Securing Basic Needs: The Uncertain Politics of Everyday Life As an Unemployed Person
Unemployment profoundly impacts one’s ability to secure basic resources and imbues these everyday life practices with uncertainty and affects the experience of dignity. This paper explores how unemployed people manage essential needs such as housing, mobility, and food across three different settings. Drawing empirically from a comparative ethnographic study that saw us shadow 18 unemployed individuals in a small peripheral city each in France, Denmark, and the USA over the course of a year, the paper uncovers how strategies to meet these needs are influenced by emotional, moral, and micropolitical factors. Theoretically, this paper builds on Laurent Thévenot’s regimes of engagement framework to examine how people engage in their uncertain situations.
In the comparison, we examine the basic needs of a) mobility, b) food and c) housing. Public transport is limited in many such peripheral regions and not having the ability to get around the city or travel to neighboring towns and cities vastly impacts the job search capabilities and capacity for self-determination. Access to food is shaped by welfare payments for food and various local initiatives, or "food projects," which are often embedded in moral and emotional dimensions. These projects are involve not only obtaining sustenance but also represent a way of acquiring dignity, reflecting different forms of engagement in each region. Housing, another critical need, affects participants' sense of dignity and emotional well-being. The availability and quality of housing are closely tied to the national political and welfare systems in which individuals find themselves.
By examining the interplay of these emotions, politics and morals and how they construct dignity, the study contributes to a deeper understanding of how unemployed individuals secure their basic needs, and demonstrates how this endeavour is both deeply uncertain.