EDUCATION AND SOCIETY IN SOUTH ASIA
SERIES EDITOR
Meenakshi Thapan
A series on EDUCATION AND SOCIETY IN SOUTH ASIA is, perhaps, somewhat ambitious given the magnitude and scope of the theme in present times. Instead of seeking to provide a narrow focus, it is hoped that a broad framework will allow the inclusion of work that seeks to understand education and society in both institutional and non-institutional frameworks. Institutional frameworks bring in a focus on schools and institutions for higher education as spaces within which educational processes and activities unfold. Noninstitutional spaces include all those other social, cultural, and political spaces where pedagogic encounters of different kinds take place. They also include movements, trajectories, and patterns of different kinds that enable children and youth to learn and grow in unconventional ways. One of the lens through which this series aims to develop the sociology of education is through a focus on children and youth and aspects of their experience both within and outside institutional spaces.
At one level, this series seeks to problematize our understanding of education, as process, in the context of the making of citizens in a ‘modern’, changing South Asia. Most efforts view schools, for example, as institutions that transmit and evaluate educational knowledge and provide certification based on academic achievement. The causes of inequality, located in gender, caste, class, and religion have been examined in this context as these shape individuals’ lives in multiple and complex ways. At the same time, schools and institutions for tertiary education are spaces, as processes, through which participants bring meaning and create worlds that hugely impact their personal and intellectual development.
Educational spaces are also about place and location in multiple ways, whether these are at the intersection of caste, gender, and class or are about location as both territorial and imagined spaces in the region. The sociology of education must unpack these complexities and bring out their implications in a variety of contexts in both rural and urban South Asia. The significance of gender, caste, religion, or language as defining characteristics of educational processes are germane to our understanding and need to be examined in different contexts in the region that make each experience unique and similar at the same time.
Conflict, crises, and events in everyday life are significant aspects of these processes. The ways in which youth may be both shaped by as well as engage with the unfolding of crises, events, and everyday life remain opaque in our understanding of how education plays an important role in the making of citizens in contemporary South Asia. It is this understanding of human agency in institutional contexts that has somehow eluded those arguments that over-emphasize the significance of the structural and ideological frameworks within which educational processes are embedded. Once we understand that students are keen and active participants in the processes in which they are inserted, our views about education and its possible outcomes may perhaps change. It is indeed possible to examine and understand the vastly differing and multiple practices that students engage in as agents within and outside an institutional framework. We need to, for example, focus on and unravel the complexities prevalent in understanding youth as active citizens in an increasingly cosmopolitan and interconnected world. How do they seek to rise above not just the normative expectations associated with their ‘roles’ as students but also with asserting themselves in deeply meaningful and contextually significant ways? This means that we must pay attention to critical consciousness as it reveals itself in pedagogic encounters of different kinds but also in peer cultures and student led organizations and movements in different parts of South Asia.
The goal is to sharpen our understanding of perspectives that do not rely on educational misgivings, institutional features, financial outlays, and state failures alone. These are only some social aspects of educational practice. There are other dimensions that envelop students, teachers, the community, and society in complex ways that we need to uncover in order to provide an understanding of how education and society connect in diverse ways.
Teachers are agents of both change as well as reproduction in education. It is important to identify and examine some of the processes that enable them to be pioneers and facilitators for transformative practices rather than only being viewed as toothless agents of the state or private bodies, as they usually are, without any possibilities for bringing about change. Both teachers and students are engaged participants in processes pertaining to education and the series needs to unpack the possibilities and potential for movement underlying the constrained and encapsulated worlds they inhabit. In this context, a focus on mainstream educational processes that incorporate a social, ecological, and moral vision for inclusive education is an endeavour for the series to document practices that focus on the well-being and holistic growth of all stakeholders in a changing and globalizing society.
Apart from students and teachers, textbooks are a significant element of educational life. The homogeneity with which we seek to build an understanding of the writing of textbooks based on religious fundamentalism alone is perhaps not the only way of looking at the problem of the textbook culture in education in India. It is equally essential to draw out other significant aspects of not only the writing of textbooks but of their transaction and impact on children’s learning. This transaction depends on teachers and students and their interaction inside classrooms. It is imperative to understand these processes by focusing on children’s and teachers’ views on textbooks and their significance in their lives.
