CFP: Precarity Reimagined—Working-Class Representation since 2020

This session invites papers on contemporary writing since 2020 that confronts working-class life not only as a social identity to be represented but as a set of managed dependencies—housing insecurity, debt, health risk, care burdens, platformed work, carceral exposure, and logistical life—organized through institutions that increasingly demand legibility, compliance, and self-accounting. Rather than asking whether recent fiction “gives visibility” to class, the session asks what kinds of representation become possible (or compulsory) when precarity operates as infrastructure: when insecurity is normalized, responsibility is individualized, and survival requires constant narration of the self (applications, ratings, audits, eligibility, “employability,” online profiles, metrics).

Representation, then, is not simply a matter of portrayal; it is a problem of mediation and capture. How do novels register the ways working-class subjects are rendered knowable—by employers, landlords, platforms, the state, the clinic, the court, the algorithm—and how do texts contest, reroute, or replicate those regimes of legibility? When does “voice” become a commodity form (marketable authenticity, trauma legibility, curated grit)? When does fiction invent counter-forms that refuse extraction, sentimentality, or voyeuristic consumption? And how do novels that participate in authenticity economies—achieving circulation precisely through their legibility as “working-class fiction”—complicate these questions of complicity, recognition, and use?

Possible topics include (but are not limited to):

• Platform labor, rating systems, workplace surveillance, and “managed” autonomy
• Housing as governance: eviction, informal tenancy, displacement, speculation, disaster recovery
• Debt, credit, eligibility, and the narrative forms of self-justification
• Care work, disability, health risk, and the moralization of vulnerability
• Carceral systems: probation, monitoring, reentry narratives, and administrative violence
• Logistics and service infrastructures as narrative settings and structuring forces
• Legibility regimes: paperwork, metrics, profiling, algorithmic sorting, “case” narratives
• Authenticity economies: commodified class identity, curated grit, marketable suffering
• Formal strategies that resist extraction: opacity, refusal, collective voice, procedural narration
• Mobility stories under strain: credentialism, “class migration,” downward mobility, stalled futures
• Genre shifts after 2020: procedural realism, neo-noir, satire, climate/speculative precarity
• Working-class fiction and success: circulation, branding, and the politics of recognition

Proposals that engage with fiction from any national or linguistic context, though submissions should address work available in English translation where applicable.

Submission guidelines: Please send a 300-word abstract and a brief bio/CV to simonlee@txstate.edu by Sunday, March 1, 2026.