Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, Vol 46(4), Nov 2026, 287-291; doi:10.1037/teo0000398
We live in what has been called an age of precarity—a time in which instability is not only endured by the most vulnerable but increasingly felt as a pervasive condition of contemporary life. This special issue responds to this moment by asking how people living under diverse and unequal conditions of precarity nonetheless build meaningful lives and how psychology might develop the theoretical tools to see and account for this. The five contributions draw on critical, phenomenological, feminist, and sociocultural traditions to examine how hope, agency, and well-being take shape under conditions of precarity. Across diverse empirical contexts, the articles reveal these phenomena to be situated, relational, temporally complex, and dialectically intertwined with the structural forces that produce precarity—challenging the atomistic, individualist, and deficit-oriented accounts that have dominated psychological inquiry. Collectively, the issue offers new conceptual tools for scholars working to understand not only what precarity does to people but what people do within, against, and through precarious conditions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)