Precarity, affect, and the moving body

Abstract

It is recognised that there is a correlation between precarity and affective mental health conditions that is typically overlooked due to the individualisation of wellbeing discourses and interventions. This paper aims to explore alternative psychotherapeutic practices that foreground relational, embodied and ecological approaches to mental health and wellbeing. It considers precarity’s effects through the context of the moving body and an openness to human and more-than-human inter-connections. Using a socio-new materialist and critical-posthuman framework, precarity is conceptualised as an assemblage of affects and emergent capacities. It is within this framing that empirical data – taken from nine qualitative interviews with practitioners from the fields of dance/movement psychotherapy, embodied-relational therapy and eco-psychotherapy – is discussed. The study identifies that precarity can also provide opportunities to affirm our inter-dependencies within an inter-connected human and more-than-human world. Alternative practices can help cultivate the relational capacities through which precarity’s complexities may be navigated.

Keywords:

• Precarity
• affect
• wellbeing
• embodied practice
• eco-psychotherapy
• relationality

Introduction

There is a recognised correlation between precarity and affective mental health conditions, such as anxiety (Frayne, 2019; Neilson, 2015). However, the relationship between socio-economic, political and material factors is often distracted by a language of self-improvement and personal responsibility narratives (Fullagar, 2017; Moore, 2018). It is suggested that the many negative affects of late capitalism, including depression, fear, exhaustion and anxiety (Ngai, 2005), are typically met with wellbeing techniques that adopt a neoliberal rhetoric of individualising positivity and productivity (Han, 2017; Southwood, 2019). Subsequently, dominant mainstream interventions have been considered to function as mere sticking-plasters to the problems facing contemporary existence (Atkinson, 2019; Fisher, 2009).

This research is situated within a socio-new materialist framework (Fox & Alldred, 2022), which has been used to explore the political and material effects of precarity. This paper draws from findings from recent doctoral work (Light, 2023), in which empirical data was gathered through qualitative interviews with alternative practitioners working in the fields of embodied and/or ecological psychotherapies. Participants are referred to by their first names, some of which are anonymised. Those who chose to waive anonymity are fully acknowledged at the end. By locating mental health and wellbeing in the moving body, these alternative approaches call attention to the relational inter-connections that extend beyond the individual human. This paper aims to explore insights into how embodied and ecological practices might help navigate the effects of twenty-first century precarity.

Precarity as assemblage

I’m standing on tiptoes on the edge of a high place, leaning out over a ravine, feeling as though at any moment I might topple in […]. I meet clients who are on that edge all the time, the precarity, that sort of on the edge, right through their lifespan. (Leanne)

Contemporary experiences of precarity are increasingly understood to mean ‘life without the promise of stability’ (Tsing, 2015, p. 2). Otherwise defined as insecurity (Crompton et al., 2002) or vulnerability (Butler, 2004), precarity has been progressively theorised throughout the early twenty-first century in a variety of ways (Armano et al., 2017). These include debates concerning worsening labour conditions (Kalleburg, 2009), the changing dynamics of global capitalism (Atzeni & Ness, 2016), existential uncertainty (Puar, 2012), the political potential for a new, collective actor (Standing, 2016), and a renewed focus on environmental instability and injustices (Bignall et al., 2016). COVID-19 recently brought with it unexpected changes, an unanticipated, temporary sense of precarity for some, and an entrenching of ongoing insecurity for others (Gray et al., 2022). It demonstrated precarity to be a process that is an affectively and differentially, yet nevertheless, shared ‘earthwide condition’ (Tsing, 2015, p. 4).

The possibility of change also brings about the possibility to live life differently. Within new materialist and posthuman scholarship, there is a theoretical space that emerges which ‘asks us to consider how we might refashion the way we live our precarious lives in association with others’ (Ecclestone & Goodley, 2016, p. 180). Affirming our inter-dependency sits at odds with the competitive individualism that arguably reinforces un-relational attitudes and behaviours. As traits of neoliberal capitalism, the latter are considered to create systemic insecurity and distrust, which are incompatible with the social and inter-dependent nature of existence (Wilson, 2017). In light of precarity, there is an argument for more awareness of the ‘networks of life within which human life is but one sort of life’ (Butler, 2012, p. 173). In addition, based on Haraway’s (2016) work, Puar (2012) suggests that any future politics of precarity needs to be thought about in relational terms that include ‘ecological, environmental and interspecies’ (p. 171) considerations.

