Mark Joseph Connaughton defends his PhD thesis
Mark Joseph Connaughton defends his PhD thesis 'Making It Work, Out of Work: Dignity at the Margins of the Labour Market in New England'
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:
- Senior lecturer Tom Boland, University College Cork, Ireland
- Associate professor Merete Monrad, Aalborg University, Denmark
- Professor Ernst Schraube, Roskilde University, Denmark (Chair of the committee)
PhD Supervisor:
- Sabina Pultz , Associate professor, Department of People and Technology, Roskilde University, Denmark
Co-supervisor:
- Magnus Paulsen Hansen, Associate professor, Department of People and Technology, Roskilde University, Denmark
Resumé
In a world marked by multiple crises and increasing uncertainty, human dignity has become an increasingly important concern in social inquiry. However, contemporary societies continue to reinforce the link between dignity and labour. This thesis examines experiences of dignity and indignity through an investigation of unemployment in a ‘deindustrialised but culturally revived’ city in New England: North Adams. Drawing on ethnographic observations, interviews, and participatory photoelicitation with seven unemployed people, the thesis argues for a situated approach to better understand the politics of dignity for the unemployed. The thesis provides the United States case study for the broader INDIGMA project, which compares experiences of dignity in small cities in the United States, France, and Denmark.
The thesis investigates unemployment beyond a lack of work to examine the plurality of dignity experiences in everyday life. Participants move between overlapping repertoires of innate and earned dignity as they respond to uncertainty, labour market exclusion, and challenges to their worth. Dignity emerges as both plural and fragile. Participants moved between overlapping repertoires of innate and earned dignity as they responded to uncertainty, labour market exclusion, and challenges to their worth. Through engagements in care, volunteering, creativity, home-making, and community participation, they also practiced forms of quiet critique that challenged dominant understandings of work as the primary source of human value.
The thesis contributes a rare empirical account of how unemployed people experience dignity in everyday life. Drawing on engagement sociology and critical psychology, the thesis develops a framework for understanding how dignity is negotiated through people's engagements with broader social, historical, and institutional conditions. Moreover, dignity is examined not only as an empirical and theoretical concept for understanding worth beyond labour market and welfare-state evaluations, but also as a methodological resource for considering how research itself can be conducted with dignity. The thesis therefore moves beyond approaches that treat unemployment as a mere lack of work, which risk reproducing stigmatising narratives, and instead characterises the lifeworld of unemployment as a busy world of arranging everyday life.
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.