Doctoral Fellow

Tirzah Jensen

Discipline: Political Science
Supervisor: Cornelia Woll
Enrolled: October 2018

Tirzah Jensen holds an MA in Social and Political Thought from University of Warwick and an MA in Comparative Literature from Aarhus University. Tirzah Jensen’s research examines the management of unemployed citizens in Denmark using Foucault’s work on neoliberalism and governmentality, in order to study how the neoliberalization of the welfare state affects the relationship between the citizen, the state, and the market.

• Project description

  The Citizen as Human Capital: Neoliberalism, Governmentality, and Citizenship in the Danish Unemployment System

  This project examines the relationship between the citizen, the state, and the market in the human capital-oriented management of jobseekers in Denmark. The active labor market strategy implemented in Denmark in the 1990s has predominantly been interpreted as an alternative to the neoliberal measures adopted elsewhere in Europe. However, building on Foucault’s work on neoliberal governmentality, this project seeks to critically analyze whether the concept of the citizen that underlies the current implementation of this policy can indeed be said to diverge from neoliberal ideas. Through ethnographic fieldwork in a number of jobcenters, the project studies the notions of the rights, obligations, and deservingness of jobseekers that inform the decision-making of caseworkers in their assessments of employability and application of activation measures.

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