Interfaces of precarity and the networks of precarious lifeworlds: Experiences of housing, social supports, and work in youth homelessness

Research on precarious work in labour geography and labour studies has been complemented by scholarship on other political-economic dimensions of precarious lifeworlds—notably housing—and more expansive accounts that attend to broader ontologies of precarity. Nonetheless, much of the literature on precarious work treats employment and housing, among other domains, as separate or unidirectionally linked phenomena. Drawing on interviews with 45 unhoused youth in Toronto, this article develops interfaces of precarity as a theoretical construct to unpack the mutually constitutive relationships among precarious work, housing, and social supports for unhoused youth in Toronto. By attending to the ways these dimensions of life collide in unhoused youth’s narratives, their dynamic, multidirectional, and spatiotemporally contingent interrelations are revealed, offering empirical insights into the ways these domains are co-produced and differentially experienced. This article also contributes to scholarship on precarity by materially grounding precarity’s relational and multiscalar character. In doing so, the article not only advances scholarship on precarity and precarious work but also highlights the importance of integrated and relational responses to multidimensional precarity in service delivery and organizing.