Feminist Comparisons of Urban Economic Precarity Presented by Dr. Araby Smyth with the GenUrb Project

The Department of Anthropology and Sociology is pleased to host a talk by Dr. Araby Smyth. Dr. Smyth is a Post Doctoral Visitor at the City Institute and Faculty of Environmental & Urban Change at York University. She is a broadly trained human geographer whose research focuses on economic, feminist, and urban geographies.

Feminist scholars have long argued that precarity encompasses both labor and life. Through comparative analysis of the lives of grassroots women living in Cochabamba, Bolivia; Delhi, India; Georgetown, Guyana; Ibadan, Nigeria; and Shanghai, China this presentation underlines that economic precarity is about more than labor. Our analysis of over 250 interviews with women living in these cities illustrates how economic precarity is experienced during the many diverse life-making practices women carry out each day such as household provisioning, children’s education, and health care.