Session Information
23 SES 08 A, Policies and Practices of Performativity and Students’ Responses
Paper Session
Contribution
Over the last two decades, youth and educational researchers have produced a significant body of evidence that suggests young people’s lives are increasingly defined in aspirational, instrumental, and economic terms. As Dolby and Rizvi (2008, p. 4) suggest, young people 'move' differently in contemporary times 'as the sites in which they live are themselves transformed'. Technological advances and shifts in labour market conditions within the context of globalisation has meant that these movements may be both figurative and literal, with more young people moving geographically for educational opportunities than ever before, and also experiencing greater connectivity on a global scale through the social web (Landri & Neumann 2014).
Many researchers now hold that attention must be given to the ways that young people engage in practices which are productive of ‘making a life’ within late modernity, replete with the compounding of particular challenges and the role of planning in doing so. Rachel Brooks (2007, p. 491) for example, argues that there is significant evidence to support the thesis that ‘young people no longer see the transition to adulthood as a ‘given’, as they did in the past, but rather a ‘project’ inextricably bound up with identity construction’.
Drawing on the interview, focus group, and a-synchronous private blog narratives of seven young women from migrant backgrounds enrolled in their final year of secondary education at three schools in Melbourne, Australia, this paper asks 'in what ways are young people's participation in senior secondary education being refigured within the logic of neoliberal imperatives of measurement and economisation?' Additionally it asks 'how are these imperatives embedded within the aspirations and identifications that young women from migrant backgrounds take up and orient toward in particular?' It is argued that migrant young people might reflect the globalised conditions of the present most acutely, in that their narratives are mediated by cultural and familial relations which privilege transnational mobility whilst simultaneously necessitating deep engagement with instrumental subjectivities and educational ‘success’. Thus, this paper provides a gendered and racialised account of these young women's experiences of senior secondary education and aspirations for the future. It suggests that these young women are reflexively 'doing' gender in strategic, novel, and traditional ways, and thus it draws upon a theoretical framework that is sensitive to questions of temporality, process, and space.
This paper uses Turner’s (1969) notion of liminality to consider how these young women open a productive space for novel experimentation that enables meaningful engagement with the senior secondary curriculum, alongside their aspirations for upwardly mobile material and social conditions for the future. It considers how these narratives are positioned as 'betwixt and between' notions of 'youth' and schooling on the one hand, and the imagined and desired 'future' on the other (Turner 1969, p.234). Drawing upon recent work on liminality in educational studies (Mansaray 2006), it argues for a rethink of the canonical theme of 'transitions' in youth and educational studies as a process of becoming, following Deleuze and Guattari (1987), that is not defined in advance, but rather unfolds in the 'doing' of senior secondary curriculum. This paper seeks to foreground the liminal space(s) of transition for these young women in their own terms, rather than emphasising what those transitions can be said to be for. It argues that this lens is particularly productive for capturing narratives of migrant and transnational young people, as it moves beyond an understanding of educational participation as a fixed site through which aspirations are realised, to one which highlights the multiple processes of becoming within new and novel spaces of identification and belonging.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Brooks, R (2009), 'Transitions from Education to Work: An Introduction', in R Brooks (ed.), Transitions from Education to Work: New Perspectives from Europe and Beyond, Palgrave Macmillan, Houndmills, pp. 1-16. Deleuze, G & Guattari, F (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. Dolby, N & Rizvi, F (2008), 'Introduction: Youth, Mobility, and Identity', in N Dolby & F Rizvi (eds), Youth Moves: Identities and education in global perspectives, Routledge, New York, NY, pp. 1-14. Landri, P & Neumann, E (2014), 'Mobile Sociologies of Education', European Educational Research Journal, vol. 13, no. 1, pp. 1-8. Mansaray, A.A. (2006) Liminality and in/exclusion: exploring the work of teaching assistants, Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 14:2, 171-187 McLeod, J & Thomson, R (2009), Researching social change : qualitative approaches, SAGE, London. Semetsky, I (2009), 'Deleuze as a Philosopher of Education: Affective Knowledge/Effective Learning', The European Legacy, 14: 4, pp. 443-56. Stanley, L (2004), 'The Epistolarium: On Theorizing Letters and Correspondences', Auto/Biography, 12, pp. 201-35. Thomson, R & McLeod, J (2015), 'New frontiers in qualitative longitudinal research: an agenda for research', International Journal of Social Research Methodology, vol. 18, no. 3, pp. 243-50. Turner, V. W. (1969) The ritual process: structure and anti-structure, Routledge, London.
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