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Precarity as Resistance and Cultural Solidarity: 

A Critical Pedagogy for Exploitative Flexibilisation 
 

Copyright © 2017 

Prism: Casting New Light on Learning, Theory and Practice 

http://prism-journal.blackburn.ac.uk/ 

ISSN 2514-5347 

Vol. I (1): pp. 97-151 

 

ABDUL AZIZ HAFIZ 
University Centre at Blackburn College 

abdul.hafiz@blackburn.ac.uk 

 

Abstract 
This discursive paper uses the work of Freire and others to propose a critical pedagogy for 

precarity which is grounded in forms of radical (post)politics. A critical pedagogy for 

precarity is proposed that calls for a replacement of, or synthesis with, the UK 

government’s employability in HE agenda. Through the conscientisation of prospective 

graduates towards a ‘being-with-the-world’ and the associated mental habits and bodily 

practices that focus on the principles of a Social and Solidarity Economy (SSE), solidarity, 

reciprocity and sustainability, as a response to precarity, is possible by creating local 

solidarity-based associational spaces for critical education and praxis, we advocate for 

critical pedagogical practices alongside more opportunities for collective action that 

engender solidarity, reciprocity and sustainability in graduates’ bodily practices and 

modes of thinking and being, through a critical pedagogy that facilitates cultural action 

for freedom, self-help and collective forms of social provisioning of biological and social 

needs: housing, food, energy production, social caring and welfare needs in general. 

 

1. Introduction 
1.1 The Experience of Precarity 

The widespread experience of precarity points towards the need to rework the praxis of 
critical pedagogy as a means of liberation resulting in the subjectivities of active social action 
(Freire, 1973, 1990, 1993, 2000, 2014) against the social conditions imposed by the 
(re)precarisation of labour relations and the social realm. This requires a decoupling from the 
existing embedded employability strategies as a magic bullet (Arora, 2013; Speight, Lackovic, 
and Cooker, 2013) and to move pedagogical imaginaries towards a reframing of liberation as 
an active resistance to future exploitative flexibilisation facing graduates in the new economy. 
The term imaginaries suggests that our shared practices – political, social, economic – are 
enabled by way of a collective imagining concerning their purpose and significance. Taylor 
(2004) and Jessop (2012) elaborate on the power and hold of imaginaries to reduce the 



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cognitive complexity of making sense of the social world. Jessop (2012, p.2) provides the 
following definition;  

An imaginary provides one entry point into a supercomplex reality and can also be 
associated with different standpoints, which frame and contain debates, policy 
discussions, and conflicts over particular ideal and material interests. Hegemonic 
and dominant imaginaries are generally socially instituted and socially embedded 
and get reproduced through various mechanisms that help to maintain their 
cognitive and normative hold on the social agents involved in the field(s) that it 
maps. Such 'mental maps' matter most where the sum of activities in relevant 
field(s) is so unstructured and complex that it cannot be an object of effective 
calculation, management, governance, or guidance. This makes a shared 
imaginary essential to agents' capacities to 'go on' in that supercomplex world, but 
the necessary simplifications can also have counter-productive effects. 

The dominant imaginary of the marketization of higher education in the UK has established 
an indentured condition mediated through student debt (Holden and McElroy, 2015; Bachan, 
2014; Ibrahim, 2011). Additionally, both cognitive and corporeal surveillance is prevalent in 
the neoliberal university leading to concerns for the traditional role of universities in nurturing 
cohesion and managing difference in multi-cultural societies (Open Society Justice Initiative, 
2016; Rights Watch (UK), 2016; Thomas, 2012). This paper aims to revisit Freire’s concept of 
conscientisation, which is viewed primarily as a strategy concerned with power, literacy, the 
self-encounter and the acquisition of an explanatory vocabulary as a means for political 
awakening and cultural action for freedom, which represents agential possibilities. Freire is 
associated with teaching strategies sensitive to the effects of relations of power based on 
race, class, gender, ethnicity, and so forth, and on learning and consciousness formation 
(Morrow and Torres, 2002). The widespread experience of precarity is a shared condition that 
can provide new forms of belonging and action (Freire’s conscientisation) within the 
emergent fragmentation of class structure in an enduring crisis-ridden economy.  

1.2 Definitions of Precarity 

Whilst the generative mechanisms of precarity are too numerous to discuss here, for the 
purpose of this paper, certain assumptions are made in defining precarity below. Precarity is 
defined here as the social, ecological, economic, cultural or political conditions that:  

I. limit the stability (corresponding to prevailing measures and or metrics or policy 
measures) of economic security in a given context (measured as readily convertible 
capital and assets, such as money or other economic instruments in sufficient 
quantities, excluding debt) that in normal conditions create the opportunity to 
weather short-term crisis and shocks (Walker, Hanna, Cunningham and Ambrose, 
2015); 

II. progressively deteriorates social mobility - intra-generational and intergenerational 
(Bukodi, Goldthrope, Waller, and Kuha, 2015; Erikson and Goldthorpe, 2010; 
Goldthrope and Jackson, 2007). Social immobility is defined here as a generational 
discrepancy between parental and offspring’s ontological insecurity and existential 
anxiety measured by the (in)ability to plan for the future (Solon, 2015; Campos-Matos 
and Kawachi, 2014; Chin and Culetta, 2014 and Piketty and Saez, 2014). It is assumed 
that security from precarity is transmitted across generations through capital assets 
and inheritance, and is deferred or displaced between social groups intra-



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generationally (from spouse to spouse, parent to offspring, offspring to parent in any 
one period) through the precarisation of one particular social group in opposition to 
the other as a ‘fix’ for multi-generational immobility. 

