Using narrative futuring as a means of facing liminal employment status and space.

Abstract

Unemployment and precarious employment have been treated as liminal states where people's everyday lives are rendered into an "in-between" position, a place where the uncertainty of meaning and decision-making prevail. Liminality has also been applied as a way of understanding a changing social world, implying a transformation in consciousness emanating from prolonged indeterminism. To develop a clearer understanding of coping with liminal status, we used a narrative futuring approach (i.e., a reflexive practice to elicit narratives from the viewpoint of a desired future). Twenty "letters from the future" were written by unemployed and precariously employed young adults with higher education degrees living in Crete. The letters engaged the participants in the process of critical reflection, where they imagined eutopian lifeworlds by attempting to place the prevalent "crisis story" in the background, embracing or confronting liminal status. Implications focus on how the narrative future-making approach can be applied to disentangle the complexities involved in understanding liminal states and their inherent transformative potential where both personal, interpersonal, and the broader social and societal context come into awareness.

Covid-19 and the politics of hope: A comparative analysis of Greek and Ecuadorian letters from a desired post-pandemic future

“…Participants are instructed to imagine travelling to a desired future in a time machine and write a letter from that future retrospectively back to the present. The Letter from the Future exercise has been adapted for research purposes ( Sools & Mooren, 2012 ; Sools et al, 22015; Sools, 2020 ) and used in various contexts, e.g., liminal employment experiences ( Sools et al, 2017 , Triliva et al, 2020 ), intimate partner violence ( Kilgore et al, 2018 ), psychiatry ( Sools, 2019 ), voting ( Sools et al, 2018 ), the future of travel ( Tussyadiah & Miller, 2020 ). Although mainly used as text-based method, there are also some promising applications of the method in visual narrative ( Ronkainen & Ryba, 2018 ) and art-based approaches ( Nouvet et al, 2019 , French et al, 2021 ).…”

Emerging from the global syndemic crucible: Finding belonging in a post corona future

“…These waves of human movement away and towards Greece create conditions where belonging is contested. In enduring these crises many Greek citizens have engaged in an extended period of critical reflection regarding their liminal existence, life’s uncertainties, and belonging (Sools et al, 2017; Triliva et al, 2020 ). The COVID-19 syndemic, a novel crisis, compounded and intensified such reflections and concerns.…”