This project aims at discussing the way uncertainty as a consequence of the precarization of work conditions has become a constitutive element of livehoods, and acquiring multiple and constitutive meanings. This will be achieved by observing different contexts and actors regarding work, family and the social. The investigation will take place in a plurality of social contexts and in the following areas: (industrial, agricultural and services; young people and the elderly; emigrants and immigrants; urban and rural contexts). It will allow us to understand the multiplicity of elements which affect livelihoods, and the multiple layers that condition ones existence in the work market. 
In Portugal the imposition of austerity regimes to tackle the sovereign debt crisis have generated an important crisis of social reproduction. Portugal is now facing an alarming rising of unemployment rates, shrinking family incomes, tax growth, increased cost of living, decrease of welfare benefits, policies of labour devaluation, growing job destruction; increased income inequality; rising levels of poverty; the increasing feelings of welfare dispossession and citizenship destitution and an overwhelming sensation of economic and social instability and uncertainty. Uncertainty is one of the most visible faces of the current social and economic crisis in Portugal. Efforts to combat the sovereign debt crisis have produced significant structural changes:profound destabilization of livelihoods, social protections, occupational identities and societal bonds.This project aims at understanding how the crisis has altered the perceptions of precarity and how new vocabularies and representations of the term emerge in different segments of Portuguese society.The spectre of unemployment indicates profound changes in the relationship between individuals, the society and the market.
The increased flexibility of labor laws within a neoliberal economic paradigm associated with a logic of short-term profitability often resulted in the dissolution of social contracts, ie, the change from wage labor towards manifold systems of service provision implied a decrease in employers’ social accountability and a unbearable sense of workers’ responsibility for their own employment status.The broad effects of labor precarity encompass multiple dimensions of everyday life, threatening the existence of citizens, unable to make necessary decisions to guarantee the continuity of their class status and lifestyles or to foresee their future. A precarious economic status suspends decision making processes and consequently suspends people’s lives.The aim of this project is to understand how people reconstruct life projects, which through the loss of key sustainability mechanisms are in need of configurations to sustain livelihoods. Are people able to transform their experiences of flexibility and contingency in the labour market to produce alternative forms of security? How do plans and strategies for the future build on an uncertain present?
Based on the results of previous studies on the socio-economic and personal consequences of the crisis in Portugal, this project adopt a people-centred approach to the economy with thick description. Taking the period 2008-2018 as a reference, this project will: 1)Identify changes in the labour market, in its insertion strategies and in working conditions; Document people’s expectations and experiences of participation in the labor market, identifying job instability effects on peoples’ sense of (in)security; 2) Examine how people face insecurity in their everyday lives and devise strategies for the future; Collect and analyze narratives and life histories that elucidate the diversity of experiences and changes in the recent history of these processes, seeking to apprehend family reconfigurations and adjustments and vicinality practices (such as neighborhood). 3)Provide a systematic description of how people respond to insecurity, including: search for jobs outside of individual’s professional competencies; the (re)turn to domestic work; strategies of resilience and resistance; disbelief and despair, the adoption of alternative life styles. 4)Analyze how a range of different social groups (immigrants, return emigrants, refugees, youth, elderly, elite) respond to contradictions emergent in these new processes taking into account age, work experience, mobility trajectories and gender.5)Examine the data in the light of the relevant bibliography on these themes to further the debate. 
To achieve these objectives we gathered a team of anthropologists with extensive experience and knowledge in ethnographic research in times of crisis and uncertainty, social relations and inequalities, grassroots economics, labour market, kinship and migration. Since our goal is to produce an alternative framework to address the new social conjuncture, this project also benefits from contributions of experts from sociology, history, law and economy    

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With the objective to increase the research activity directed towards the achievement of the United Nations 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, the possibility of associating scientific projects with the Sustainable Development Goals is now available in Ciência_Iscte. These are the Sustainable Development Goals identified for this project. For more detailed information on the Sustainable Development Goals, click here.