III. limit the ability to exchange skills (World Economic Forum, 2016; De Pleijt and 
Weisdorf, 2014)1 in a knowledge-based economy (OECD, 1996; Brinkley, Fauth, 
Mahdon and Theodoropoulou, 2009; Sum and Jessop, 2013)2 for wages or income 
above the required sum to sustain a livelihood (Lee and Sissons, 2016; Lee, Sissons 
and Jones, 2016; Goos, Manning and Salomans, 2010) corresponding to the ability to 
make long-term choices, e.g., marriage, family planning, housing (Oshio, 2008; Allison, 
2013; Cangiano, 2016, pp.4); 

IV. increase political desistance (Laurison, 2015; Armingeion and Schädel, 2015; Teivainen 
and Trommer, 2017; Kagarlitsky, 2017; Pettifor, 2017; Jessop, 2017;) defined as 
disengagement from formal or informal forms of government and governance and 
limits political resistance (Ettlinger, 2007; Maeir, 2013; Foran, 2014; Neilson, 2015; 
Vogiatzoglou, 2015;) defined as engagement in direct and indirect forms of formal and 
informal social action in a given social context due to ontological insecurity and 
existential anxiety. 

 

1.3 Precarity as a Paradigm Shift 

The political issues surrounding precarity (Lee and Kofman, 2012) have identified a range of 
contributing factors that focus on urban life (Mayer, 2012); the labour market (Elcioglu, 2010); 
industrial relations (Cunningham, Baines, Shields and Lewchuk); welfare reform (Greer, 2016); 
the political potential of migrant labour (Banki, 2013; Lewis, Dwyer, Hodkinson and Waite, 
2015); migrant worker experiences (Scott, 2015, Potter and Hamilton, 2014); creative labour 
(Murray and Gollmitzer, 2012) and the transitions for youth (Bright, 2016). 

It was during the late 1980s and early 1990s that, through its use by social movement activists 
and critical theory academics, the notions of precarity acquired the new meaning (Biglia and 
Bonet Marti, 2014). Precarity points toward the social and economic condition of 
abandonment at the core of social life by the crisis of the welfare state and by the weakening 
of labour rights associated broadly with neoliberal economic planning. It is the dismantling of 
this safety net as a reality or as a project that signals one constellation of meanings around 
precarity. Casas-Cortés (2014) identifies four distinct although interrelated conceptual 
developments that redefine precarity as follows: (i) labour after the rollback of welfare state 
provisions; (ii) the new paradigm of intermittent and immaterial labour; (iii) the unceasing 
mobility of labour; (iv) the feminisation of labour and life. The term precarity can be seen to 
have come to prominence at a specific historical juncture in many post-industrialist societies 
that is associated with changing economic landscapes, intensifying trajectories of 
neoliberalism and globalisation (Dicken, 2003; Gorz, 1982, 2000; Ohmae, 1990; Aglietta, 
1979) and increased mobility (Urry, 2000).  

                                                           
1 Some have suggested that downward mobility and some deskilling during the classical years of the Industrial Revolution (c. 1750-1850) 
and some in the agricultural sector (between 1550-1750) took place. The transition from artisan workshops to factory production and that 
mass production substantially raised the demand for unskilled workers (including women and children).  
2 See OECD (1996) Knowledge-Based Economy for a description, for a definition, Brinkley, I. (2006) Knowledge economy programme 
report. The Work Foundation and for a critique Sum and Jessop (2013) Competitiveness, the Knowledge-Based Economy and Higher 
Education. Journal of the Knowledge Economy, 4 (1). pp. 24-44. 



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1.4 Precarity as vulnerability and instrument of governing 

Precarity indicates an ontological condition of vulnerability, exposure, or capacity to suffer 
shared by all living creatures: the inability of life to survive without a protective net provided 
by others, by social caring, and collective protection leading to fluctuating ontological security 
and existential anxiety (Neilson, 2015; Giorgi, 2013). Butler, in Precarious Life (2004), 
confronted what she calls precariousness, which should be distinguished from precarity 
intended in the labour market sense. For Butler, precariousness is an ontological and 
existential category that describes the common, but unevenly distributed, fragility of human 
corporeal existence. The political usage of the term precarity relates to an attempt to identify 
or imagine precarious, contingent or flexible, workers as a new kind of political subject, 
replete with their own forms of collective (dis)organisation and modes of expression. In its 
most ambitious formulation it would encompass not only the condition of precarious workers 
but a more general existential state, understood at once as a source of ‘political subjection, 
of economic exploitation and of opportunities to be grasped’ (Standing, 2011, 2014). 

1.5 Precarity as insecurity  

Precarity is a concept that is located within the wider discourses of resistance to the new 
economy (Maume and Wilson, 2015; Baldry, 2007). In sum, the new economy characterized 
by job insecurity, deindustrialization, and occupational polarization that represents a break 
with the past. These discourses of resistance re-present precarity as a symbolic form or 
expression, or symptom of the exploitative relations that are an enduring feature of social 
formations (Sassen, 2014). Precarity is an ontological subjectivity and a social condition, 
whereby ontological, economic, political and social insecurity leads to the experience of 
temporal poverty, informalisation of labour rights, casualisation of social life and the 
deprivation of a sense of belonging including class consciousness and/or occupational 
community.  

Two broad strands of literature can be distinguished in research on precarious employment; 
precarious employment as insecurity regarding income sufficiency and regarding job stability 
(Rodgers and Rodgers 1989; Quinlan, Mayhew and Bohle, 2001; Barbier 2004; Kalleberg 2011; 
Olsthoorn, 2014). This literature only provides measures rather than address the ontological 
insecurity and future crisis potentialities of the new economy that new graduates are likely 
to encounter. In order to define a radical critical pedagogy for precarity, we need to reflect 
on the conditions wrought by the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), the Eurozone Crisis and Brexit. 
It has been argued by some that, at least in the US and UK, young people aged 16-243 have 
suffered disproportionately during the recession (Department of Business, Innovation and 
Skills, 2016). Part-time working, working-time preferences and increased migration suggest 
that younger age groups are more supply-constrained than other age groups by reduced 
levels of labour demand during the recession (Bell and Blanchflower, 2011).  This can be 
explained through the intense competition for jobs between the young and those at a much 
later stage in their careers, possibly approaching retirement. Job insecurity is becoming the 
norm for young people in the UK (The Economist, 2013; The Conversation, 2014; Simmons 
and Smyth, 2016).  

