Figurations of the Precarious in the Global South

01/04/2026 to 31/03/2031

In our age of accelerated globalisation with its manifold social, economic, and ecological crises, the conceptual field of the “precarious” has emerged as one of the central tools for making sense of our contemporary moment. The planned RTG takes up the challenge of critically testing the scope of the precarious – and derivatives such as precarity, precariousness, and precarisation – as categories of cultural and social analysis in the Global South. We build upon an international research environment connecting African, Asian, and Latin American Studies within the framework of a multidisciplinary and transversal approach to (trans)area studies and use its resources to examine the social and cultural production of the precarious within dynamics of interdependence. It is our goal to investigate how individual or collective social subjects perceive and interpret everyday life situations, social conditions, or scenarios of interaction as precarious; we explore the cultural references they use to make sense of precarity, and the tactics, strategies, and navigational capacities they develop to deal with precariousness and precarisation. Beyond the binaries of postcolonial thinking, we envision the Global South as a space of entanglements where dispositifs of Western modernisation overlap with autochthonous ways of worlding. Despite enduring legacies of coloniality as well as radical economic and political asymmetries, the Global South is envisaged as a space of agency, resilience, and resistance against precarisation – or, in terms of post-development studies, as a site of knowledge production where models of problem-solving are elaborated.
Our goal is to assist our doctoral researchers in learning to look beyond the conventional subject areas of their disciplines by taking up impulses from Global South Studies that contribute to the decentring of academic knowledge cultures. The qualification programme builds on a high degree of international interconnectedness with partner universities in the Global South and an interdisciplinary dialogue between humanities, social and political sciences, anthropology, law, and ethics. The specifically interdisciplinary dimension will be enhanced by the Module “Research on Theory and Methodology” and its delivery of figuration analysis as an innovative methodological and terminological toolbox for research on the precarious. This module includes innovative features such as a collaborative writing workbench and two major joint publication projects. The RTG will equip doctoral researchers with a particular set of skills that will enable them to develop the methodological and theoretical design of their research from the subject matter itself and to focus on the specific ways social subjects make sense of forms of precarisation. The training will also encompass critical awareness of the ethical challenges that emerge when researching precarisation.