As I finish this dissertation, I find myself afraid of going again to the labour market. I will hopefully have a Ph.D., but even this does not guarantee that I will be able to find a job in the increasingly precarious and competitive field of academia. During the years that I have been working on my doctorate, I have seen and heard numerous stories of highly qualified people unable to find a permanent position in the Neoliberal Academy. My hopes are not very high.
When I started doing this research, and many times during the long hours doing interviews and transcriptions, I felt very sad, discouraged and angry. It was painful to realise how the capitalist system is constantly finding new ways to exploit us, to create new fantasies and aspirations to its advantage, and to put our lives and desires in a constant state of uncertainty. After the process of doing this Ph.D., at least now I feel more critical of my long standing dream of being a successful, preferably famous and influential academic. I feel farther away from that reality and, although I feel disappointed, it is an invigorating feeling reminding me that I am enough, but this system is not. Not enough for me, not enough for anyone who cares about justice and collective dignity. Doing this thesis has moved me away from ideas about success and individual empowerment, and has reignited my conviction that feminist work is justice work, and thus can only be achieved in a collective level through collective mobilization.
Despite all the darkness about our current precarious context, I also feel hopeful. I do not feel hopeful about my working trajectory, but I have come to the conclusion that the most relevant lesson that these years thinking about precarity have taught me is that there is a process of survival counteracting any process of precarization. To reflect about how the participants of this study survive has made me aware of my own survival. How have I survived during all these years, coming from a Mexican working class family? How did I survive being an immigrant in South Africa, many times lacking a community? These questions have led me to reflect about all that sustains me and many others: our affects, interests, friends, families, desires, daily struggles. There is power in all of that, power and hope in all that reasserts our lives as liveable and our bodies as mournable. Because, as Audre Lorde said, some of us were never meant to survive in any case, so: for all of us this instant and this triumph.
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