Research

The central purpose of my PhD is to:

• investigate what is being learned by adult individuals during long-term (involuntary) unemployment; how, when and why learning is taking place during unemployment; and how these learning processes can be analyzed as dependent on and dialectically intertwined with the socio-political organization and cultural embeddedness of work/paid labor as well as the embodied and life-historical learning of the subject, the auto-biographical sense-making and the unconscious and emotional dimensions of subjective experience of the long-term unemployed.

My main areas of knowledge and research/theoretical interest:

• The philosophy/political economy/social theory of work
• Worklessness/unemployment
• Life history research
• Adults' learning, experience and identity processes
• The role work in Critical Theory
• Psychodynamics of work
• Psycho-societal theory/social psychoanalysis/materialistic socialization theory

Experience prior to PhD:

I've had three years of practical experience doing social pedagogy and developing a 'pedagogy of work' - exploring the emancipatory and learning potentials of diverse forms of work together with long-term unemployed adults, while trying to counter the often times alienating and marginalizing features of the back-to-work system.

Management and Cooperation

The research is done in collaboration with Center for Special Education, who carries a practical interest in developing their methodological approach to occupational rehabilitation in more emancipatory directions with a focus on enhancing the life conditions of the long-term unemployed while creating better possibilities for transformative learning processes, humanization of work and identity development.