Picturing precarity through occupational mapping: Making the (im)mobilities of long-term unemployment visible

Abstract

The 2008 recession had long-lasting economic effects that made everyday experiences of precarity more prevalent in many countries. Within a broader neoliberal context, however, the prevalence of precarity and its social production tends to be obscured, leading to a need for actions aimed at enhancing social awareness and informing social change. In this article, we illustrate how the precarity associated with long-term unemployment, which persisted at historically high levels through 2018, can be made visible by analyzing the mobilities of occupational engagement. Our illustrations derive from a larger four-phase collaborative ethnography conducted in the United States and Canada between 2014 and 2018. Informed by a critical occupational science perspective, the study utilized multiple methods to generate data with participants who self-identified as being long-term unemployed. One of those methods, occupational mapping, explored how participants negotiated daily routines and occupations at the local scale during their unemployment. Analysis of four exemplar cases, as informed by the mobilities paradigm, illuminates the lived impacts and geospatial effects of precarity on everyday occupations in situations of long-term unemployment. Findings contribute to the wider examination of how precarity is spatially experienced within the situation of long-term unemployment as reflected in people's (im)mobilities and occupational engagement.

Centering the Complexity of Long-Term Unemployment: Lessons Learned from a Critical Occupational Science Inquiry

“…An initial analysis of four other participants' occupational maps highlighted the intersection of precarity and mobility in lived experiences of long-term unemployment [46]. Specifically, this initial analysis illustrated the salience of participants' experience of financial precarity, which shaped participants' mobilities in their communities and provided a window into the impacts of long-term unemployment on their daily lives.…”

“…We expanded and collapsed codes through the iterative coding process. For occupational mapping data, we identified a list of places and occupations that participants represented on the maps and developed a series of open-ended analytic questions informed by our theoretical lens to facilitate reflexive and interpretive analysis of maps and corresponding transcripts (see [46] for further details). Our analysis began with a pre-defined list of 12 types of places and nine occupational categories based on understandings developed through previous pilot research [30,39] and information obtained in narrative and semi-structured interviews with each participant.…”

Who is safe at work? Problematizing employment volatility during the 2008-2018 Spanish socioeconomic crisis from a critical occupational perspective

“…Considering neoliberal policies as an articulator of the various forms of employment that coexist in the world, this study problematizes job insecurity as an occupation located in a changing sociopolitical and economic context, characterized by the crisis experienced in the last decade and that affects the human and labor rights of people, which provides a different and novel nuance than in previous studies. Thus, the context as an articulator of the occupational rights of the population has already been seen in similar studies (Aldrich et al, 2020;Asaba et al, 2021;Ferreira-Marante et al, 2017;Huot et al, 2020;Veiga-Seijo et al, 2017). Thus, this research reflects on how this globalized society in which we currently live generates volatile employment situations.…”

“…In this sense, the authors have been aware of how critical OS (Farias & Laliberte-Rudman, 2016;Laliberte-Rudman, 2018) has been a valuable tool for analyzing volatile employment situations in different parts of the world (Aldrich et al, 2020;Asaba et al, 2021;Huot et al, 2020;Laliberte-Rudman & Aldrich, 2016) to address the structural, sociopolitical and economic conditions that situate employment as an occupation. In this work, this theoretical position has made it possible to question and problematize tensions about employment as an occupation, to analyze the possible situations of inequality and occupational injustice in which workers may find themselves, as well as to understand how employment is negotiated in the Spanish labor reforms in which the culture of productivity is taken for granted (Laliberte-Rudman & Aldrich, 2016;Laliberte-Rudman, 2018).…”

Daily life coping—Helping stress-afflicted people manage everyday activities

“…Consistently high levels of mental stress can lead to impaired physical and mental functioning [5], increased use of health care services and increased risk of both short and longterm sickness absence [6,7]. Long-term sickness absence may be associated with negative changes in daily life rhythms and balance [8,9]. During long-term sickness absence, stressafflicted individuals may adapt new routines wherein work is no longer regarded the primary occupation [2].…”