Few studies have examined boredom as a central experience of everyday life. This article adds to the boredom-related literature by examining the role of boredom and boredom-aversion in the everyday life of young people confined in secure care for young offenders. Data are primarily drawn from an ethnographic study in a Danish secure care unit and include both participant observation and interviews with unit residents. Drawing on theories of boredom and young people's creation of action through risk-taking edgework, the article demonstrates how boredom is a key experience in daily life in secure care. Waiting is a defining aspect of the experienced boredom, and the young people spend much time "doing nothing," finding it difficult to relate to the unit's daily routines. Analyses show that the young people deal with the experience of boredom through the generation of risk-taking action.
In this article we analyse the significance of silence in qualitative interviews with 36 individuals interviewed about high-risk, illegal activities. We describe how silence expresses a dynamic power relationship between interviewer and interviewee. In the analysis, we focus on two different types of silence: ‘silence of the interviewee’ and ‘silence of the interviewer’. We analyse how silence functions as an interviewee’s resistance against being categorized as ‘social deviant’, how an interviewer may use silence strategically, and how silence stemming from an interviewer’s perplexity constructs significant data. We conclude that silence constitutes possibilities for interviewees and interviewers to handle the complex power at play in qualitative interviewing either by maintaining or by losing control of the situation.
The COVID-19 pandemic caused countries around the world to initiate societal lockdowns, especially during the spring of 2020. This article focuses on online gaming’s role in young people’s lives during the lockdown in Denmark. Informed by a practice theoretical framework, the analyses of 35 interviews with young people (16–19 years) examine how gaming proved to be something to do in a situation of nothing to do. The analyses find that the young people’s gaming practices were beneficial (a) in allowing the young people to maintain a social life and (b) in providing a legitimate social space for maintaining friendships and/or coping with boredom. The findings demonstrate that young people who engage with online gaming are capable of adapting to fundamental changes to society to fulfil their social needs and aspirations, including during a pandemic.
Through a conceptualization of timely care defined as the right care at the right time, this article analyzes the challenges involved in synchronizing the needs of vulnerable youth with the care provided through the welfare state bureaucracy. While the process of timing care provision with fluctuating human needs is a major challenge for any welfare state bureaucracy, the issue of time has yet to be integrated systematically into research on care provision. In particular, the subjective time dimensions of care remain understudied. To help address this gap, we introduce Henri Lefebvre’s work on rhythms to develop a deeper theoretical understanding of how the rhythms of everyday life and the bureaucracy face a continuous risk of falling “out of sync.” Empirically, we draw on two studies of care provision in Denmark: one study focusing on youths with complex needs and the other focusing on welfare state professionals’ provision of care. The analysis demonstrates various ways in which the professional rhythms of bureaucracy and the everyday lives of youth can be out of sync and how that can be reflected in different youth experiences such as neglect and clientization. Conversely, we demonstrate how care provided “in sync” with a youth’s perceived needs is experienced as timely. Based on this, we argue that provision of timely care is possible in welfare state bureaucracies given sensitivity toward the subjective time dimensions.
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