                                                           
3 In 2015, both graduate and non-graduate employment rates returned to their pre-recession levels; however postgraduate employment 
rates remained below their pre-recession level. Graduates saw an annual decline in their high skilled employment rate between 2014 and 
2015 of 1.3 percentage points across the working age population (16-64 year olds) and 2.2 percentage points across the young population 
(21-30 year olds). 



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In response to the contradictory and uneven distribution of social and economic impacts of 
globalisation, Walters and Cooper (2011) argue the case for a re-insertion of politics and 
power into the theory and practice of lifelong learning and work. This provides a starting point 
for the dialogical practice of a radical critical pedagogy for precarity. They cite the work of 
authors such as Mojab (2009) who proposes that “turning work and lifelong learning inside 
out” and standing conceptions of learning on their head through a re-interpretation of 
conceptions of knowledge and learning, or current practices of work-related education and 
training to critically analyse the social relations that underpin these conceptions and 
practices. The process of commodification that is transforming learning into a possession to 
be traded for gain in the market-place in parallel with “learning as dispossession”, stripping 
away a person’s identity and the understanding of their own exploitation (Walters and 
Daniels, 2009). Estrela (1999) pointed to the ambiguities and misleading ideas about the 
relations of power which are established among teachers, educators and trainees, the ways 
and effects of the reflection. Conscientisation of reflective practices which are more than a 
collection of techniques, a reflective practice should be based on an educational and training 
theory which should stimulate the teacher to take critical consciousness of the educational 
situations and of his/her own practice in the situation. This paper advances the issues raised 
by Estrela in the context of the precarity faced by graduates today. Freire’s concept of 
conscientisation linked to the dialectic unity of theory and practice through praxis should 
produce an instrument of theoretical and operational value for education. New 
interpretations will cause the teacher to wonder about him/herself, about the world around 
him/her, promoting a critical and dialogist relationship towards the world, solidarity with 
others and to explore technical and practical reason. 

2. Changing Landscapes 
2.1 The Economic Landscape Facing UK Graduates 

In the context of a deepening and widening retreat of state funded social protection systems, 
combined with an abandonment of the standard employment contract model by employers 
in welfare capitalist states, larger shares of risks from the crises from economic instability in 
a globalised economy are (re)shifting to individuals. High skilled labour are not exempt from 
the threat of ontological insecurity and existential anxiety on a more regular basis. Human 
labour is being displaced by automation, robotics and artificial intelligence combined with the 
major challenges of reviving growth, reforming market capitalism and managing technological 
change (The World Economic Forum, 2017).  
 
Whilst graduate employment vacancies have increased over the last year and the UK HE 
sector perceive a buoyant labour market for graduates, graduates are reporting exploitative 
practices in employer culture (Higher Education Careers Services Unit, 2017; Association of 
Graduate Careers Advisory Services, 2016, pp.9). More generally in the UK, despite increasing 
the total employment over the last forty years, the UK employment stock and employment 
rate from 1971 to 2013 suggests that during recessions in the 1980s and 1990s and most 
recently in 2008, the labour market recovered to regain jobs that were lost and total 
employment has been at record levels in recent years (Office of National Statistics, 2013). This 
does not necessarily result in income security (Abrassart, 2015; International Labour 
Organisation, 2014). The early experiences of class remain an active variable in career success 
for graduates, and only through personal strategies and supported reflective action can this 
be addressed (Burke, 2015a; Burke, 2015b; Atkinson, 2013; Christie, 2017).  



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Since the GFC in 2008, Euro-zone crisis and Brexit (Price and Livsey, 2013; Cantillon, 2013; 
Centre for Economic Performance, 2016; Miller, 2016), living standards have been directly 
affected as a result of the vicious cycle of debt defaults, retrenchment of welfare and a trend 
of de-globalisation. Cumulatively, “the outlook for living standards in 21st century Britain do 
not look promising” (Corlett and Clarke, 2017, pp. 12; MacQuarie Group, 2016). Between 2004 
and 2013, there has been a significant percentage change in employment. Technological 
change, globalisation and demographics have been the key drivers of change in the structure 
of employment and patterns of demand for skills in the 21st century so far. Skills possessed 
will provide graduates with good employment prospects and education will play a key role in 
helping them understand society and the economy, and their role in it, with a greater 
emphasis required on social values and help for graduates to gain a broader understanding 
of what makes happiness and well-being (Wilson, 2013, pp.107; 2012).  
 
The UK economy underwent its longest and deepest recession since at least the Second World 
War and the recovery remains the slowest on record. Output is over 15 per cent below what 
it would have been had the long-run trend growth (1955-2008) continued from 2008 
onwards. Thus, full economic recovery has a long way to go (Department of Business, 
Innovation and Skills, 2015). Between 1997-2013 there has been a fall in employment for UK 
men under 25 and UK men 25-49, UK women under 25, UK women low skilled aged 25-49 and 
50-64. A rise in employment for high-skilled UK men aged 50-64, high-skilled UK women aged 
25-49 and 50-64 (ibid.). Whilst job polarisation is explained in general as technical progress 
with machines replacing people in routine tasks for which software programmes can now 
perform the task, in Britain, the demand for both low-skilled and high-skilled employment has 
also shrunk, alongside competition for work and employers demanding higher skills for lower 
salaries (Goos and Manning, 2003; 2007; Manning, 2013). Offshoring has led to a decline in 
middle-jobs as these jobs move to economies with lower wage costs, jobs are being replaced 
by low wage jobs requiring higher skills (Urry, 2014, pp.1-15). For instance, skilled crafts and 
bank clerks have declined in volume and are being replaced, in some part, by other mid-pay 
jobs that require similar skills requirements. There is widespread evidence for the existence 
of hollowing-out or job polarisation, whereby if jobs are ranked by their initial wage at a point 
in time in the late 1980s or early 1990s, then increases in employment share are observed at 
the top and bottom of this distribution, whereas those jobs that were in the middle have lost 
employment share over time with intermediate jobs with lower pay offsetting some of the 
offshoring effect (Lloyd, Mason and Mayhew, 2008; Holmes and Mayhew, 2016, 2012; 
McIntosh, 2013; Butcher, 2013).  
 
