Paper short abstract:

This paper explores redundancy to think through the relationship between decline and regeneration. It examines redundancy as a contemporary societal as well a personal phenomenon, drawing on online and in person dialogue as well as auto-ethnography.

Paper long abstract:

Over the past couple of years, I have been exploring, with fellow anthropologists, the idea of “regenerative anthropology”: an anthropology that fosters planetary and personal regeneration, and in so doing helps to regenerate our struggling discipline itself. However, regenerative anthropology must begin by understanding and indeed centring decline: there is no regeneration without decline, the two are inextricably linked. This paper explores this by focusing on redundancy. Whilst there is no unemployment crisis as such at the moment (official unemployment figures still being historically quite low), there are nevertheless rising redundancies across a number of professional sectors: TV, journalism, IT, charities, public services and higher education. With no end to cuts in public spending, marketisation, inflation and indeed the rapid rise of AI, it feels like this may just be the beginning. This paper examines redundancy as a contemporary societal but in particular as a personal phenomenon, drawing on online and in person dialogue as well as auto-ethnography. It explores both the experience of redundancy itself, but also what happens in the months and years afterwards, in particular the “best thing that ever happened to me” narrative. What does a focus on redundancy teach us about regeneration?