Exploring Limbo: The Experience of Job-Loss and Unemployment in a Jewellery City in Italy
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.21301/eap.v11i2.10Keywords:
unemployment, ruins, Limbo, community of practices, economic crisisAbstract
The article investigates the experience of job-loss and the following unemployment. Based on the ethnographic research conducted in Valenza, Italy, between 2008 and 2012, the article challenges an interpretation of unemployment as a liminal phase. I argue former workers experience unemployment as a “Limbo” – an existential condition underpinned by the ambiguity of being and at the same time not-being a worker. The exploration of this “Limbo” sheds light on the emotional, physical and symbolic labour that laid-off workers undertake facing their new condition. This research offers elements to read the loss of a job as an exit from a community of practices and to investigate the ways in which individual negotiate this departure.
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