The vicious circle of precarity
cognitariats in the era of austerity and authoritarianism
in Social Anthropology/Anthropologie socialeSearch for other papers by Aimilia Voulvouli in
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Based on ethnographic material produced during the last six years in Greece and Turkey, this paper will discuss the trajectory of three scholars who sought academic refuge in Turkey to escape the precarity that austerity policies created in their own country, Greece. They were forced out of their jobs, and consequently Turkey, when caught in the middle of the Turkish government’s authoritarian outburst following the failed coup attempt of July 2016. Drawing on approaches that construe precarity as a normality in all labour groups, including academics, and the authoritarianism inflicted on academia as an assault on civil liberties by the regime aimed at preventing academics from mounting a serious challenge to the incumbent, I will try to illustrate two things: (a) that for the cognitariat, precarity that results from austerity policies differs little from precarity that results from authoritarian policies and (b) that structural precarity has the tendency to reproduce itself through the disciplining mechanisms of these two types of governmentality.