The UK central government expenditure and receipts 1947-2014 also show that receipts more 
or less have kept up with expenditure with a marked divergence from this trend since 2008 
(Jowett and Hardy, 2014, pp.8; Pope and Waters, 2016, pp.37). This means that despite record 
levels of employment, income and corporation tax collection are lagging behind, however 
Value Added Tax receipts have risen sharply since 2009-2010 impacting on the cost of living 
(Jowett and Hardy, 2014. pp.7; Corlett and Clarke, 2017). The growth in the number of 
employee jobs has been somewhat weaker and this is a contributory factor. While there were 
29.7 million in June 2016 – a record number – employee jobs increased by 366,000 (or 1.2 per 
cent) on June 2015, and 99,000 (0.3 per cent) since April 2016. In contrast, self-employed jobs 
have grown three times as fast, with a 3.5 per cent increase (151,000) in the year to June 



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2016, to 4.53 million, although the number of self-employed jobs remained just below the 
peak recorded in June 2014 of 4.55 million (Business, Innovation and Skills, 2016, pp.16-36).  
 
Since 2010 real wages have fallen by around two per cent each year, the longest sustained 
period of falling real wages in the UK on record. The marked decline in real pay since the onset 
of the recession, and its stagnation on some measures, is linked to the drop in productivity, 
increasing non-wage costs of employment, and a rise in inequality within wages. The UK has 
seen a sustained growth in self-employment, accounting for 83 per cent of the net gains in 
employment since 2007, however this is alongside a fall in relative earnings from self-
employment and substantial real terms reduction in income. There has also been an increase 
in ‘precarious’ forms of employment, including casual, very short-term arrangements or those 
with ‘zero hours’ contracts. (UK Commission for Employment and Skills, 2014).  
 
The UK graduate population are hit hardest by job volatility, between 2006-2015 graduate 
annual employment rates are only now returning to pre-recession levels. Graduates aged 21-
30 had lower high skilled employment rates than any of the other graduate age categories, 
which may suggest it takes time for graduates to become established in the labour market or 
to reach the higher levels in organisations that are captured by the high skilled employment 
rate measure. Graduates saw an annual decline in their high skilled employment rate between 
2014 and 2015 of 1.3 percentage points across the working age population (16-64 year olds) 
and 2.2 percentage points across the young population (21-30 year olds). Graduates that 
studied ‘Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics’ (STEM) subjects in their degree 
had higher employment rates, greater high skilled employment rates, lower unemployment 
rates and higher median salaries than graduates that studied ‘Other Social Sciences, Arts and 
Humanities’ (OSSAH) subjects (Kreyenfeld, Gunnar and Ariane, 2012; Business, Innovation 
and Skills, 2016a). 
 

2.2 The Oversupply of Graduates? 

The expansion of the UK higher education sector (1970-2013) has been greater than in most 
of the rest of Europe, however, occupational filtering down means that graduates are entering 
jobs that were once carried out by their non-graduate mothers and fathers. A degree has 
become a requirement for an ever-larger proportion of jobs and skills mismatches are leading 
to 4.3 million workers possessing skills and qualifications beyond the requirements of their 
employment (Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, 2015). The number of non-
employing businesses have increased by 112,000 with the growth being around +3% 
(Business, Innovation and Skills, 2016b; New Policy Institute, 2015), which is a demonstration 
of contemporary production practices that will in future perpetuate precarious labour market 
experiences due to the mismatch between graduate skills and prospective employment. The 
era of downward mobility is now a reality, the role of education in social promotion valorised 
in discourses of meritocracy have been exposed as cloaks for the naked inequality of human 
conditions and prospects (Bauman, 2012; Giroux, 2014; Giroux, 2015). 
 



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3. A radical critical pedagogy for precarity?  
3.1 Social and solidarity economy education 

 
‘If we fail to understand precarisation, then we understand neither the politics nor 
the economy of the present…In the leading neoliberal Western industrial nations 
it can no longer be outsourced to the socio-geographical spaces of the periphery 
where it only affects others…It has become an instrument of governing and, at the 
same time, a basis for capitalist accumulation that serves social regulation and 
control’ (Lorey, 2015:1). 

The main argument in this paper is that critical pedagogy in an era of widespread precarity 
requires a redefinition, politicising graduates towards formal politics is unlikely to lead to any 
significant improvement in happiness and well-being. Instead, it is proposed that we turn to 
Friere’s concept of conscientisation towards the exchange of skills and knowledge in a social 
and solidarity economy (SSE). SSE aims to locally reinvent economic life on the margins of the 
capitalist system based on values of solidarity, reciprocity and sustainability as opposed to 
vulnerability to precarity through the accumulation of student debt as the foundation for 
housing debt in the future.  
 
SSE is related to other familiar concepts such as Social Economy; Solidarity Economy; Plural 
Economy; Popular Economy; Third Sector. Defourny (1990) defines social economy as made 
up of associative activities based on values of solidarity, autonomy and citizenship. Those 
activities are carried out by commercial enterprises, mutuals and associations that operate 
based on the following principles: (i) democratic decision-making, (ii) social goals, and (iii) 
limited return on capital and socialization of benefits. The social economy positions itself as a 
third form of enterprise in a pluralist economy alongside the traditional private and public 
sectors SSE is associated with emphasising the imperatives of social and often environmental 
protection, but also systemic transformation. It has six forms or features: family; domestic; 
autonomous; community; associative; and cooperative. It has been argued that the latter 
three can be seen as part of a popular and solidarity economy. In European contexts, SSE is 
sometimes conflated with the third sector, defined as not part of the government, any profits 
are usually reinvested for social, environmental or cultural aims, and participation is largely 
voluntary. Any returns from enterprise are maximized for collective or mutual benefit (Amin, 
2009; Neamtan, 2009; Utting, van Dijk and Matheï, 2014).  
 