The quote at the start of this section offers an embodied illustration of precarity as a sense of living ‘on the edge’. Fear of toppling into the ravine is, perhaps, matched by the fear of being stuck on that edge indefinitely. Both a fear of change (toppling) and a fear that there will be no change to our precarious predicament takes its toll on bodies, with some affected throughout their entire lives. However, continuing with the desire to consider the opportunities afforded by a precarious, rather than fixed existence, might a possibility for change also present as an opportunity to move or be moved sideways, to fall backwards onto soft grass, perhaps into supportive arms? What potential is there to notice, learn from, or become open to, other human and nonhuman entities, to be facilitated to take risks, to reframe precarity, not as an individually fixed position but as a relational capacity leading towards transformation?

One way to explore this is to understand precarity as a complex assemblage made up of multiple bodies, materials, events and encounters (Berlant, 2012; Fox & Alldred, 2017). It affects and is affected by bodies’ relationships to self, to others, to work, money, politics, to health and environment. Precarity is, as one participant described, a ‘constellation of lots of different things’ (Emma) which, another suggested, shines a light ‘in all sorts of directions when you put it centre-stage’ (Tim).

Conceptual framework

A critical posthuman and new materialist framework is used to underpin this exploration of the moving body within the context of precarity and embodied health (Braidotti, 2019; Massumi, 2015). The research subscribes to a growing field of socio-new materialist research, including through its openness to posthuman and more-than-human sensibilities, and by attending to the concept of assemblage, as briefly discussed (Duff, 2014; Fullagar et al., 2021). Additionally, it involves drawing attention to ‘the complex flows of affect in the everyday events that progressively and endlessly produce and reproduce the social world and human lives’ (Fox & Alldred, 2022, p. 6). This latter point brings focus to this paper’s affective analysis of precarity.

There is an important distinction to make regarding ‘affect’ as a key concept, which needs to be briefly discussed. Within this framework, affect is drawn from a Spinozist-Deleuzian philosophical conceptualisation which, at its most simple, refers to ‘the power to affect and be affected’ (Massumi, 2015, p. ix). The starting point for affectively analysing precarity and the moving body is not, therefore, based on the stabilising traits of the psychobiological approach (Tomkins, 1962). Rather, it is a conceptualisation of affect as emergent bodily capacities (Clough, 2010). Both strands draw attention to the body, but Massumi (2015) argues that for affect to be useful, it must be ‘rethought in a way that understands it not as fundamentally individual, but as directly collective (as pertaining to relation)’ (p. 91). Indeed, it is argued that affect needs to be ‘de-psychologised, and to be de-linked from individualism in order to match the complexity of our human and non-human relational universe’ (Braidotti, 2019, p. 45).

Relationality, in this context, explores the processes and potentials of ‘becoming together’ (Massumi, 2002, p. 88), because:

[w]hen you affect something, you are at the same time opening yourself up to being affected in turn, and in a slightly different way than you might have been the moment before. You have made a transition, however slight. (Massumi, 2015, p. 4)

This indicates that bodies’ capacities to affect and be affected mark a transition. In turn, a transition implies that movement has happened or is, perhaps, (always already) underway. It reveals affect to be micro-political because it intensifies the flows and forces that make changing from one state to another (im)possible in any given encounter, moment or situation (Cluley et al., 2021). The inference here is that affect is ‘an intensity characterised by an increase or decrease in power’ (Hemmings, 2005, p. 552). With this in mind, the purposeful selection of alternative practitioners was to gain insights into how embodied, movement-based practices – and openness to post/more-than-human sensibilities – might influence the flows of affect within a precarity assemblage.

Methodology

The methodology draws from a section of wider doctoral research that explores the material and political effects of precarity (Light, 2023). The thesis more heavily emphasises the relationship between a number of theoretical concepts and the empirical data using a method based on Jackson and Mazzei's (2012) ‘thinking with theory’ (p. 1). In this paper, the theoretical concept of ‘affect’ is itself considered to be an affective force that feeds into and responds to the empirical data. However, the empirical data is emphasised slightly more in this paper, due to the theme of this special issue and for the interests of readership.

