Underground tales, overground lives: negotiating a post-retirement identity

This is a small pilot project supported by the Ageing and Communication Technologies Partnership (ACT), a partnership funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council Canada (SSHRC). The project trials a research design for understanding retirement identities by bringing together mobile methodologies and media methodologies. In particular, we are interested in the identities associated with a specific organisation: the London Underground. We explore this firstly through collecting data on embodied experiences of retirees return to their workplace through a ‘Hidden London’ tour of part of the disused London Underground network; and then through film-elicitation interviews using a reality TV programme, ‘The Tube: going underground’, broadcast in the UK in Spring 2016.

Much has been written about representations of workplaces and labour (particularly places/sites of drama - such as hospitals or the police) as there has about the curating of some workplaces as museums and tourist sites. So, while we know something about how the workplace is represented, mediated and consumed we know very little about how encounters with a re-produced workplace constitute post-work identities. This project seeks to produce a methodology for producing this knowledge in a larger project.