CAPTURING PRECARITY NOW: THE LIVED EXPERIENCE OF PERSISTENT INSECURITY

Abstract

How shall we then live? This question, posed by a participant in my PhotoVoice research developed with middle-class working mothers, animates my central inquiry into the holistic experience of precarity in postmodern American households. Through three empirical studies employing a mixed-methods design, I advance both the conceptualization of precarity and a new theoretical framework—structural classism—to explain why insecurity persists across traditional social class lines. Existing definitions of precarity are inadequate, tending to emphasize narrow domains such as labor instability or inadequate material conditions; I develop here a broader, more nuanced redefinition. In Chapter 2, I examine grocery taxation as a concrete structural mechanism, demonstrating quantitatively that regressive tax policy in food tax states contributes to food insecurity in racially differentiated ways, disproportionately burdening Black and white households. In Chapter 3, I construct a Precarity Index using nationally representative pandemic-era panel data, employing principal components analysis to capture precarity as a holistic construct including both objective and subjective domains. The PCA findings confirm that precarity is a generalizable, multi-domain experience that extends well beyond income thresholds. In Chapter 4, I employ PhotoVoice to center the lived experiences of middle-class working mothers, revealing how persistent insecurity is experienced not only in material strain—the "broken" institutions and structures they navigate—but also in psychological and existential unease, and what participants describe as a "blurring of the lines." Together, these studies demonstrate that employment and income alone do not protect households from precarity, and that the subjective dimension of persistent insecurity is essential to an expanded definition of precarity that captures the postmodern experience of Americans. With these mixed-methods studies in focus, I then propose an outline for a theory of structural classism, which I define as the structural and institutional processes by which class inequality is produced and maintained across material, psychological, relational, and policy domains, in intersectional ways. This is based on Pierre Bourdieu's (1973) theory of social reproduction, Zygmunt Bauman's (2000) concept of liquid modernity, Ulrich Beck's (1994) definition of risk society, Guy Standing's (2011) theorization of the precariat, and Leicht and Fitzgerald's (2007) explanation of the post-industrial peasant, as well as the ethnographic work of Marianne Cooper (2014). Race, gender, and immigration status are shown to be integral to this framework: Hispanic and Black households carry significantly higher precarity index scores than white households even when controlled for income levels, and participant narratives illustrate how structural forms of oppression—racism and sexism—operate in tandem. I identify that regressive taxation, the loss of family-friendly policies, the transfer of institutional risk to individuals, and the hollowing-out of community and public infrastructure and institutions are key mechanisms sustaining and perpetuating structural classism. I conclude this dissertation with policy recommendations targeting family support, mental healthcare, and the protection of democratic institutions, by arguing that political discourse must shift from individual blame toward structural accountability. Future research should validate the Precarity Index with broader datasets and continue to develop multidimensional, intersectional approaches to studying the lived experience of persistent insecurity. Ultimately, this dissertation is a call—from my position as a researcher, educator, sociologist, community member, and world citizen—to take seriously the question the PhotoVoice participants are already living: How shall we then live?