The chapter sets out to examine Nairobi as a site of cultural imagination. It argues that since its founding by the British colonialists, Nairobi has featured prominently as a site of “rest” for its many immigrant communities but also for the local Kenyans from its rural hinterlands. The chapter further examines how writers of African fiction have tapped into its rich tapestry, turning it into a powerful archive and a rich source of literary imagination. The chapter shows how Nairobi has become a site where the antinomies of the new nation-state play themselves out, as it gets mobilized by writers of fiction to figure a number of competing cultural and social imaginaries within Kenya and the East African region more broadly. By drawing attention to a set of fictional works on Nairobi, the chapter allows us to literally take a “walk” through the streets of Nairobi and to absorb its full significance as a layered site of archival imagination. It offers a glimpse of Nairobi as a bottomless resource for archive-building – a site of endless potential for literary imagination.

Chapter 10 approaches recent research on birth and infancy through a crisis-oriented framework. Birth and infancy are processes of transformations involving caregivers, kin, community, and the state. These take place in sociocultural and ecological contexts, which are many times also changing and adapting to known and unpredictable situations and possibilities. After introducing crisis as a pertinent concept for the study of birth and infancy beyond normative developmental frameworks, the authors describe works on notions of personhood, self, and attachments as processes involving lifecycle and non-lifecycle crises. The chapter approaches crises as disruptions that take place at different levels and temporalities, which are intrinsic to the understanding of birth and infancy contextually, highlighting long-term critical events that permeate societies and are intertwined with policy trends. The final section examines the crises of infancy, including attachment processes entangled in higher-order social crises, such as among socially and economically oppressed populations living with conditions of extreme precarity.

This chapter delves into the multifaceted dimensions of aging and senescence, given the rapidly aging global population. While aging research traditionally centered on frailty and illness, contemporary discourse emphasizes the concept of “aging well” and preserving one’s youthful vigor. Anthropological studies adopt a comparative lens, recognizing the contextual variations in what constitutes “successful aging.” This chapter underscores the role of local cultural understandings in shaping individual experiences of aging and decline. Care emerges as a central theme, intricately woven within political, economic, and social power dynamics. Sakti’s research, with a focus on contexts of involuntary migration and mobility, sheds light on the challenges faced by older individuals navigating displacement and loss in a post-conflict setting. The Timor-Leste case reveals how older individuals reconstruct their lives amidst upheaval, intertwining notions of care, interdependence, and ancestral connections. This exploration challenges conventional notions of aging well, emphasizing the interconnectedness of individual and collective well-being within broader social and cultural contexts.

Extractive activities in central Russian peatlands gradually declined in the late Soviet period, a change which reflected the reorientation of the country’s energy system toward Siberian fossil fuels as well as a shift in the cultural perceptions of peatlands, as scientists began to recognize the value of intact wetlands and a wider public expressed concerns about their loss. The Soviet collapse and subsequent economic crisis made the end of extraction an unsettling experience. Many regions were gradually cut off from the resources and services that had sustained them for several decades. Communities experienced high outmigration and social marginalization, while abandoned peat extraction sites became serious fire hazards. Tracing the decline of extraction and its legacies, this chapter demonstrates that, instead of recovery, the end of extraction brought new forms of social and environmental precarity. While peat’s role as a fuel has shrunk dramatically in the past decades, the legacies of its extraction and use are bound to remain.

The history of Russia’s peatlands is closely entangled with the environmental issues of our time. Although most peat extraction in central Russia ceased decades ago, the legacy of this history is ongoing. Drainage and industrial exploitation have turned peatlands from carbon sinks into powerful carbon emitters. Recognizing how this issue is rooted in a larger history of economic growth adds depth to our understanding of the current planetary predicament. Even though Russia may not soon become an ally in efforts to cure degraded peatlands, writing their history constitutes an important step in addressing the ecological amnesia surrounding these ecosystems and in developing more caring relationships with them.

Displacement owing to climate change is quickly outpacing conflict, political oppression, and other sociopolitical forces from which people flee the states in which they habitually reside. However, at present, most ongoing state-based programs to admit displaced persons explicitly address themselves to people displaced by conflict and human rights abuses. One notable exception is Temporary Protected Status (TPS) in the US. Nationals of countries experiencing “natural disasters” can be designated for TPS while in the US. Recipients often renew these twelve- to eighteen-month visas for many years, meanwhile putting down roots in the US and forming mixed status families. Such relief is episodic, insofar as it treats natural disasters as discrete and unpredictable events, and discretionary, insofar as it depends on the judgment of the United States Attorney General. This chapter raises questions about whether such an approach is a good model for future programs that will be needed to support people seeking refuge from uninhabitable or inhospitable environments.

This chapter explores the connection between informality, migration, and precarity and how urban villages are formed in China. It discusses the contribution of the book and the fieldwork methods and introduces the readers to the structure of the book.