Applying SSE to graduate employability education aims to find solutions to the ontological 
insecurity and existential anxiety through economic uncertainty to be faced by many 
graduates in the UK, as a response to employability education measured by the normalisation 
of compliance to exploitation in the existing neoliberal economy and paradigms of “trickle up 
economics” and “competition fetish” (Chang, 2015; David, 2016; Naidoo, 2016). Security from 
precarity is possible by redefining economic life through transformative practices from the 
bottom up by providing local solidarity-based associational spaces and engaging in a science 
of social provisioning by redefining the intent and content of economic life, opened up 
through a radical critical pedagogy for precarity with SSE at its core (Whyte and Wiegratz, 
2016; Dash, 2016; Polanyi, 1944).  
 



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Society cannot function without the value that is derived from unpaid work. The discourses 
of unpaid work and precarity allude to forms of exploitation, whereby graduates in 
internships or work-based learning placements offering their time for free act as free labour 
in the economy. A critical pedagogy for precarity shows possibilities of social value production 
and social value provisioning through collective action. Social provisioning in the context of 
the current discussion is aligned to Todorova’s (2013: 62) definition, as the provision ‘for the 
material means of life which results in economic activities that generate the flow of goods 
and services that is necessary to meet the biological and socially-created needs of individuals 
and to maintain various social values’. This paper does not argue for systemic change in 
welfare-destroying crises, although this is seen as an evitable course of political action in 
response to the current crises of capitalist accumulation, financialisation of social life and the 
flexibilisation of existence. We advocate for more opportunities for collective action that 
engenders solidarity, reciprocity and sustainability in graduates’ bodily practices and modes 
of thinking and being through a critical pedagogy that conscientises self-help and social 
provisioning of biological and social needs - housing, food, energy production and social 
caring.        
 
Events during the 2000s, especially in southern Europe and the US are evidence of 
“precarisation as governmental precarisation” and corresponding responses of resistance, 
social insecurity can be found in the most different ways and in the most diverse social 
positions. Living and working conditions of precarity are being normalised at the structural 
level, and as a result have become a “fundamental governmental instrument of governing” 
(Lorey, 2015, pp.63). The contemporary period can be viewed as a period in which the 
normalisation of precarisation occurs through subjugation and conformity, creating 
widespread ontological insecurity and existential anxiety through the fear of being 
disposable, replaceable and flexibilised. ‘Flexicurity’ (Chung, 2012) in conjunction with 
technology and the cyber-augmented-digital-reality world act as an ever established mode of 
human-human interaction and human-production. This process is creating uncertainty for 
graduate experiences in the labour market as well as in the social realm.  
 
The site for the production of skills as a means to obtain security lie within the university. In 
the university, the UK Quality Code for Higher Education emphasises employability, enterprise 
skills and entrepreneurial skills through (i) careers services; (ii) as a focus for improving 
student’s experience of learning; (iii) embedding employability in the curriculum design; (iv) 
enterprise and entrepreneurship initiatives; (v) national initiatives, such as, the Higher 
Education Achievement Report; (vi) links with employers; (vii) skills development and 
professionalisation in the existing higher education workforce and (viii) digitial literacy.  
Meanwhile, the business community is working to ensure that education remains the best 
way to raise living standards; plan for the Apprenticeship-Levy; access to skills from the global 
talent; and a flexible labour market (The Confederation of British Industry, 2017; Quality 
Assurance Agency, 2014, pp. 1-4;).  
 
Over the past decade discourses in higher education policy have leaned towards state-led 
attempts to tighten the relationship between higher education and the economy (Leitch, 
2006). Higher education in the UK has experienced some key structural changes; gradual 
massification and more recently greater individual burden, risk and expenditure towards 
higher education in the form of indebtedness through student fees. State commitment to 



106 
 

financing higher education declines as it applies pressure through regulation of the ‘market 
responsiveness’ of the curricula offered in universities. This coincides with a shift towards a 
flexicurity in a post-industrial knowledge-driven economy. At the same time, the creation of 
new forms of higher education institutions and degree provision show the future threats to 
quality and integrity that are evident in the emerging infrastructure of higher degree 
apprenticeships with independent end point assessment organisations and co-investment 
models requiring large employers, SMEs and HEIs to collaborate through public sector 
procurement and regulation regimes (Chartered Institute of Personnel Development, 2017; 
Skills Funding Agency, 2017). This will lead to a more heterogeneous mix of graduates leaving 
universities who face more flexible labour markets and workplaces, the overall contraction of 
management forms of employment, an increasing intensification in global competition for 
skilled labour and increased state driven attempts to maximise the outputs of the university 
system (Harvey, 2000; House of Commons, 2009; Brown and Lauder, 2009; Tomlinson, 2012, 
pp. 25). The current iteration of the employability agenda can be found in the Teaching 
Excellence Framework, which will assess a higher education provider’s competence through 
measuring the destinations of graduates entering high-skilled employment (Business, 
Innovation and Skills, 2016c).    
 

3.2 Responses to precarity in Freire’s process of conscientisation 

Today, graduates face the “perils of precarity” (Kalleberg, 2013) in an economy faced with a 
situation where growth is achieved without jobs (DeNicco, 2015; Shimer, 2012; International 
Labour Organisation, 2014), profit is produced without prosperity (Lazonick, 2014) and work 
is carried out without job quality (Kalleberg, 2012). In order to develop: (a) a critical pedagogy 
for precarity and (b) praxis centred around pedagogical strategies of resisting exploitative 
flexibilisation, we first need to investigate the post-GFC crisis landscape. There is a risk here 
to restrict analysis and intervention that only deals with issues such as unemployment, 
conditions of work including contractual arrangements and jobs, as indicators that the longer 
term effects of the GFC have been neutralised. Jobs are empirically and pragmatically relevant 
as the tangible outcomes of debt-based investment in higher education, but jobs alone do 
not fulfil the higher purpose of pedagogy. Instead, the shared exploitative flexibilisation 
experienced by the educator and the student in the UK in 2016, provides the scope for 
dialogical co-intentional action (Read and Leathwood, 2014). 

