From the AIDS epidemic in New York to the politics of human rights in Buenos Aires, activists in the Americas of the late 1980s fought against state policies that defined which human lives should be protected and which lives could be abandoned. These activists created a politics of the precarious that revealed and contested conditions of vulnerability, exposure and survival suffered by citizens who were subject to the dictates of the state. In our current context, which intensifies social and political precariousness for many social groups, their interventions have a new relevance and urgency.

This conversation addressed how the entanglement between precariousness and survival shapes activisms north and south.