This paper draws from significant discussions produced through semi-structured qualitative interviews with nine purposefully selected practitioners in the fields of dance/movement psychotherapy (DMP), embodied-relational therapy (ERT) and eco-psychotherapeutic practices. Such practices will sometimes be referred to as ‘alternative’, indicating an alternative to the medical model of mental health, as well as to the standard models of talking therapies typically practised in the UK. These alternative practices are used to consider how movement, inter-connections and openness to more-than-human sensibilities might support or disrupt the affective flows and forces within a precarity assemblage.

Bodies, stasis and cultivating movement

The following sections draw upon qualitative interviews with specialists working in the fields of DMP, ERT and/or eco-psychotherapeutic practices. Such practices acknowledge that ‘we connect in the world with our bodies, and we feel it in our bodies’ (Matthew). Both bodies and embodiment were discussed by participants as a ‘live, dynamic process, rather than a thing’ (Emma). Within these processes, embodied and embedded work together, and are constantly contextualised by ‘the different ways that bodies, human and more-than-human bodies, exist together in any one moment [gesture: fingers threaded together, palms up], there’s a sort of interlacing’ (Caroline). Embodiment is thereby considered to be a relational process, because the ‘interlacing’ of bodies means a body is never just an isolated, individual ‘thing’.

Bodies are both knowledgeable and sources of knowledge, yet are often regarded secondary to cognition in western cultures (Alaimo & Hekman, 2008). Embodiment practices are underlined as vital due to the alienation of the body, which can be traced back to the Cartesian dualistic interpretation that mind and body are entities that are essentially separate (Mehta, 2011). This notion of separation has dominated mainstream western thought since the seventeenth-century, and is connected to a long history of denigration of both the human body and the natural environment (Guattari, 2000; Johnson, 1995). The privileging of mind over body has long been critiqued and challenged, including by feminist, new materialist and ecological thinkers and practitioners (Bateson, 2000; Coole & Frost, 2010; Sharp & Taylor, 2016). Braidotti’s (2017) description that we are ‘embodied brains and embrained bodies’ (p. 30) is a helpful summarisation to express the way bodies and embodiment are referred to here.

Precarity’s effects are discussed below as provoking another kind of separation:

The effects of precarity, it’s a split, isn’t it? Because it can cause us to freeze, it can cause us to hang on to stasis more, and it can also free us up to go, well, if life is this precarious then […]. Precarity also nudges us and pushes us and sometimes demands that we change […], and sometimes we just jump because we have no choice. And there’s a weird kind of privilege in that, I think. When our emotional, psychological wellbeing becomes an existence challenge, then it can trigger us into activity. Not for everyone, some people just die (Stephen).

The split described here paradoxically combines a ‘freeze’ and a freeing up. Freezing causes us to ‘hang on to stasis more’. It suggests being afraid of the unknown and implies that change denotes a threat. Freeing up intimates a letting go, an acceptance that ‘if life is this precarious’, then there is, perhaps, nothing to lose by stepping into the unknown. At times precarity ‘demands that we change’, it becomes necessary to move because there is no other choice. The participant also suggests that being challenged at an existential level ‘can trigger us into activity’. It appears that there are multiple responses to precarity, however, not everyone is able or in a position to change, and some people do not survive.

As illustrated above, the likelihood of freezing or being freed up intimates that the capacities to respond to precarity may be compounded by other intersectional factors, including poverty, upbringing, disability, or access to support (Brown & Moloney, 2019). It is, in this context, a ‘weird kind of privilege’ to have the opportunity to move towards change or adaptation, regardless of how frightening it might seem. Yet if we are to celebrate or nurture our inter-dependent survival and relational wellbeing, then there also comes with it a shared responsibility to not let people ‘fall off the edge, to become the excluded one’ (Caroline). This is where precarity, as an affective force, needs to be considered for its relational potential and emergence, offering an alternative to the individual psychologising of its effects (Braidotti, 2019; Massumi, 2015).

The question of how embodied practices might support us to move within spaces of uncertainty is considered in the following extract:

… what’s it like to be in the unknown, and the what if, and the what might be? Because that idea that we need to know, actually, what if we let that go? And we don’t need to know. So, there’s the obvious physicality of opening up, breathing, and focusing on the breath. I almost start everything with breath work and a little bit of guided body scanning, almost everything starts and ends with that. (Clara)

An emerging theme that arose through the interviews referred to the possibility of letting go of the ‘need to know’ what is going to happen. Embodied practice offers a space to explore instead what it is like ‘to be in the unknown’ by encouraging connection with and through the body. Within this movement-based practice, ‘focusing on the breath’ and ‘guided body scanning’ are used at the beginning and end of sessions, as a way of physically ‘opening up’ and bringing attention to the body in the here-and-now. A curiosity and a becoming more attuned to the body is encouraged, rather than an attempt to fix something in place or control the situation. Another participant also begins with breath work and discusses how he develops it further:

