Hopeful Engagements: Unemployment and the Struggle for Hope

The aim of this article is to answer the research question: how do unemployed people engage hopefully in their everyday lives? It is based on ethnographic research following 6 unemployed people over a year in a remote, de-industrialized city in Massachusetts, US, however for this purpose, we center on the case of Sheila. The research uses qualitative methods, including shadowing and participatory photo elicitation, to understand the relationship between unemployment and hope.
Theoretically, the study draws on Laurent Thévenot’s regimes of engagement—plan, familiarity, exploration, and worth, combined with social psychology of everyday life to investigate experiences of hope. In the regime of the plan, hope emerges through future-oriented strategies with a somewhat clear object and the investment can either succeed or fail. Engaging hopefully in the regime of familiarity, involves building hope on comfort in familiar spaces like ones home or from intimate relationships and here hope is shaped by past experiences. The exploration regime highlights how new and novel experiences outside the labor market can foster hope through a clear presence in the present spurred by curiosity and openness. Hopeful engagements in the regime of worth are oriented towards the desire to be treated with respect. The study argues that hope is a social, nonlinear process, oriented towards a more or less vague object of future improvement. Hope involves a sense of agency, however limited, and various forms of hope help maintain dignity among unemployed people who are oftentimes challenged feeling worthy in a society valorising paid labor.
The paper critiques conventional unemployment research that focuses on deprivation and by that inadvertently reinforces stigmatizing narratives. We offer a more nuanced approach based on exploring the social psychology of everyday life from the vantage point of unemployed people. This involves acknowledging small pockets of hope and recognizing how hope can manifest in unexpected ways, offering a deeper understanding of the unemployment experiences.