Hopeful Engagements: Unemployment and the Struggle for Hope
everyday lives, based on ethnographic research that followed one unemployed person over a
year in a remote, de-industrialized city in Massachusetts. The research uses qualitative
methods, including shadowing and participatory photo elicitation, to understand the
relationship between unemployment, dignity, and hope.
Theoretically, the study draws on Laurent Thévenot’s regimes of engagement—plan,
familiarity, exploration, and worth—to investigate how hope is negotiated. In the regime of
plan, hope emerges through future-oriented strategies, though unfulfilled plans may lead to
disappointment. The regime of familiarity shows how hope is built on comfort in familiar
spaces like home or social relationships. The exploration regime highlights how new and
novel experiences outside the labor market can foster hope through curiosity and openness. In
the regime of worth, interactions with support systems are examined to understand how they
shape hope.
The research highlights that hope is not solely future-focused but can be cultivated
through engagement with other temporal dimensions. It also emphasizes the fluid interaction
between hope and other emotions such as grief, nostalgia, and sentimentality. The study
argues that hope involves a sense of agency and personal subjectivity, particularly within the
regimes of familiarity and worth, where even vague forms of hope help maintain dignity.
The paper critiques conventional unemployment research, which often reinforces
stigmatizing narratives, by proposing a more nuanced approach to studying hope. This
involves acknowledging small instances of hope and recognizing how it can manifest in
unexpected ways, offering a deeper understanding of the experiences of the unemployed,
particularly those perceived as trapped in hopelessness.