Violence that enters the lives of precarious subjects exists in the form of insurgency, rebellion, and even roguery. The chapter opens with a reading of two texts: Michael Peel’s A Swamp Full of Dollars, about a real-life journalist with a penchant for literary devices, and Helon Habila’s Oil on Water, about a fictional journalist with social realist proclivities. By employing literary devices charged with concealed violence, both texts reveal that precarity breeds insurgent violence. Each treats Delta militancy as a metaphor – a symptom of inequalities crystallized into insurgency – and traces other absent metaphors, including naturalized violence, that are laden with militancy: area boys, urban gangs, and precarious ecologies. This is followed by a reading of the “subterranean violence” in Tony Nwaka’s Lords of the Creek: rather than addressing the root cause of insurgency, Nwaka’s novel reveals how the oil fraternity and power elites manufacture a false sense of emergency to crush militants. Thus, the real emergency concealed under the second order of diegesis implodes into insurgent violence. The play of the militant tropes in the three texts is complemented by the “routine violence” in Tiny Sunbirds Far Away, where militancy becomes a response to violent disruption of the daily routines of Delta populations.

This section thinks about the relationship between compositional creativity, labour, and money. It outlines how artistic freedom and agency have often been inversely related to stable income, and suggests some ways that composers today might navigate these elements in order to monetise their work.

A current prominent translingualism strand in sociolinguistics has started paying increasing attention to linguistic ‘playfulness’. When language users are involved with translingual practices, they may often be identified through the ‘playfulness’ of their interactions and dialogues (commonly a euphemism for creativity, innovativeness and fluidity), where one’s repertoire is deeply connected with forms of playful exchange to create alternative linguistic lives and identities. Yet, this extensive spectacle of ‘playfulness’ seems to dwell more on conviviality than potential ‘precarity’, overlooking the fact that precarity has arguably always been a condition of human life and norm for most language users, who are deeply embedded in local economies of uncertainty, marginalisation and vulnerabilities. In this chapter, we aim to re-visit two key notions that are core to translingual experiences: ‘precariousness’ and ‘playfulness’. The key implication of this chapter, therefore, is that the next generation of sociolinguists needs to focus more on the precarity of the translingualism trend, not just the playfulness. The two concepts need to be treated with caution, so as not to assume that we understand too easily what is ‘precarious’ or ‘playful’ for whom. In so doing, we re-navigate the jubilant scenes of ‘playfulness’ and move towards the centrality of ‘precariousness’.

While much attention has been paid to the creativity surrounding translingual practice, there has been little focus on the underlying politics behind such practice in periphery or precarious contexts. This chapter explores the political underbelly of translingual practice in the under-researched Muslim world through two case studies in English-medium instruction (EMI) universities in the United Arab Emirates and Bangladesh. Online and offline data are analysed through the lens of critical social inquiry. Ethnographic observations and metapragmatic reflections revealed that translingual practice is a key element of students’ identities with varying ideologies attached. The chapter explores the micro and macro relations influencing ideologies, such as linguistic and symbolic distances between languages, monolingualism, linguistic imperialism, neoliberalism, secularization and sacralization. The chapter specifically investigates how translingual practice problematizes dominant monolingual biases in higher education and monolithic approaches to social, political, and religious realities. The chapter also analyses internalized mainstream monolingual ideologies in some students, leading to feelings of unworthiness and shame over translingual practices. Thus, the chapter sheds light on sociolinguistic complexities of translingual practices in two under-investigated Islamic countries. Suggestions are made as to ways in which the current gap between complex sociolinguistic realities and monolithic policies can be bridged.

In order to explore translinguistic precarity in greater depth, we need to do three things: First, move towards a sufficiently complex understanding of what precarity means (and does not mean). Is it a general condition of our times, a longstanding effect of capitalist exploitation or an emergent property of unequal social relations? Second, we need to think through ways of relating precarity to language. It is not enough to predefine precarious lives in terms of marginalisation, poverty, struggle or discrimination and then to assume that the language used by or towards such speakers is necessarily precarious or produces precarity. We need instead to understand the co-articulation of translingual practices and lived experiences of precarity, asking how one informs the other. So third, it is important to understand the dynamic interactions among material relations, language ideologies and linguistic resources, where precarity may be an emergent feature as much as a pre-condition, of a local assemblage. Drawing on data from our longitudinal metrolingual project we make a case for understanding translanguaging and precarity in relational terms, entangled with family and friendship support structures, contingencies of the local economy, gender norms, cultural and religious practices, and local language policies and possibilities.

Women from circumstances of displacement and precarity are often considered from perspectives of postcolonial subalternity and suffering. Their linguistic versatility is understood as emerging from conditions of hopelessness, poverty and vulnerability. In this chapter, the authors bring vignettes of conversations with southern multilingual women living now in Australia, who at different stages of their lives and despite circumstances of precarity, exhibit ingenuity in survival through dextrous translingual and transknowledging practices. More than this, they demonstrate how their multilinguality is integral to their potential to thrive in hope. In the three small stories offered in this chapter diverse women of Australia – Anangu women from remote central Australia, young displaced women of extraordinary resilience, and women who escaped violent conflict in East Africa – reveal their strategies of self-efficacy in conversations of complicity and trust, and in processes of telling and retelling with the researchers. Mindful of ‘decolonising methodologies’, ‘southern epistemologies’ and ‘epistemic reflexivity’ , the authors recognise their limitations and privileges as researchers in the south, hopeful that in stepping lightly towards spaces that are at times private and at others, public, they can turn the lens towards playful and purposeful southern multilingualisms.