… then starting to notice other sensations around the body that may be connected with that. And also noticing impulses, movement impulses, or stillness impulses, mainly. And then including relational impulses, an impulse to move towards, or away, to throw something, to hide. (Stephen)

Breath work is often used for centring, grounding, bringing attention to the body and calming thoughts, emotions and the nervous system. Awareness to ‘other sensations around the body’ might also be encouraged. The use of the word ‘noticing’ regarding the impulses to move or be still, refers to a growing awareness of a body’s desires or urges. Again there is a curiosity and space that has been created through the breath work. There follows a broadening of awareness to include ‘relational impulses’ or actions, a moving ‘towards or away’ something or someone. Noticing these impulses arising in the body gives information through the body, and may be an opportunity to begin regaining trust in bodily knowledges.

As discussed, many embodiment practices begin from a place of stillness and grounding, and the breath is often referred to as an anchor in meditation, yoga and mindfulness practices (Lalande et al., 2012). Yet breathing is itself movement, the rise and fall of the ribcage, the diaphragm, nostrils, the oxygen moving through the body. The participant below considers how movement and stasis might be reframed:

To start from movement is already a different relationship to change, because the nature of movement itself is change, movement is not static; stasis, for me, is part of movement […]. If I can really cultivate this sense that we can see in nature, of change as the default, so that movement itself becomes the anchor, then I think that’s the direction that we need to go in times that are getting more and more uncertain, because the very ground will shake under our feet. (Sandra)

This example suggests that stillness may be re-configured as ‘part of movement’. It offers an important insight for thinking about precarity’s effects, the fear of change, and the fear of being stuck because ‘to start from movement is already a different relationship to change’. When we consider nature, we can see that things are always changing, ‘change is the default’. Therefore, what needs to be cultivated is an understanding that movement itself ‘becomes the anchor’. In these precarious times, when ‘the very ground will shake under our feet’, becoming comfortable with movement may help prepare us to cope better with change. Cultivating movement could help produce an embodied state that can better assist us in dealing with change than rigidly trying to hang on to stasis.

Inter-connections and relationality

As outlined previously, the philosophical approach to affect being used in this research suggests that ‘the starting point for analysis should be relational processes rather than stable traits’ (Ellis & Tucker, 2015, p. 164). There is an ontological emphasis on relationality in the new materialisms (Bennet, 2010; Braidotti, 2013; Deleuze, 1988). It indicates that human bodies and all other materialities are considered to not have any ‘ontological status or integrity other than that produced through their relationship to other similarly contingent and ephemeral bodies, things and ideas’ (Fox & Alldred, 2017, p. 17). Relationality does not, therefore, refer to just a basic relationship between things, as if those things are always already separate (Barad, 2007). Rather, ontological relationality works with the assumption that things are always already relational, which helps to circumnavigate the tendency to think dualistically. Dualism emphasises separation whereas the monism of the new materialisms helps to displace common binaries, such as mind/body, human/nonhuman or nature/culture (Murris, 2022).

Ecological, embodied and relational practices are compatible with this theoretical lens because they draw attention to inter-connections and encourage a nurturing of relationships (Totton, 2021). The following excerpt refers to a training programme within a field of embodied movement-based therapies:

We weren’t just creating people who became therapists, we were creating people who understood what it meant to be in relationship, in an honest and congruent way […], and there’s a deep connection that can happen really quickly, because […] we’re encouraging embodiment, we’re encouraging learning through the body, like, what’s the body telling you? And so much more comes out of it then than ‘this is what we’re going to learn about today’, and everybody remains in their own cognitive processing around that. When we go into the embodied or the creative approach to learning, it becomes a co-creation, it becomes a shared experience, and there’s power in that. (Clara)

Training to become an embodiment therapist is more than just cognitively learning and adopting the tools of the trade. The use of a person-centred approach (Rogers, 2004) to learning was additionally found to help emphasise what it meant ‘to be in relationship in an honest and congruent way’. Within this environment, a ‘deep connection’ can be created quite quickly due to the engagement with embodiment and ‘learning through the body’. Rather than being instructed about what is going to be learnt through individual ‘cognitive processing’, the embodied approach to learning becomes a ‘shared experience’. The embodied process facilitates ‘co-creation’, in which power plays out as a relational capacity to affect and be affected within a creative, learning assemblage.