The volumes in the series cover a few specific themes in institutional and non-institutional contexts of educational discourse in the region: students, youth, teachers, the politics of education and citizenship, and the social, ecological, and moral issues that underlie such discourse. It is an eclectic and comprehensive approach to understanding educational activities and processes in the region as well as the spinoffs from such processes in the lives of children, youth, and teachers.
We may conclude that the series is an initiative in the discipline of sociology wherein research on education is a somewhat neglected dimension of the broader disciplinary framework in India and the rest of South Asia. As Basil Bernstein, late Karl Mannheim professor of Sociology of Education at the University of London Institute of Education, used to say, ‘My dear, we’re at the bottom of the pile! No one in sociology wants to study education.’ Thirty years later, with marginal improvement in educational studies in sociology, this series seeks to redress this lacuna by focusing precisely on a disciplinary area that begs attention.
Meenakshi Thapan is director of Rishi Valley Education Centre, Rishi Valley, Andhra Pradesh.
2.1. View across the Kathmandu Valley with Patan Campus in the Foreground, January 2012 46
3.1. Flyer of a Private Education Consultancy Displayed around Patan Campus, March 2012 73
4.1. Runners at the Starting Line during the Campus Sports Day, December 2011 81
5.1. Students Volunteering to Clean a Children’s Hospital in Kathmandu, November 2011 99
5.2. Wall-Hanging in the Office of a Youth Club in Kathmandu, January 2012 104
Preface
As this book goes to press, the young Nepalis who are at the centre of this study have found their futures. The conversations we had in Kathmandu in 2011–12 took place at a time when these young people faced a number of decisions which, they felt, would set the course for their future lives. The decisions are made. They are no longer the subject of debate. Yet, the arguments and the findings presented in this book continue to be of topical interest because they elucidate one of the conundrums at the core of social scientific debates about young people’s role in processes of social change. Young people are commonly found to be highly aspirational as regards their potential futures and, at the same time, they are acutely aware of a range of persisting constraints that make it unlikely for them to realize their hopes for a better future. Educational expansion, economic restructuring, technological modernization, and international migration have opened up new horizons of opportunity. In view of these large-scale developments, wider society commonly rests its hope for progress and prosperity on the younger generation, which is expected to emerge as new future leaders and change agents. Persisting social, economic, and political constraints, however, obstruct young people’s efforts to realize the hope for a better future life, with the result that young people seem to be increasingly unable to resolve their own difficulties, let alone the problems faced by their respective societies. The image generated through such debates is one in which youth are seen to be either the makers or the breakers of future society (Honwana and de Boeck 2005).
This discrepancy between aspirations and practicable avenues is a challenge confronted by young people across the world. In response, national governments and global institutions have developed numerous policies which seek to ‘unleash’ young people’s capacity to act (cf. World Bank 2018). In the specific case of Nepal, the debate about young people’s agency has been reinvigorated in the aftermath of a series of devastating earthquakes in 2015. Impressed by the enormous resources that educated young Nepalis were able to mobilize in a timely manner for search and rescue efforts, the media, public authorities, and international experts readily took to the idea that youth activism offered an answer to the country’s lingering economic and political problems. ‘Build back better’ became the principal motto and Nepal’s young population was called upon to look beyond immediate relief efforts and to aspire to long-term economic growth and political transformations (Hindman and Poudel 2015). Particularly in situations of adversity like this, policymakers and scholars regularly turn their attention to young people’s collective actions and their potential social implications.
It is now well established among social scientists that young people have agency, but much less is known about what types of agency young people may demonstrate. My primary interest in conducting this study was, therefore, to scrutinize some of the conceptual ideas that underlie prevalent visions of youth as agents of social change and as a source of hope for a better future. In each of the empirical chapters in the book, I take up this point with reference to three vignettes of specific encounters and conversations I had with educated young Nepalis in Kathmandu. This way of retelling the stories of these young people allows for their views, experiences, and ways of being to take a central place. In line with David Arnold and Stuart H. Blackburn (2004), I suggest that these detailed accounts can reveal insights into the experiences and attitudes not just of the specific person but also of the social category of youth, more generally. I was also inspired by the work of Arnold and Blackburn (2004: 6) not least because the authors further emphasize that this way of telling people’s lives ‘is of particular value in seeking to understand and analyze groups that are … not normally heard’.
