, merely to keep its borrowed shell. Across nineteen years I have paid this tax in evenings, in weekends, in the constant low hum of having to earn my place again and again. Burridge and Gill (2017) describe precisely this drain in the lives they study, the exhausting work of countering one’s own precarious position within a system arranged to keep one uncertain (Burridge & Gill, 2017). The time tax is how an asymmetrical ecology quietly transfers life from the exposed to the secure.
Interdependence as the Ground of Repair
Here is where the ecological view turns from diagnosis toward hope, and it is the reason I hold to it. If precarity is relational, then so is its repair. Sangaramoorthy (2018), studying how immigrants and care providers improvise mutual aid across a threadbare rural landscape, shows that precarity, even as it wounds, also generates circuits of social connection, belonging, and care (Sangaramoorthy, 2018). The very dependence on others that exposure forces upon us becomes, in her account, a profound recognition of our responsibility to one another, and the care that people offer each other inside precarity becomes a political act that opens the possibility of a livable life (Sangaramoorthy, 2018).
This is the deepest lesson of the tidepool. Interdependence is the wound and interdependence is the medicine. The same web that distributes insecurity unevenly is also the only thing strong enough to redistribute security. Grenier and colleagues (2017) call for exactly this, a response rooted in our shared fragility and in obligations of care that the secure owe the exposed (Grenier et al., 2017). My union work, my advocacy for non-regular faculty, my refusal to treat my precarity as a private problem, all of it grows from this single recognition: that we are an ecology, and an ecology survives through its relationships or fails through them.
What the Tidepool Knows
So I have stopped describing my insecurity as personal weather. It is an ecology, interconnected and asymmetrical, in which some are kept afloat by the sinking of others. Naming it that way is not merely an academic exercise. It is the difference between blaming myself and organizing with others. It is the difference between shame and solidarity.
I think often of those mornings crouched over the warm rock in Loreto, watching the held and holding lives in the basin. Every creature there was precarious, and every creature there was also someone else’s shelter, food, or threat. The pool survived because it was a web, and it suffered when the web was torn. We are the same. My precarity is bound to yours, and yours to mine, across the whole tilted ecology of our working and dwelling lives. The work of justice is the work of mending the web so that no one is made secure by another’s drowning. No creature in the tidepool is precarious alone. That is the wound, and it is also, if we choose it, the way out.
References
Blomley, N. (2020). Precarious territory: Property law, housing, and the socio-spatial order. Antipode, 52(1), 36-57. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12578
Burridge, A., & Gill, N. (2017). Conveyor-belt justice: Precarity, access to justice, and uneven geographies of legal aid in UK asylum appeals. Antipode, 49(1), 23-42. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12258
Butler, J. (2004). Precarious life: The powers of mourning and violence. Verso.
Grenier, A., Lloyd, L., & Phillipson, C. (2017). Precarity in late life: Rethinking dementia as a “frailed” old age. Sociology of Health & Illness, 39(2), 318-330. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9566.12476
Sangaramoorthy, T. (2018). “Putting Band-Aids on things that need stitches”: Immigration and the landscape of care in rural America. American Anthropologist, 120(3), 487-499. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13054