Raising awareness of bodily sensations, shaping and information to re-build trust in the body’s knowledge and in relationships, may also extend to be inclusive of more-than-human knowledges and the inter-connections between humans and nonhumans. The following example of practice engages with and makes apparent the relationality between human and more-than-human bodies, using horticultural ecotherapy:

… then going out, opening again to this much bigger connection to land. The seedling that they planted last week, the seedling that’s there but has been eaten by a slug and they’re kind of bereft, and I guess the term ‘ecological self’ then becomes really part of this. The ecological self is a self that’s relational in a much more multi-faceted way than which we normally operate in our daily life, or that our culture encourages us to relate. The ecological self is aware of all of those inter-connections and kind of moves between and selects and responds. (Robbie)

Developing on from a relational awareness and connection to elements inside a room, going outside invites an ‘opening again to this much bigger connection to land’. This example discusses a seedling that someone has planted, which has been destroyed in some way, and the sadness and grief this might cause. This kind of sensitive connection draws closer to an ‘ecological self’, which is a self that is ‘relational in a much more multi-faceted way’ than our culture or daily life normally gives space for. The ‘ecological body’ (Reeve, 2011, p. 51) moves between these relationships, selecting what it pays attention to and how it might respond. It suggests that opening up to more relationality invites connections that may bring comfort, while at the same time, it may also invite more pain. It therefore comes down to ‘requirements and tolerances’ (Sandra), an exploration of the relations that make it possible to ‘get along and cohabit’ (Sandra). Becoming alert to these other relationships is a step towards an embodied-relational process that recognises humans as part of a wider ecology (Rust, 2020). It is not about pursuing an idealised state, but it is a way to live in this world with awareness of our interconnected, rather than isolated, position.

Neoliberal capitalism encourages us to exploit others, the world and, increasingly, ourselves (Han, 2017). It incites a relationship of extraction, including through methods of self-help or corporatised, consumerist approaches to wellbeing. For example, the term ‘McMindfulness’ (Stanley, 2019, p. 93) has been adopted to emphasise the fast-food style consumption of mindfulness as ‘the latest iteration of a capitalist spirituality’ (Purser, 2019, p. 18). The pain of witnessing capitalism’s seeming co-option of what was once considered radical territory, marks an awareness that ‘anything that has the potential to challenge the system, inevitably will be subsumed within it’ (Matthew). Even now, many practices marketised under the name of embodiment are thought to have ‘nothing radical about them whatsoever, quite the opposite’ (Tim). Nature, too, is marketised ‘as resources to be consumed for human benefit’ (Matthew), repackaged ‘into products that we can sell and put online’ (Emma), and thereafter regulated and applied within the confines of the market. The term, ‘nature’, is additionally problematic for many ecological theorists and practitioners because of the implied dualisms that have historically separated nature/culture and humans/nonhumans. It is not used unironically in this context regarding the capitalist co-option of it.

Arguably subsumed by the neoliberal wellbeing agenda, and in addition to mindfulness-based practices, the mass roll-out of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) is regarded by some psychotherapists and activists to have become little more than a ‘tool to adapt individuals to the norms of capitalism’ (Atkinson, 2019, p. 170). The focus on alternative practices in this research is not about applying yet further techniques to cope with capitalism better, though this could, perhaps, be a side-effect. What is really being nurtured through the work of the alternative practitioners in this study are attitudinal, ethical shifts and a movement towards reciprocity encouraged through relationality (Henson, 2018). The final section considers how this might be supported and, thus, how the potential of these practices might still find ‘new opportunities, new interstices’ (Tim) opening up.

