Living and working on the edge: ‘Place precarity’ and the experiences of male manual workers in a U.K. seaside town

Abstract

Based on an ethnographic study of male manual workers in Blackpool, a large seaside town in the United Kingdom, and drawing on Bourdieu as a theoretical frame, this article explores the role of place in understanding conditions and experiences of precarity. With higher than average levels of deprivation, seaside towns have experienced particular employment challenges where precariousness is likely to be at the forefront of male manual workers' labour market condition. Results highlight the significance of the interplay between place, employment prospects, geographical ‘constriction’ and dispositions of ‘provisionality,’ which, together, produce ‘uneven geographies’ of labour. We develop the concept of ‘place precarity’ to show how precarity is fundamentally rooted in the spatial context and to capture how conditions and experiences of precarity interact with localised employment conditions.

Talking population geographies and a ‘love letter’ to the journal

“…Taking the overall volume of papers published in the journal there is merit in such a claim, although the exact truth might rather be that theory of sorts has been present but very lightly worn. Moreover, as well as brushes with Foucault and assemblage theory, as already detailed, it is possible to find explicit engagements with the likes of de Certeau and Lefebvre (Chattopadhyay, 2010;Ho & Hatfield née Dobson, 2011), Latour (Jöns, 2015;Phillips, 2010;Välimaa et al, 2023), and-maybe a particularly distinctive dimension of papers clustering in the journal, suggesting a 'Bourdieusian' (Zotova & Cohen, 2019) population geography concerned with 'doxa', 'habitas' and different forms of 'capital'-Bourdieu (e.g., Bauder et al, 2017;Boterman et al, 2018;Holt et al, 2019;Prazeres, 2018;Schapendonk, 2015;Simpson et al, 2021;Walker, 2011). useful, and I think quite a lot of money has been put into working on things like census geographies, which can of course also benefit inquiries into migration geographies, because it's seen as providing that kind of useful knowledge.…”