CARTOGRAPHIES OF PRECARITY: APPROACHES TO THE EXTRACTIVISM OF HUMAN ENERGY AND NOCTURNAL SOCIO-ENVIRONMENTAL VULNERABILITY IN THE AMERICAS
This symposium emerges as a space for deepening and regional debate following the results obtained at the Congress held at the Université de Bretagne Occidentale (Brest, France) in February 2026. It proposes to interrogate the socio-environmental vulnerability resulting from contemporary labor precarization. This phenomenon, which reaches its most critical level at night, sits at the intersection of social environmentalism and the sociology of work.
A critical and situated approach is proposed, in order to denaturalize the “dialectics of night work” in the Americas and the Caribbean. The objective is to illuminate the structural inequalities shaping contemporary workspaces, often resulting from policies of dispossession.
Hemispheric asymmetries are evident: in North America, informality hovers around 8.7%, whereas in South America and the Caribbean this figure rises to 51.7% (INDEC, 2024). A progressive feminization and youthification of precarity is evident, reaching more than 58.9% in cases such as Argentina. These differences reveal not only unequal forms of access to social security but also asymmetries regarding workplace conditions. Unregistered work is concentrated in areas of housing and social vulnerability, strongly marked by low technical qualification.
This symposium invites interdisciplinary reflection on “non-stop” capitalism and its naturalization of atypical schedules, interpreting this process as an “extractivism of human energy” that impacts both bodily spaces and urban ecosystems.
Transdisciplinary researchers are invited to submit papers on the following topics:
1- Tensions between formal labor regulations and the invisibilization of informal night work
2- Cartographies of resistance and actions against precarization
3- Subjectivities and experiences within the night economy
The symposium’s objective is to generate a debate that goes beyond statistical description and incorporates the night from a chronopolitical perspective, as a category of socio-environmental analysis and as a space of dispute over life.