Basing my analysis primarily on participants’ verbal accounts meant that I was required to work in two foreign languages,
namely, English that I already spoke fluently and Nepali that I was just about to learn. For the young Nepalis I spoke with, it was mostly the other way around. While Nepali was not necessarily the native language of all of my respondents, they all had a good command of the language and felt comfortable speaking it. Manoeuvring this linguistic challenge, however, influenced the way in which I gathered as well as worked through the data. In fact, the little Nepali textbook that I carried with me at the beginning of my field research proved to be a wonderful icebreaker. Specially those who otherwise were shy about talking to me, because they were concerned that their English-language skills did not suffice, would join me in a circle around the little booklet and help me go through the exercises and improve my pronunciation. Then again, others insisted on speaking English, even though they struggled to express their thoughts in the foreign language and could only converse in monosyllables. Having some knowledge of English is perceived to be an important marker of educational advancement and social status, particularly among the younger generation in Kathmandu (see also Liechty 2003, 2010).
In addition to considerations regarding the respondents’ preferences and my own language skills, the different modes of research also influenced the use of language. I digitally recorded 50 interviews, almost half of which were in Nepali and the remaining half either in a mixture of both Nepali and English or predominantly in English. The transcripts of all the recordings were written out in English. Longer sections originally in Nepali were translated and transcribed by my research assistants. Most of the informal conversations I had with groups or individuals were originally in Nepali. When I recorded them afterwards in my research diary, I noted them down in English. As a significant share of the material was translated by my research assistants and myself—none of us being a trained translator or a native English speaker—I chose not to concentrate on respondents’ use of specific concepts during data analysis. In other words, I focused more on the wider ideas that research participants sought to convey than on the exact terms they used to express themselves. In some situations, I was unable to fully account for confidentiality. Therefore, it became all the more important for me to repeatedly cross-check informed consent as I proceeded with
the study. As part of this process, I agreed with all research participants that I would protect their identity by using pseudonyms when writing about our encounters.
The manuscript of this book has been nine years in the making and, as such, has benefited from comments I received on other publications. Some of the empirical material presented in Chapters 3, 4, and 5 has appeared, in other guises and in part, in my articles in Comparative Education (Kölbel 2013) and Social and Cultural Geography (Kölbel 2018) and in my chapter, ‘Nepal’s Educated Non-elite’, in Bridges, Pathways and Transitions (Kölbel 2016). In this book, however, I approach the material from different analytical angles and discuss it in combination with a whole set of other narratives and findings. The book, therefore, offers a more thorough understanding of young people’s everyday life in Kathmandu and contributes new perspectives to conceptual debates about youth, aspiration, and mobility.
Upon completion of this book, I struggle to find the right words to thank all those who made it possible for me to carry out, to carry on, and to carry through this project. First and foremost, I wish to thank the students and faculty of Patan Campus for allowing me to join them on campus, as well as follow their daily routines, which enabled me to learn about critical durations in their lives. I specifically would like to acknowledge Sujata Singh and Rajju Mulmi for the excellent research assistance they provided. I want to express my gratitude to Linda McDowell, Craig Jeffrey, and David Gellner for their academic guidance, and to Johanna Waters and Karen Valentin for their constructive feedback. I would also like to offer special thanks to Laxmi Nath Shrestha, my language teacher, whose love for the Nepali language, his home country, and its people has been a true inspiration for me. I thank Meenakshi Thapan and two anonymous referees for their advice on the production of this book. I am grateful for the financial assistance that I received from the Scatcherd Scholarship Scheme, St Cross College, Oxford, UK, and the Economic and Social Research Council, Swindon, UK [ES/I025073/1].
