Re-defining ‘Me’: exploring career transition and the experience of loss in the context of redundancy for professional opera choristers

This paper presents an in-depth, qualitative investigation into the impact of job loss for seven opera choristers. The paper focuses on their perception of this loss and how this perception influences the experience of career transition and subsequent redefinition of the self. Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis is used to highlight the individual nature of dealing with loss and transition. Discussion centres on three themes which best capture the psychological process involved in the renegotiation of self for the participants. Analysis shows that a key issue in adapting to career transition is re-defining what it means to be a singer without the validation of full-time employment. The Organismic Valuing Theory of growth after adversity (Joseph & Linley, 2005) is used as a framework within which to discuss individual fluctuations between searching to develop new areas of the self and restoring the established self. The study concludes that singers are unique in the employment market because of their relationship to their embodied voice. For the seven participants, the experience of career disruption is determined by their ability to re-evaluate the role of singing as a primary agent of self-formation

Profane Relations: The Irony of Offensive Jokes in India

On the shopfloor of an Indian automobile plant, a multi-ethnic workforce exchanges potentially offensive ethnic jokes with one another while remaining largely silent on actual incidences of communal violence. This paper shows how silence and profane humour are important aspects of an inter-ethnic sociality in the workplace, which distances itself from the retaliatory logics of communal violence. Speaking in the indirect register of irony, I argue that jokes about one another's religion and ethnicity are a means by which cultural intimates articulate anti-communal perspectives on public life. I suggest that profanity is a style of interaction that relates to an anti-communal sociality which distances itself from the politics of sanctity