Hardship-as-Usual: The Emotional Experience and Management of Constant Adversity by People in Poverty

• In Event: Narratives of Emotion: Situational, Temporal, Flexible

Abstract

Drawing on longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork conducted with people of color living in poverty, this paper investigates the emotion management of constant adversity. I make three contributions. First, I coin the term of “hardship-as-usual” to make sense of the repeated crises that are experienced as both painful and commonplace by people in poverty. This conceptual move reclaims territory from the mushrooming of the notion of trauma in the sociology of poverty. Both terms attend to the emotional imprint of difficult events but while trauma emphasizes a tragic rupture from normalcy, hardship-as-usual captures a human and social condition in which the entire ground of expectation has shifted. Evictions, incarcerations, and premature deaths are watershed moments in the lives of people in poverty. But they are not once-in-a-lifetime events: they are repeated occurrences in the lives of individuals and pervasive in their networks.Hardship-as-usual maps similar terrain as the recent concepts of “slow emergencies” and “clustered vulnerabilities”. However, while these concepts emphasize the social structuring of adversity, hardship-as-usual goes further by putting front and center the emotional experience of chronic struggle, where devastation and habituation co-exist. This structural and emotional location comes with a range of coping strategies, which is my second contribution: my research participants used various social and sensory practices (food, conversation, sex, music, drugs) to alternate between states of oblivion to escape constant worries and states of hyperactivation to avert crises and feel a sense of agency in the face of structural obstacles. On occasion, some of these coping strategies failed and resulted in (self-)destructive outbursts. However, and this is my third contribution, both successful and failed attempts at emotion management could run afoul of institutional requirements and timelines, sometimes with severe material consequences. Meanwhile, institutional encounters, whether mundanely frustrating or severely punishing, added to the sum of emotional burdens needed to cope with and recover from on a regular basis.

Author

• Ekédi Mpondo-Dika, University of California-Berkeley