Now is a propitious time to re-examine the present forms and political implications of precarity. As my colleagues and I write the essays for this special issue of Emancipations, questions abound regarding the manifestations of precarity that have appeared since popular movements in France first adopted the slogan of ‘the precariat’ in the early 2000s. Then, ‘precarity’ fit as an intuitive name for people’s negatively altered living and working conditions as national governments, corporations and supra-national institutions consolidated neoliberal transformations as, indisputably, the new norm. Two decades hence, should this situation simply be reaffirmed as the not-so new normal
