Description

Book Synopsis
Precarious objects explores the traffic between design and activism by telling stories drawn from contemporary counter-precarity cases in Italy. As a category of labour and of global social experience in general, precarity is a wicked problem that affects all aspects of life, regulating the production and circulation of a wide range of material and immaterial effects. In this book, three microhistories of counter-precarity explore existent forms of resistance and resilience to precarity. Drawing on ethnographies and archives and bringing together debates from design theory, cultural studies and geography, this study shows how design objects and practices recode political communication and reorient how things are imagined, produced and circulated. It also shows how design as a practice can reconfigure material conditions and prefigure ways to repair some of the effects of precarity on everyday life.

Table of Contents

List of plates
Acknowledgements
Introduction: design, activism and precarity
1 MayDay! MayDay! Precarious objects and parades
2 Serpica Naro: precarity in the fashion system
3 Making otherwise: WeMake, a makerspace in Milan
Conclusion
Select bibliography
Index

Precarious Objects: Activism and Design in Italy

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    RRP £85.00 – you save £8.50 (10%)

    Order before 4pm tomorrow for delivery by Sat 20 Jun 2026.

    A Hardback by Ilaria Vanni

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      View other formats and editions of Precarious Objects: Activism and Design in Italy by Ilaria Vanni

      Publisher: Manchester University Press
      Publication Date: 02/12/2020
      ISBN13: 9781526135537, 978-1526135537
      ISBN10: 1526135531

      Description

      Book Synopsis
      Precarious objects explores the traffic between design and activism by telling stories drawn from contemporary counter-precarity cases in Italy. As a category of labour and of global social experience in general, precarity is a wicked problem that affects all aspects of life, regulating the production and circulation of a wide range of material and immaterial effects. In this book, three microhistories of counter-precarity explore existent forms of resistance and resilience to precarity. Drawing on ethnographies and archives and bringing together debates from design theory, cultural studies and geography, this study shows how design objects and practices recode political communication and reorient how things are imagined, produced and circulated. It also shows how design as a practice can reconfigure material conditions and prefigure ways to repair some of the effects of precarity on everyday life.

      Table of Contents

      List of plates
      Acknowledgements
      Introduction: design, activism and precarity
      1 MayDay! MayDay! Precarious objects and parades
      2 Serpica Naro: precarity in the fashion system
      3 Making otherwise: WeMake, a makerspace in Milan
      Conclusion
      Select bibliography
      Index

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