Becoming 'unemployed': Mapping and (re)constituting subjectivity within ​​​​​​​jobactive

Abstract

This project utilised a Foucauldian-inspired critical psychology perspective to rethink how it is possible to study unemployment. The study drew on critical psychology, governmentality studies and critical methodology to reconsider how research can reconnect the economic, political, institutional, material and affective factors that coordinate to produce a particular form of unemployment. This PhD examined the problem of research methods in psychology and governmentality studies, particularly in relation to how to research unemployment. By drawing on key insights of this literature, and returning to first principles of a Foucauldian-inspired poststructuralist study, this research utilised a quasiethnographic design to trace how elements are held together in policy and everyday practices in an employment service provider in South East Queensland. The study was motivated to examine the conditions of possibility for unemployed subjectivities outside of the dominant psychological and policy explanations. Here, the research attended to the broader processes, materialities, and the daily social practices that (re)produce unemployment as a certain type of problem, and in doing so, also (re)produce unemployment as a certain object. In an attempt to maintain (meta)theoretical coherence, this study also attended to the way unemployment was produced as a certain type of problem through the enactment of research methods. The objective was to research unemployment and unemployed subjectivity in ways that do not (re)produce 'psycomplexified' understandings of unemployment which are often taken as 'self-evident' in employment services as well as research. In short, this PhD explored how it is possible to not think about unemployment as we have so far (Fryer, 2019). This study extended on the latest methodological debates in governmentality studies by attuning research focus to the how methods, especially the interview, are implicated in the power-knowledge nexus. In governmentality studies, quasi-ethnographic methods are presented as innovative ways to hold together macro and micro governing practices. This study used a critical reading of policy, interviews and observations in one Employment Services provider in South East Queensland to highlight how the unemployed are produced as such through the practices used to govern them. Namely, I discuss how unemployment is produced as a problem of the unemployed who require reformation into an affective subject ready to withstand the ebbs and flows of the market.