Initiating Change: Negotiations of Subjectivity in a Danish Activation Programme for Young Adults with Psychosocial Problems and Common Mental Disorders

An increasing number of young adults in Denmark experience difficulties in completing their education and holding down a job. Many of these young adults have psychosocial problems and common mental disorders. To retain public income support they must attend education and work-directed activities, known as 'activation programmes'. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this study presents an analysis of how one such programme unfolds in practice and how the participants engaged with the activities and negotiated the underlying rationales. We argue that the activities involved in the programme constitute 'biographical techniques' that entail a configuration of the participants as being responsible for their own biographies and having the capability to solve their problems themselves. The participants challenged this configuration of subjectivity by recounting complex or immediate problems that could not be solved through biographical techniques and by refusing to deal with their life stories as a way of configuring their futures. Biographical techniques limited the possibilities for grappling with the complexity of the participants' problems. We conclude that the participants are therefore subjected to biographical coercion because forms of subjectivity other than biographical subjectivity are disregarded.