Learning, identity and worklessness

The PhD project investigates 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 dialectically intertwined with the socio-political organization and cultural embeddedness of work/paid labor as well as the embodied and life-historical learning, the unconscious and emotional psychodynamics and subjective experience of the long-term unemployed. The empirical material is made up of eight life-historical interviews with four men and four women, who have been unemployed for more than two years and are currently still viewed as capable of working in some capacity by the Danish employment service system.