Death is a well-established metaphor for how individuals experience and cope with change: from organisational restructuring to job loss. However, the critical potential of death metaphors, particularly relating to job loss and unemployment, has not been fully realised. Drawing on dialogues between long-term unemployed men and their case workers at a Work Club in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK, this article addresses a lack of theorisation of situated relational jobseeker resistance. Interpreting these experiences through Bakhtin’s concept of death–rebirth, metaphorical death can be understood as a feeling induced by stigmatising unemployment discourse. Rebirth represents the temporary resistance of this death through carnivalesque laughter, parody and grotesque humour. It is concluded that the men resist the stigma of blame for their own unemployment by using humorous carnivalesque reversals between death and rebirth as a form of relational jobseeker resistance.

中文翻译：

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“如果你没有乐趣，你会死”：将长期失业者的经历解释为巴赫金式的死亡-重生


死亡是一个公认的隐喻，指的是个人如何体验和应对变化：从组织重组到失业。然而，死亡隐喻的关键潜力，特别是与失业和失业有关的隐喻，尚未得到充分实现。借鉴了英国泰恩河畔纽卡斯尔工作俱乐部的长期失业男性和他们的个案工作者之间的对话，本文解决了情境关系求职者抵抗力缺乏理论化的问题。通过巴赫金的死亡-重生概念来解释这些经历，隐喻的死亡可以理解为一种由污名化失业话语引起的感觉。《重生》通过狂欢式的笑声、模仿和怪诞的幽默代表了这种死亡的暂时抵抗。结论是，这些人通过使用幽默的狂欢式的死亡与重生之间的反转作为求职者关系抵抗的一种形式，抵制了对自己失业的指责。