... Chapter 6 takes the homeless’s pursuit of consumer pleasure into mainstream shopping malls. The chapter details ethnographically the efforts of homeless men and women to use practices of consumption to move beyond a marginal space of boredom and toward a sense of incorporation into the city...

... everyday life boredom rehabilitation war stories domesticity ...

... Boredom, the conclusion argues, is not just a matter of time but also a matter of one’s place amid the global production of desire. Boredom registers the inability of displaced persons to move toward valued opportunities. This ethnographic observation allows for a dramatic rethinking of both...

... As the politics of social exclusion, and ultimately of social death, unfold in Bucharest through the inability to participate in consumer practices, the chapter examines the homeless’s efforts to manage their boredom, as much as their poverty, by seeking out stimulation. The chapter explores...

... The introduction historicizes the entanglement of both deepening poverty and a widely felt sense of boredom in postcommunist Romania. In the communist era, homelessness did not exist as an official social category as state guarantees assured a baseline subsistence. It was only after the fall...

... Chapter 1 examines the forms of space-time expansion that are endemic to globalization. The chapter contextualizes the diminishing economic activity of low-skilled workers in Romania by contrasting the idleness of communist-era breadlines with the boredom of homelessness and unemployment...