Precarious Objects: Activism and Design in Italy
By (Author) Ilaria Vanni
Manchester University Press
Manchester University Press
3rd December 2020
United Kingdom
Tertiary Education
Non Fiction
Theory of art
History of art
745.40945
Hardback
160
Width 170mm, Height 240mm, Spine 14mm
562g
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. -- .
Ilaria Vanni, University of Technology Sydney, is Associate Professor of International Studies and Global Societies in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.