Living a ‘shadow life’

The disorientations of losing orientation and agency while waiting through furlough

Bibliographic Data

ID8962363
AuthorsVictoria Jones (0000-0002-1104-3095, Faculty of Art, Design and Social Science Northumbria University Newcastle upon Tyne UK, corresponding author)
Year2025
Volume50
Issue4
Publication date2025-03-16
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueTransactions of the Institute of British Geographers (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0020-2754 • E-ISSN: 1475-5661
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/tran.70003
OpenAlexW4408499942
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited82

This paper explores forms of disorientation that affected UK workers furloughed within the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme during the COVID‐19 pandemic. It draws on Sara Ahmed's queer phenomenology, the work of social and cultural geographers, and the accounts of four furloughed workers drawn from a wider study of 35 participants (see Jones, 2023). The paper details how the loss of a worker's agency through the suspension of their work life led them to feel disorientated. One study participant described the disorientation of furlough as like leading ‘a shadow life’. ‘Shadow life’ articulates how the loss of the furloughed workers' sense of agency through work led them to treat the actions of others as orientation markers. To elucidate this, the paper develops four conceptualisations of disorientation as ‘shadow life’: ‘circumnavigation’—a spatial disorientation; ‘vacillation’—a temporal disorientation; ‘periphery’—an emotional disorientation; and ‘intrusion’—a sensorial disorientation. Through these four conceptualisations of disorientation, I argue that the disorientations of furlough acted as a point of exposure for how engrained work life is for some people. Amidst their disorientation, the study participants created alternative orientation markers, but crucially were able to endure and live through their disorientation. These insights contribute to understandings of the lived experience of furlough, worker agency and wider geographical work that attends to disorientation within contemporary life

Agency (philosophy · Business · Clothing · Orientation (vector space · Political science · Shadow (psychology · Social science · Sociology · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Law · Mathematics · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism · Psychology · Spatial and Cultural Studies

Tools

Open DOIOpen Access