Living a ‘shadow life’: The disorientations of losing orientation and agency while waiting through furlough

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.