../diaries of
an unemployable
marxist sociologist

This is basically my Masters dissertation turned into a zine. In this project, I used zine-making along with interviews to research how neoliberal notions of employability impact our lives. I'm interested in how work and employment require a mandatory social performance that becomes interalised as a form of self-oppression: we are required to present ourselves as palatable products, as not only productive workers, but crucially as enthusiastic and ambitious. The pressure to always self-optimise is not confined to traditional employment, but seeps into our personal lives, as our personalities become projects to develop and to sell on the labour market. This requires an enormous amount of mental labour, which in turn leads to psychological exhaustion but also anxiety over not being able to keep up with the impossibly fast-paced demands of today's precarious economy.

This zine is mostly text-based, but also includes the zines my research participants made in a workshop I organised. We used the zines to explore our feelings around notions of employability and self-marketing strategies. I wanted to make my research more accessible with this zine, since no one reads a Master's thesis apart from my supervisor, and academic writing can be a little out there. So I rewrote the dissertation to make it a bit more fun to read, and included my participant's really cool zines.