In Cultural Action for Freedom (2000), Paulo Freire explains the process of conscientisation as 
an instrinsic element of collective and socio-cultural action for freedom. He asks us to reject 
the mechanistic, behaviourist understanding of consciousness as a mere replica of reality,4 
instead, proposing a critical dimension of consciousness that recognises that human beings 
are not dormant agents in transforming their reality from being in the world, signifying a lack 
of both self-knowledge and knowledge of the world, to being with the world, which can be 
achieved only through an objective distance from reality. The construction of our reality is a 
social process, so requires interaction with others. This interaction may cause a sense of 
difference or solidarity, as all humans are both subjects and objects of conflicting cultures. 
Many of our mental habits and bodily practices are inherited in a ‘taken for granted’ fashion 
and need modifying in order to alleviate ontological insecurity and existential anxiety. We are 
arguing here that it is the conscientisation of social and solidarity economy practices 

                                                           
4 Freire provides a further framework in which conscientisation can only occur by moving beyond, mechanistic objectivism, solipsistic 
idealism and logical behaviourism. 



107 
 

collectively that can provide an enduring security. In the analysis of the causation of human 
action, the level of the species (genetic populations) should be considered as distinct from 
the level of social structures (institutions, organizations, social groups, social classes) and from 
the level of personal identity. Correspondingly, the evolutionary time of the species should 
be distinguished from the historical time of social structures, and that should be distinguished 
from the biographical time of individual life. (Berger and Luckmann, 1967; Bourdieu, 1977 
[1972]; Luckmann, 2008; Klüver, 2008; Correa, Asuncíon and Estibaliz, 2015).  

In order to transform mental habits and bodily practices local solidarity-based associational 
spaces, firstly have to be created and utilised as the classroom for a radical critical pedagogy 
for precarity, in which being in the world consciousness can be transformed into being with 
the world consciousness. Objective distance from reality can only be created when 
approaches to social value production utilise post-disciplinarity, inter-disciplinarity, multi-
disciplinarity practices in order to produce social provisioning of housing, food, energy and 
welfare in general, in exchange for time resources from graduates across disciplines towards 
social provisioning.      

‘Whereas the being that merely lives is not capable of reflecting upon itself and 
knowing itself living in the world, the existent subject reflects upon his [sic.] life 
within the very domain of existence, and questions his relationship to the world. 
His domain of existence is the domain of work, of history, of culture, of values – 
the domain in which [humans] experience the dialectic between determinism and 
freedom’ (Freire, 2000: 40). 

The consciousness of and action upon reality is the entry point into the critical dimension of 
consciousness. This critical dimension can be developed into a characteristic of reflective 
instinct, then imagination, intentionality, temporality and transcendence. Temporality refers 
to the fact that here and there cannot exist without a now, before and after.  Once subjective 
reality becomes objectified giving power to words, as a means to communicate through a 
common language that describes the dehumanising conditions of precarisation, including 
linguistic, non-dyadic communication, semiotic, and interpersonal non-verbal 
communication. In learning a common language that articulates relations of oppression and 
domination, we learn to define and to distinguish between the ‘human’ and ‘de-human’ 
practices and encounter the problem posing or imagining of alternatives, once we think about 
reality in these terms. This is the starting point of imagining an individual biography that is a 
unique history, with a now, before and after, as well as a biography, which is socially universal, 
common and shared, this being the need to sustain ourselves in the evolutionary sense and 
through productive work. Such biographies include cultures of silence and dialectics of change 
in the social structure - superstructure as the world as we find it plus infrastructure as the 
means to resist and alter the world as we find it; dominators as those who “have a voice” + 
dominated as those who exist in a “culture of silence”. In today’s terms, Freire provides a 
helpful insight to question the nature of the relationship between ‘the metropolitan’ or 
‘urbanised’ and the ‘dependent’ or precarious societies in critiquing the neo-liberal pedagogy 
of employability.  

The metropolitan and the urban are outcomes of the acceleration of urbanisation, the 
atomisation and individualisation of life represented by a globalised economy logic of a 
financialised world of debt-based growth that gives a dominant definition to pedagogy and 
stratifies and contains populations, spaces and places in a hierarchy of core, periphery and 



108 
 

semi-periphery relations. These social relations constitute peculiar pedagogical subjectivities 
and identities that presuppose the servility to the neoliberal logic and the centrality of this as 
the purpose of higher education (Readings, 1997; Canaan and Shumar, 2008; Molesworth, 
Scullion and Nixon, 2011; McGettigan, 2013; Rapper and Olsen, 2016). The neo-liberalisation 
of higher education in the UK legitimises modes of naïve transitive/semi-intransitive 
consciousness that obscures the “structural perception”, which is contingent to obliterate the 
dominated consciousness including self-blame, and to objectify the problematical situations 
in the daily life of the graduates’ lived experience through a praxis against their perceived 
natural incapacity. The authentic dialogic conversation between the educator and the student 
mediates the conscientisation process as a mutual or reciprocal encounter. This is only 
possible through the denunciation of dehumanising and unjust structures and the re-
envisioning of a new reality. In this way, higher education becomes the site in which the 
antagonism between cultural action for domestication – domination and oppression, cultural 
action for conscientisation - the scientific unveiling of reality and cultural action for freedom 
- the philosophy of the science of the unveiling of reality or the debunking of the 
mystifications of ideological knowledge, can be realised.  

