Love in the midst of precariousness: lamenting the trappings of labour in de-intellectualized worlds

Abstract

Increasingly, the precariousness of labour has become an important concern, as employment relations structure numerous injustices for workers. We engage in an auto-ethnography of our lives as two academics immersed in the labour of teaching management courses in India to outline how the precarious informs our experiences. In the midst of our precariousness, we trace the journey of our love and marriage. We find that love itself is precarious and involves a willingness to negotiate vulnerabilities. We draw on Arundhati Roy’s novel, ‘The Ministry of Utmost Happiness’ to uncover a conceptual vocabulary for the precariousness of love and life, and the need for actors to poetically engage with inconsolable grief of the other. What disturbs us is the unwillingness of actors within academia to discuss their precariousness with respect to each other. Instead, academic actors strive to conceal and manage their precariousness, and end up structuring loveless, de-intellectualized worlds for themselves and others.