Bodily knowledge and openness to more-than-human

For ecologically minded practitioners particularly, relationality includes and goes beyond human-to-human relations. The notion that ‘inter-connection is always happening [is] a question of recognising it, rather than doing anything’ (Sandra) and, perhaps, comes down to ‘what information we privilege and what information we kind of filter out’ (Caroline). The participants’ insights support the view that there are a whole range of human and nonhuman voices not being listened to, and thus the capacities for change continue to lack diversity and can be limited by western capitalist mindsets (Braidotti, 2022). Noticing the people and things that we receive knowledge from, can reveal what and who is privileged, and what or who is ignored, both locally and on a global level:

There’s something about where we look for information for input about ourselves. We can look for input in the newspaper, we can look for input in our intellectual processes, we can also look for it in a much more open way. We can look for it in our symptoms, we can look for it in things we overhear people saying on the bus, we can look for it in the flight of birds, you know? Opening up the channels for information creates a huge shift in our relationship with the world. […] In some ways it’s a difference between a focused gaze and a wider gaze, actually letting what’s in the corner of one’s eye emerge rather than zero-ing in on the centre of the picture. (Tim)

It is possible to see from the above that there are alternative ways to receive ‘input about ourselves’ and knowledge of our situation as planetary beings. What is normalised in mainstream western cultures, is a privileging of ‘our intellectual processes’, including what we read in the media or other informative texts. It is feasible, however, to also look for input ‘in a much more open way’, for example, through what we feel in our bodies, what we see in the more-than-human, or what we might casually overhear. Alternative ‘channels for information’ can create changes in our relationships with the world because we become more open in our thinking. Opening to ‘a wider gaze’ rather than a focused one allows for an emergence of ideas and knowledge that exist beyond the scope of one’s individual perception or perspective. For instance, horticultural ecotherapy is indicative of a broadening of relationality that can be nurtured and developed on a practical level:

One of the parts of this work is a surrendering, a letting go, it’s a widening of agency. I, as a practitioner, am supported by all of these other things that are going on […], whether it’s this little seedling or whether it’s a tree, the bird that sings outside their [a client’s] window each morning. (Robbie)

The above quote is an example of increasing the ‘ability to relate to multiple others, in a productive and mutually enforcing manner’ (Braidotti, 2019, p. 166). Alternative practices and ethics that foster embodied, eco-systemic approaches, are not merely alternative because they practise outdoors, or focus on movement or on growing things. They are alternative because they recognise that ‘what is missing’ (Leanne) are relationships produced and nurtured through the affective flows of ‘love’ (Caroline), ‘compassion’ (Clara) and ‘care’ (Robbie). While narratives of self-care and self-love are engrained in the neoliberal marketisation of wellbeing, they are inevitably loaded with a sense of self-enclosed individualism (Keating, 2012). However, affect ‘feels out the world’ (Massumi, 2015, p. 209), which suggests that the relational, moving body could play a crucial role in navigating precarity and its effects on mental health and wellbeing.

Conclusion

Precarity is recognised to be damaging and painful due, largely, to the violence of neoliberal capitalism and the inequalities inherent within current political-economic systems. However, it is also considered to be indicative of, and an opportunity for, inter-dependency and change. Instead of individualising the negative effects produced by precarity and, thereafter, adopting individualised solutions, embodied and relational practices draw attention to our inter-connections, and encourage attitudinal and ethical shifts towards models of reciprocity, rather than competition and extraction. Power is thus seen to operate in the affective flows and forces, that is, in the relational capacities of bodies and other materialities to affect and be affected.

With regards to mental health and wellbeing, preparing the ground for affective capacities that open up, rather than close down, alternative ways of moving are necessary and timely. Within the relational ontologies of the new materialisms, affects like insecurity, fear and anxiety are not focused on as individual, emotional states but can be affirmatively and relationally reworked. A precarity assemblage reveals that the flows of affect are not unquestioningly negative in and of themselves, but rather they become negative when they block relational capacities that enable movement and change. By nurturing the space for embodied relating to self, to other humans and to more-than-humans, DMP, ERT and eco-psychotherapies have the potential to be transformational.

This paper concludes that alternative practices and ethics have the capacity to reinforce and create affirmative spaces that nurture and celebrate the inter-dependent nature of existence. Bodywork and openness to more-than-human sensibilities are recognised to create co-operative opportunities from which to navigate the ‘embodied and embedded, relational and affective’ (Braidotti, 2019, p. 12) conditions of precarity.

Acknowledgements

Ethical Approval was obtained through Ulster University’s School of Law Filter Committee. Consent Forms were signed and returned to the research team. With special thanks to all anonymised and non-anonymised participants, including: Robbie Breadon, Caroline Frizell, Matthew Henson, Emma Palmer, Sandra Reeve and Stephen Tame.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Amanda Light

Amanda Light is a recent PhD graduate from Ulster University and a research associate at University of York. Her research focuses on precarity, embodied health and movement practices, and draws from critical theory, new materialist and posthuman perspectives.