Waiting through Furlough:
A Geography of Disorientation

Abstract

This thesis tells a story of waiting. More specifically the thesis investigates the lived experience of those who waited through furlough as part of the UK Government Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme, which paid workers to not work during the
COVID-19 pandemic. Although the pandemic and the scheme form its backdrop, the thesis foregrounds understandings of how waiting through furlough was lived and felt. The thesis investigates the embodied feelings and detached work life relations experienced by those furloughed and how they narrated their experience. It draws on the accounts of furloughed workers shared in thirty-five in depth interviews, and extended attention to the spatial, temporal, corporeal, felt and tensive dimensions of waiting, through literatures of waiting, affect and queer phenomenology. In doing so the thesis argues that the detachment from work life and its rhythms made life disorientating for those waiting through furlough. As such, this thesis is also a story of disorientation.

Disorientation is conceptualised in the thesis as having a plurality of forms and shaped the furlough’s capacity to act, feel and endure their situation. Spatial disorientation involves an orientation towards another who becomes an emotional marker for those furloughed. Temporal disorientation is the consequence of an orientation towards work time which is maintained, substituted for, slips or become hazy. Tensive disorientation describes how the suspension from work life is felt as a series of tensions. This study’s surfacing of the different dimensions of disorientations within a duration of waiting, potentially adds to understandings of embodied disorientations and (non)work life within geographies of waiting, disorientation, labour and COVID-19.