Refract: An Open Access Visual Studies Journal

Precarity is an overwhelming and persistent condition of unpredictability, instability, and insecurity, especially as related to employment, housing, health care, and migration status. While spread unevenly, it is a hallmark of our contemporary world. At UC Santa Cruz, a federally designated Hispanic-Serving Institution where more than one-third of the undergraduates are first-generation college students and more than half receive need-based financial aid, many of my students are of the precariat, the people for whom precarity is a driving force. Like intersectionality and heteronormativity, precarity allows us to name, to better understand, and then to change the conditions that shape our world. And like intersectionality and heteronormativity, it is an abstruse concept. To help my students identify and comprehend precarity, I have found that it is useful to visualize it. To do so, I turn to art, specifically to Mona Hatoum’s Drowning Sorrows (20012) and Guadalupe Maravilla’s Walk on Water (2018).