These central pillars became a solid fundament for me to build on thanks to a number of other people who lend their support, even though they assumed no official role in this project. I am deeply indebted to three exceptional academics whom I look up to as my
mentors: Beatrice Fromm, whose persisting nudges and phone calls laid the foundation stone for this project; the late Colin Brock, who walked with me when the going got tough; and Joanna PfaffCzarnecka, who met me on the twentieth floor and saved me from dropping this book project. I am immensely thankful to Reidun Faye and Gaëtan Cousin for much-needed encouragements and for very fruitful joint writing retreats. I wish to thank Luna Shrestha Thakur and her whole family for their hospitality and for sparking my interest in the future of Nepal’s younger generation. The friends I made over the course of this research process have been an invaluable source of inspiration and distraction: Rachel James, Eveliina Lyytinen, Sanne Verheul, Renate Schamböck, Sarah Schneider, Sabin Ninglekhu, Swetha Manohar, Rocio Urrutia Jalabert, Stefanie Lenk, Margaret Scarborough, Ina Zharkevich, Uma Pradhan, Marco Meyer, and the late Pratibha Khanal Tamang. Thank you all for making the nine years that I spent working towards the publication of this book in Oxford, Kathmandu, and Berlin so much more enriching and joyous.
Without the reassuring trust and love of my family, however, I may have accomplished none of this. I thank my sister for asking the right questions, in response to which I built up the confidence necessary to go ahead with this project. I thank my nieces for helping me to keep a sense of perspective regarding the important things in life. I thank my parents for giving me wings and roots and for believing in me—always.
These words of gratitude still do not suffice, for they are written exclusively in English. The best and perhaps only way to extend my gratefulness to all concerned may be for me to say: Thank you very much, dhērai dhan'yavāda, vielen lieben Dank!
Moving from Present to Future
Youth is basically the time in life when people are in search of a future.
—Anandi, 25-year-old woman, Kathmandu, November 2011
This book is a study of young people’s capacity to identify and realize promising educational and occupational pathways. It is about the social influences and structuring forces that shape young people’s future orientations and the uneven and often unexpected ways in which young people forge their futures. At the centre of the book are the stories of 40 young women and men who in 2011–12 were all studying, working, and living in Nepal’s capital city, Kathmandu. Over the course of nine months of field research, I spoke with these young people about their educational and occupational experiences and they shared with me the aspirations and anxieties they had with regard to their own future lives. Based on these conversations, I unpack particularly critical durations in young people’s lives, where the decisions they had to make with regard to their educational and occupational careers were likely to significantly shape their future life chances.
A basic premise of this book is that young people are not simply troubled victims of political and economic transformations, but active agents in their own right, capable of negotiating the structuring forces and social pressures that shape their lives (for example,
In Search of a Future. Andrea Kölbel, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190124519.003.0001.
Holloway and Valentine 2000b; James, Jenks, and Prout 1998; Willis 1977; Wulff 1995). This way of framing the life experiences of young people is useful in many respects. By taking seriously young people’s own ways of thinking about their situations, researchers have been able to contribute new perspectives on issues at the centre of public policy and social action, including education, employment, politics, migration, civil society, and social welfare. Increasingly, however, scholars working with young people have been called upon to move beyond what might be immediately useful in terms of policymaking and to connect with intellectual debates about the concepts and questions at the core of social scientific research (for example, Evans 2008; Hanson Thiem 2009; and Horton and Kraftl 2005, 2006). As part of this discussion, researchers have only just begun to investigate the extent to which existing conceptualizations that shape research with youth tend to reinforce stereotypical ideas attached to young people’s behaviours and roles in wider society (see, for example, the debate between Roberts [2007] and Wyn and Woodman [2006, 2007]).
The principal aim of my investigations is therefore to scrutinize some of the conceptual ideas that underlie prevalent visions of youth as agents of social change and as a source of hope for a better future. Precisely because there has been, above all, a consistent theoretical concern to show that young people have agency, many scholars involved in research on young people’s lives have frequently looked for instances in which young people broke with established social norms and resisted cultural hegemonies. As a result, much of the existing literature on youth assimilates young people’s agency to acts of liberation, resistance, and deviance. Such a narrow perspective on youth agency, however, runs the risk of reinforcing pervasive and often polarizing depictions of youth. In order to broaden our understanding of young people’s collective actions and their potential social implications, I therefore contend that it is necessary to ask: what types of agency do young people demonstrate?
