Ilaria Vanni 
Precarious objects 
Activism and design in Italy

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 Content

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

About the author

Ilaria Vanni, University of Technology Sydney, is Associate Professor of International Studies and Global Societies in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.