Mikkel Bygum Hove defends his PhD thesis
Mikkel Bygum Hove defends his PhD thesis 'Not-Work and the Dialectic of Absence A Psycho-Societal Life History Study on the Learning, Experience, and Political Psychology of Unemployment'
The defense is public, and everybody is welcome; the defense is scheduled for a maximum of three hours and will be held in English.
Follow the defense online via Zoom
The Doctoral School at Department of People and Technology will host a small reception afterwards.
Supervisors and assessment
Assessment committee:
- Linda Lundgaard Andersen, Professor, PhD, Department of People and Technology, Roskilde University , Denmark (Chair)
- Alastair Roy, Professor, PhD, Professor of Social Research, School of Health, Social Work and Sport, Lancaster University, England
- Henrik Kaare Nielsen, Professor emeritus, dr.phil. Aarhus University, Denmark
PhD Supervisor:
- Niels Warring, Associate Professor, Department of People and Technology, Roskilde University, Danmark
Resumé
This thesis explores how learning processes unfold in the lives of unemployed individuals who encounter institutional systems of activation, case management, and precarious labour. Drawing on a psycho-societal methodology rooted in Alfred Lorenzer's deep hermeneutics and informed by critical theory and Marxist psychoanalysis, the thesis analyses the life histories of two individuals - Barbara and Richard - each of whom narrates their experience of unemployment through a dense interplay of ambivalence, misrecognition, and symbolic displacement.
Rather than approaching unemployment as a momentary disruption, a biographical void in an otherwise continuous work biography, the thesis treats it as a scene - a psychosocial and structural formation where desire, identity, and social contradictions intersect. Through life-historical interviews and interpretive reconstruction, the thesis examines how institutional pedagogies, particularly those embedded in the jobcentre and vocational education systems, operate as instruments of ideological reproduction and blocked learning.
The thesis argues that contemporary back-to-work policies reflect a "pedagogy of misrecognition" - a logic that demands adaptability and self-management while structurally foreclosing the conditions for symbolic integration of experience. It demonstrates how unemployed individuals aften carry dormant learning potentials - linked to creative, relational, and expressive dimensions of life - which are suppressed or rendered unintelligible within dominant activation regimes.
By tracing the affective and symbolic contours of learning in the shadow of capitalist work society, the thesis contributes to ongoing debates in critical adult pedagogy, psychosocial studies, and social philosophy. It concludes by calling for a radically different understanding of learning in relation to unemployment - one that recognises contradiction, honours biography, and supports emancipatory appropriation of one's conditions of life rather than behavioural correction.
The dissertation will be available for reading at the Roskilde University Library before the defence (on-site use). The dissertation will also be available at the defence.