Rural–Urban Lifeways Post–Pandemic: Views From Asia

ABSTRACT

This editorial introduces a Special Section that explores how ‘the precariat’ has managed life and livelihood during and after the COVID‐19 pandemic. How have livelihoods linked to the market through mobility, trade, farming and various forms of precarious employment fared when their ways of making a living seemingly came to a halt? The collection's six papers gather views from across South and Southeast Asia to understand how the unprecedented economic and social disruptions affected those in Hyderabad, India, the Myanmar/China border region, northwestern Cambodia, Capiz province in the Philippines and the islands of Sulawesi and Flores in Indonesia. The collection's aim is to deepen understanding of the pandemic's interrelated and indirect effects on lesser‐heard voices and lesser‐studied locations while considering the potential longer‐term ramifications of the pandemic for rural–urban mobilities, livelihoods and work. Each paper analyses how precarity is lived and experienced at individual levels through case‐based, qualitative analysis. Taken together, this special section shows how new understandings of crisis and precarity are needed across gender, generation and social class lines, and how the precariat's future—whether the people concerned live in or move between urban and rural areas—seems just as perilous as during the COVID‐19 pandemic due to a number of intersecting factors that include rising debt, inflation, resource depletion and successive livelihood shocks.