Special Issue: Vol 61, No. 1, July 2024

Our everyday life is defined by what we do. These actions are vital to the meaning of both the present and the future. The future lies in the now, and hence we need to nourish this now, the present moment, with intimacy, social engagement, aesthetic education, and resilience. That is to say, the future of the planet and possibilities of life conditions for human and more-than-human survival need to be invested with components of care and repair right here, right now.
However, the post-1990s has marked a turn to more rigid forms of suppression and disruption of the elements of care. Perhaps, a case can be made that the neoliberal regime has rendered a transformation from care-mentality to governmentality - precisely the reason why Margaret Thatcher went on to claim that there is no such thing as society: “There are individual men and women and there are families, and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first.”
Consequently, social infrastructures were rendered fragile, and, in many countries, they were even devoured. The extractive nature of the neoliberal regime led to the emergence of precarious lives. It also led to the onslaught of rapacious colonization of the planet. Likewise, many scholars, including Amitav Ghosh, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Achille Mbembe, ask us to reconsider our relationship with the planet, to become more cognizant of the lurking threat of destruction or extinction that awaits us if we remain inactive. They advance the need to think more collectively, and to create modes of care and repair of what Wai Chee Dimock (2020) terms the “weak planet”, where the “baseline condition” of humans and other forms of life is vulnerability and susceptibility to harm. Dimock advocates human agency in initiating interactions and collaborations for resilience building, because “these precarious mediations release us from paralysis, sustaining hope in a future still unforeclosed, weakly but meaningfully open to our efforts” (12)
This special issue of SARE: Southeast Asian Review of English, “Faces of Precarity: Restructuring Care-mentality in Asia,” seeks to identify and debate different forms of precarity that pervade our planetary life. It aims to discuss the relevance of care in our daily lives that has the potential to mitigate the disruptions caused by extractive economies. We identify care not just as an affective mode; rather it is to be seen as an action and process that hold possibilities to create sustainable futures.

Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:
• healthcare privatisation
• urbanisation and precarity
• migration and neoliberal labour market
• digital trauma and care aesthetics
• intersections with disability studies
• ageing population and neoliberal ageing policies
• food security and hunger
• conflict, trauma and healing
• environmental precarity
• consumerism and materialism
• mental health
• social media, self-care, identity
• post-work society
• post-biopolitical porous entities
• postgenomic body-politics
• the politics, and ethics of care
• trans-corporeal ethics
• queer identities
• hope and utopia
• neoliberalism and socioeconomic equality
We solicit articles that deal with the above-mentioned themes via literature, popular culture, and cinema. Articles should not exceed 6000 words. Kindly submit an abstract of 150 – 200 words with 6 keywords.

Abstract submission deadline: October 31, 2023
Article submission deadline: February 28, 2024
Final draft submission: April 30, 2024
Publication date: June end, 2024
Email: precaritycare@gmail.com