Creating from the Margins: Precarity and the Study of Folklore

In policing the participants of the game, the boys were also protecting the boundaries of their community in the hope that it would in turn provide affective networks of social support that could protect them from real or imagined social, political, or economic vulnerabilities. Uneven public health responses to COVID-19 and reactionary regime-supported violence against the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and efforts to dismantle white supremacy emphasize the degree to which precarity-wrought both by disease and racial injustices-disparately affects already marginalized communities. [...]pandemic-induced economic vulnerability-when set against ever-present economic vulnerabilities in the Global South-and pandemic-required social distancing-when considered alongside the fact that capital-owners have always lived separated from those upon whose labor they depend-suggest both that neoliberalism has established new forms of precarity and that precarity is a general condition always experienced differentially. The articles variously consider how individuals and communities living in economic precarity, cobbling together income through contingent work, may turn to folk traditions to foster a sense of stability.