ABOUT THIS BOOK

In The Space of Boredom Bruce O'Neill explores how people cast aside by globalism deal with an intractable symptom of downward mobility: an unshakeable and immense boredom. Focusing on Bucharest, Romania, where the 2008 financial crisis compounded the failures of the postsocialist state to deliver on the promises of liberalism, O'Neill shows how the city's homeless are unable to fully participate in a society that is increasingly organized around practices of consumption. Without a job to work, a home to make, or money to spend, the homeless—who include pensioners abandoned by their families and the state—struggle daily with the slow deterioration of their lives. O'Neill moves between homeless shelters and squatter camps, black labor markets and transit stations, detailing the lives of men and women who manage boredom by seeking stimulation, from conversation and coffee to sex in public restrooms or going to the mall or IKEA. Showing how boredom correlates with the downward mobility of Bucharest's homeless, O'Neill theorizes boredom as an enduring affect of globalization in order to provide a foundation from which to rethink the politics of alienation and displacement.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Bruce O'Neill is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Saint Louis University.

REVIEWS

“An excellent and thorough exploration of the mundane emotion of boredom. This ethnography is certainly necessary reading for anyone working in the area of homelessness, especially, but also those interested in the impacts of global capitalism more broadly.”

-- Christopher M. Kloth Anthropology Book Forum

“The Space of Boredom offers a detailed and sensitive cartography . . . both of what the author calls ‘boredom’ and of the particular context he studied. The image he paints of a looming, barren autumn—which the homeless live, but which hangs over all of us—should be of concern everywhere.”

-- George Tudorie Romanian Journal of Communication and Public Relations

"A historically rich and theoretically innovative ethnography of contemporary homelessness and social exclusion in Bucharest."

-- Peter Soles Muirhead Allegra Lab

"This book is a brilliant social story."

-- Jean Martin Caldieron Journal of International and Global Studies

“An insightful investigation. The Space of Boredom stands as useful tool for policymakers involved in the integrated alleviation of homelessness and the general development process of the city.”

-- Mirela Paraschiv Journal of Urban and Regional Analysis

"A significant contribution to the anthropological literature on neoliberalism and structural violence . . . O’Neill is evidently attuned to his informants, and portrays thoughtfulness and reflexivity throughout the ethnography. . . . An important book."

-- Evy Vourlides Anthropological Quarterly

"O’Neill’s book serves as excellent doc-umentary evidence on particular cases of homeless people in Bucharest. . . . Chapter by chapter the reader is introduced to the sad but still fascinating realm of people at the margins of a marginal European society."

-- Bogdan Voicu Slavic Review

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface ix
Acknowledgments xvii
Introduction 1
1. Space-Time Expansion 19
2. Bleak House 44
3. The Gray Years 72
4. Bored to Death 96
5. Bored Stiff 122
6. Defeat Boredom! 147
Conclusion 175
Notes 185
Bibliography 229
Index 245

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