Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, Vol 46(4), Nov 2026, 292-307; doi:10.1037/teo0000344
The aim of this article was to answer the research question: How do unemployed people engage hopefully in their everyday lives? It is based on an ethnographic research following six unemployed people over a year in a peripheral, deindustrialized city in New England, the United States. For the purpose of an in-depth analysis of how the unemployed engage hopefully, we foreground the case of Sheila, a long-term unemployed 61-year-old woman and contextualize her case with ethnographic insights from other unemployed participants. During the fieldwork, we used qualitative methods, including shadowing and participatory photo elicitation to understand the relationship between unemployment and hope. Theoretically, the study draws on Laurent Thévenot’s regimes of engagement; plan, familiarity, exploration, and worth, and combines this framework with insights from the social psychology of everyday life to investigate experiences of hope as it unfolds in everyday life. The study argues that hope is a social process and a nonlinear life force, oriented toward a more or less vague object of future improvement, while also revealing the roots of hope in one’s past. We problematize the relationship between hope and agency, as it can occur with varying degrees of agency. The many forms of hopeful engagements contribute to maintaining dignity among unemployed people whose worthiness is often challenged in a society that primarily valorizes humans through paid labor. The article critiques conventional unemployment research that focuses on deprivation and in the process inadvertently reinforces stigmatizing narratives. We offer a more nuanced approach based on exploring the everyday lives of unemployed people, unveiling in the process the ways that unemployed people contribute outside of paid labor, through what we term hopeful engagements. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)