At a time of global crisis and insecurity, the vocabulary for identifying participants in (often conflictual) micro- as well as macro-processes becomes itself an object of contention. Categorial terms such as "markets", "democracy" and "sovereignty", but also "refugees", "terrorists" and, indeed,"Europeans", have been used in complex new ways, often calling into question their suggested stability of meaning, and often now in a reshaped public sphere which is no longer uniform and transparent (with states and mass media dominating), but has become infinitely layered and stratified due to the explosive growth of social media. The terms of what we know as the political debate have thus been altered, in both senses of the term: its core vocabulary is in perpetual need of updating and critical inspection, and the structures of the debates have become far less easy to comprehend too.

One of the most relevant recent innovations in the political-economic core vocabulary has been Guy Standing's proposal to use the term "precariat" for increasingly large communities of workers whose labor base is structurally unstable, even if they work in traditionally "white collar" positions. Standing saw in the precariat a "new dangerous class" and an element of the structural instability of the present world-system, as well as a harbinger of a new political-economic order.

Both aspects deserve deeper and wider scrutiny. This symposium takes Standing's theses as its points of departure, and examines them from perspectives that draw extensively on discursive, social, cultural and new media practices.

Chair: Ico Maly

• Introduction - Odile Heynders (Tilburg University)
• Lecture Guy Standing (SOAS, University of London)
• Response Jan Blommaert (Tilburg University)
• Lecture Jens Maese on Power and critique in Europe. On the discursive logic of austerity discourses within a “new Weberian universe"
• Response Jan Blommaert (Tilburg Univesity)
• Response Piia Varis (Tilburg University)
• Discussion and concluding remarks by Guy Standing (SOAS, University of London)