Biographical standstill

On the experience of time among people living in poverty from a social phenomenological perspective

Abstract

The article explores how poverty transforms the temporal structure of subjective experience. Drawing on social phenomenology and biographical theory, it demonstrates that poverty can bring about the disintegration of highly significant structural patterns of subjective temporal experience. Narrative case analyses reveal that individuals affected by poverty struggle to understand and narrate their lives as progressive, coherent stories. The loss of biographical articulacy leads to a perception of stagnation in one’s own life and thus indicates an erosion of biographical meaning-making. This highlights that time and biography function as key mediating forms between social structure and subjective experience. Methodologically, the paper combines phenomenological time analysis with reconstructive biographical research, thereby contributing to the study of the subjectivation of social inequality.