Conscientisation ensures that after the critical dimensions of consciousness come into being, 
once manifest, do not then degenerate into the old cultural myths. Freire advocates for a 
post-disciplinary approach to conscientisation. Specialisms narrow the area of ‘knowledge’ in 
such a way that the specialists are incapable of thinking and lose sight of the speciality as a 
whole. Conscientisation is the basic dimension of reflective action for educator and student. 
Whilst Freire’s (1970) call to action for a pedagogy of the oppressed is contextualised against 
the backdrop of the mass mobilisation of ‘illiterate peasants’ movements in north-east Brazil, 
its utility may be extended as a pragmatic strategy for resistance by the oppressed in 
advanced economies, as the processes of precarisation begin to affect many different 
professions (Walsh, 2014). This paper is advocating for educational practices inside and 
outside the classroom that engage in a praxis of neoliberal de-socialisation. This refers to the 
transformation of a consciousness which has been historically and culturally conditioned 
through an inversion of praxis. Taking account of Freire’s helpful binary which separates 
schooling from education. Following on from this, our goal is to develop a problem-posing 
pedagogy of critique and resistive action against precarisation, which is shared in many 
instances by the educator and student alike, albeit in different ways (English and Mayo, 2012; 
McKenna, 2013; Lopes and Dewan, 2015; McLaren and Jandric, 2014).  

The Fighting Against Casualisation in Education (University and College Union, 2016) 
campaign group reveals that in some institutions, up to a third of staff are on teaching-only 
contracts (Times Higher Education, 2016). According to the best workforce data available in 
the Further Education sector (FE), 34% of lecturing staff and 37% of other teaching staff in FE 
colleges are employed on precarious contracts. The most common form of precarious work 
is an hourly paid teaching contract; 30 colleges employ more than 50% of their staff on 
precarious contracts. Data from the Higher Education Statistics Agency confirms that less than 
two-thirds of the UK’s academics are on permanent contracts (Higher Education Statistical 
Agency, 2015). A mixture of fixed-term, hourly-paid, fractional and zero-hours contracts and 
working at more than one institution is common place for the ‘casual academic’. In the UK, 
this issue of casualization of knowledge-based labour in further and higher education has also 
been taken up by a number of trade unions, University and College Union and Unison. 



109 
 

We face a situation where young people have been schooled for several generations in 
market values of hyper-commodified and consumer-oriented culture through the 
naturalisation of neoliberal governmentality, which has gradually intensified this “culture of 
cruelty” (Giroux, 2011, 12) since the 1970s. The departure from any past generation is that 
their inheritance will be marked by ever-widening wealth distribution, the dismantling of 
social safety nets, declining job markets, in some part due to the job destruction process 
and/or due to technological developments in artificial intelligence and robotics and 
technology in general, student debts, increased precarity where unions and pensions are 
under assault including the increased retirement ages and the proliferation of adjunct jobs 
(Fisher, 2011).  

In the penumbra of the GFC, programmes of deficit reduction and austerity have been rolled 
out affecting many areas of society, including higher education and graduate employment 
(Seymour, 2014). At the same time, the acceleration of flexible employment, flexible firms, 
flexi-production and flexi-institutional practices alongside the retrenchment of social 
democratic values are evident in the workplace and welfare regimes (Farnsworth, 2015). The 
downsizing, outsourcing, near shoring and privatisation experienced in the higher education 
sector in the UK points to a precarity experienced by students and academic as a shared 
experience (UCU, 2016). In this context, the ‘edufactory’ workplace of the new economy 
becomes the site in which new forms of radical critical pedagogy become necessary in the 
face of post-partisan, post-political forms of government and governance and the emerging 
opportunities for cultural solidarity to be forged as a basis for collective resistance towards 
precarity. The shared experiences of uncertainty, instability, ontological insecurity and the 
inability to plan for the future is widespread across traditional national, cultural, ethnic 
boundaries as processes of precarisation take hold. Lorey (2015) provides an agenda for 
existing pedagogical practices that merely focus on more active participation in formal 
politics, upwardly mobile aspiration or student destinations.   

The modern casualisation that is taking place as part of globalisation involves a steady 
restructuring of social income and labour recommodification, in which many workers are 
finding that an increasing share of their remuneration is coming from money wages, which 
are a relatively insecure part of their social income (Standing, 2008). This paper deviates from 
the pursuit of a universal basic security merely through the paradigm of work, including the 
universal basic income. We propose a universal basic security that is not dependent on a 
universal basic income in cash terms. The reason for this is that such security is nonetheless 
conditional on particular behaviours, instead we propose a social income that is based on a 
theory of radical critical pedagogy for precarity that creates co-intentional practices by the 
educator and student that equips the graduates with the skills, knowledge and experience to 
sustain their basic needs, food, shelter, warmth and social belonging utilising the human 
capital gained through their academic discipline but outside of the rhetoric of employability.  

We advocate a departure from old and new labourist strategies of collective bargaining for 
wages and towards a collective bargaining for the commons - space and land that can provide 
the basis for experimenting with the production of a universal basic security. The rationale 
for a radical critical pedagogy is informed by the crisis tendencies of capitalist accumulation 
and the concomitant ecological insecurity associated with climate change. A new imaginary 
of knowledge transfer across networks and social exchange between communities facing 
uneven precariousness is proposed in order to produce a shared social security.         



110 
 

3.3 A Radical Politics of Critical Pedagogy for Precarity? 

 
‘It is typical of the post-Fordist multitude to foment the collapse of political 
representation: not as an anarchic gesture, but as a means of calmly and 
realistically searching for new political forms.’ (Virno, 2005) 

In recent years, an emergent literature across the social sciences has conceptualised 
contemporary processes of depoliticisation in terms of post-politics, post-democracy, and the 
post-political (Wilson and Swyngedeouw, 2014; Allmendinger and Haughton 2011; Catney 
and Doyle 2011; Clarke and Cochrane 2013; Crouch 2004; Diken 2009; Garsten and Jacobsson 
2007; Kythreotis 2012; Pares 2011; Vergopoulos 2001; Žižek 1999). A radical critical pedagogy 
for precarity uses living and working conditions as a starting point for possibilities for political 
agency in neoliberal conditions. Both Bourdieu and Castel had warned of the impossibility of 
collective resistance in the context of precarity. We argue that the battleground needs shifting 
towards a common ground of formal solidaristic practices, forming alliances between those 
atomised into rigid identities. In Italy and Spain the common ground has emerged not from 
the political or even university contexts, they have been realised in art institutions and social 
centres. The precarious cannot be unified or represented through classical forms of corporate 
organising due to their disparate interests. Contemporary relations of production and diverse 
modes of production “absorb and engender” subjectivities, extending economic exploitation 
and multiply identities and work places (Lorey, 2015:7-9). An example of this is that in the UK, 
there has been a decline in employee representative structures in the period 2004-2011 (UK 
Commission for Employment and Skills, 2014). 

The alternative to a life of precarity is one of protection, political and social immunisation 
against everything that is recognised as endangerment. Neither the security state nor the 
welfare state prevent precariousness, instead they engender new historical forms of 
precarity, new insecurities. Protection from insecurity is conditional on the obligation to 
obedience and subordination. The conditions of precarity are both the cause and effect of 
domination and security. Lorey (2015) goes on to discuss that domination is not legitimated 
through social security in post-Fordist societies, instead we experience governing through 
insecurity. Precarity denotes the relations of inequality as a hierarchy that accompanies the 
processes of othering. This governmental precarisation destabilises the human through 
employment, the conduct of life and modes of subjectivation that can only be overcome by 
bodily and practices of self-empowerment that recognise the ambivalence of modes of self-
government, conformist self-development/conformist self-determination. The patterns of a 
liberal ordering of precarity can no longer shift the danger elsewhere. It is now actualised in 
the individualised governmental precarisation of those whose cruel treatment is normalised 
under neoliberal conditions. The pursuit of hyper-efficient productivity will lead to an era of 
insecure employment (Chartered Management Institute, 2015; White, 2015). A radical 
politics of critical pedagogy for precarity starts from connectedness with others in dialogues 
about common interests and shared vulnerabilities within the differentness of the diverse 
precarious through new forms of organising and a refusal of obedience.      

Casas-Cortés’ (2009, p. 328) ethnographic study of social movements in Spain finds that 
precarity is used “both as an analytical tool and as a strategic point of departure to produce 
political subjectivities and re-invent different alliances and ways of struggle” (Arnold and 
Bongiovi, 2013). A diffusion of resistance, the decline of labourism and the periodic 



111 
 

emergence, diffusion and re-emergence of social movements leading to a discontinuity in 
social, economic and political progress, if progress is measured in the context of human 
flourishing. Critical pedagogy becomes the intersection for education and society and the 
problematic of precarity symbolises a governmentalised agency in an open networked super-
infrastructure. In the UK higher education context, Dowling and Harvie (2014) proposed that 
an exploration of commons and communities within higher education can possibly help to 
posit a transcendence of capitalist education. Commons suggest alternative, non-
commodified means to means to fulfil social needs - to obtain social wealth and to organise 
social production. Commons are necessarily created and sustained by communities, i.e., by 
social networks of mutual aid, solidarity, and practices of human exchange that are not 
reduced to the market form (DeAngelis, 2003). This begins with the gift economy of the 
university (social networks of mutual aid, solidarity, and practices of human exchange that 
are not reduced to the market form); a cooperative form of convivial competition amongst 
the research community of the university; and an encouragement of the constitution of 
community in the classroom.   

4. Conclusion 
4.1 New directions? 

My starting point for a radical politics for precarity is an employability education which 
centralises John Pearce’s (2003:25) Third System of the social economy; self-help, reciprocity 
and social purpose and the concept of a solidarity economy (Laville et al, 2007) that promote 
alternative economic practices in opposition to development models centred on the 
assumption of individualism and profit maximisation, organised around co-operation to 
satisfy common needs and benefits for local communities. Alternative frameworks include 
local living economy, community economy, community economic development, people’s 
economy. This altern-pedagogy for precarity prioritises glocalism (Swyngedouw, 2004), 
communal attachment and alternative consumption patterns. We recognise that this may 
require trade-offs. In the context of SSE, UK graduates can apply their disciplinary skills and 
adopt and enact co-operative and solidaristic practices including connecting with precarious 
communities, not in a paternalistic way, but to become conscious of the knowledge they can 
share with other precarised communities. This process may be mediated through reciprocal 
knowledge transfer or transactional relations; resources, technology and ideas. In the face of 
the loss of belonging in urbanised environments (Pinkster, 2016) and the crisis tendencies of 
the welfare state (Offe, 1984; Svallfors and Taylor-Goody, 1999; van Kersbergena, Visb and 
Hemerijck, 2014; Farnsworth, 2015, Taylor-Gooby, 2012, 2013), SSE can provide numerous 
advantages: economic empowerment; reciprocity and social capital; political empowerment 
and participatory governance; solidarity and ethicality.  

The literature on the ways in which groups cope with collective responsibility for ecological 
problems is limited, but raises questions about how groups construct representations, engage 
in collective emotional processes in response to collective responsibility (Caillaud, Bonnot, 
Ratiu and Krauth-Gruber, 2016). The conscientisation of solidarity in response to precarity 
emphasises the need for a dialogue about individual biographies of past, current and future 
insecurity in prospective graduates’ lives; food prices, housing costs, energy prices, housing 
volatility, job insecurity and climate change. The praxis of conscientisation of solidarity 
extends co-operative practices in a concrete way through a live classroom which searches for 
solutions to insecurity. Fundamentally, the aim of critical pedagogy is twofold: 1] to correct 



112 
 

the pessimistic conclusion of Neo-Marxist theories, and 2] to transform a “language of 
critique” into a “language of possibility” (Giroux, 1997, 108). We need to move beyond a 
hyper-commodified and consumer-oriented culture that relies on ‘money’, instead 
collectively develop cultures of social value production and social provisioning to create new 
forms of social currencies. Diverse theories and approaches in critical pedagogy can be 
identified which call for 1) the project of experience, 2) the project of anti-system, 3) the 
project of inclusion (Cho, 2010). A critical pedagogy for precarity proposes a project of 
experience that encourages lifelong learning in a live, real and actual laboratory that tests a 
curriculum in social value production and social provisioning in general, and specifically in 
food production, energy production, production of utility such as water purification and waste 
management, housing development and a pedagogy for precarity that is framed within the 
students’ own biography of insecurity towards a social solidarity economy of hope.       

 

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