In this book, I address this question with a focus on a group of young Nepalis, who have so far received comparatively little attention in both scholarly and public debates about youth in Nepal, or elsewhere, for that matter. I argue that this is precisely because their behaviour did not raise any immediate concerns about the direction
in which society was moving in the future. In 2011–12, they were studying for a master’s degree at a public university campus located in the Kathmandu Valley and each of them had experience of working full time alongside their university studies. All of them shared a strong desire to do well in work and study, and genuinely strove to comply with established notions of social respectability.
Born in the mid-1980s, these young people belonged to a generation of young Nepalis whose lives were forcefully shaped by political instabilities and economic uncertainties, but who, at the same time, were encouraged to aspire to higher levels of education, salaried jobs, and international migration. Despite these shared experiences, it was a highly diverse group of young Nepalis. Of the 40 research participants, 21 were women, of which seven were married and two had children at the time fieldwork was conducted. Half of them belonged to an ethnic group or a lower caste and 22 research participants had migrated to Kathmandu from various parts of the country, including some remote areas in the mountainous parts of eastern and western Nepal and in the hill region. Overall, more than half of the research participants belonged to social groups that have long been subject to forms of discrimination and are, therefore, underrepresented at university level (cf. Bhatta et al. 2008). Through my interactions with young educated Nepalis of both genders, from different social and familial backgrounds, I was not only able to unpack some changes in the established social order but could also identify which constraints still persist. This helped me to develop a more nuanced understanding of young people’s agency and, specifically, of the ways in which young people’s capacity to act is linked to their social and spatial identities.
My investigations into the future strategies of young people in Nepal tie into ongoing efforts to broaden the scope of youth research in ways which often challenge dominant ideas about young people’s lives and help to uncover the small gestures and practices through which young people grow in their own power (see also Cole 2010; Durham 2008; Dyson 2014; Kraftl 2008). I do so by bringing the literature on youth agency into conversation with theoretical work on the concepts of aspiration and mobility. The empirical analysis presented in this book makes evident the varied nature of young people’s agency and, in this way, moves beyond dualistic categorizations
of youth: conformist versus deviant; aspirational versus apathetic; mobile versus immobile. The findings, therefore, are of relevance to the interdisciplinary field of youth studies, as well as to emerging debates in social scientific research and policymaking about the apparent need to produce ‘aspirational citizens’ and about the meanings attached to spatial (im)mobilities in contemporary societies.
In this chapter, I locate my research within the scholarly debate on the role of youth in processes of social change. More specifically, I trace important changes in the ways in which social scientists have thought about and, increasingly, worked with young people in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. A review of more recent contributions to the field of youth studies, however, also reveals that researchers have approached questions about young people’s practices from a rather narrow angle. In order to supplement this work and provide new perspectives, I want to remain particularly attentive to ideas and strategies that may be less expected given the dominant discourses on youth. For this purpose, I bring together different strands of research on the concepts of vital conjunctures, aspiration, and mobility and, in so doing, establish the theoretical foundations for my empirical analysis of young people’s time–space strategies in the context of urban Nepal. Finally, I outline my research strategy and the structure and argument of the book.
TheorizingYouthandSocialChange
The truism that ‘youth are the future’ captures very well an assumption that underlies much of the research conducted in the field of youth studies. Young people’s lives are commonly perceived as critical sites through which others may gain an understanding of what the future holds (Cole and Durham 2008: 3–4). Since young people are seen to be still in the process of making their place in society, and of exploring and experimenting with different identities and options, they are thought to serve as a catalyst for social change (for example, Arnett 2000). It is through the collective decisions and actions of the younger generation that a new and different future seems to become possible. This rather hopeful conception of youth agency nevertheless directly links to public concerns about the apparent inability of young people to resolve the indeterminacies and difficulties they
confront in the present. In times of political and economic crises particularly, young people often struggle to establish themselves within their respective societies and are left with a sense of being trapped in between confirmed social statuses. If youth are taken to embody the future, the problems faced by this specific subgroup of society are essentially tantamount to the dismantling of the widespread hope for future progress (Weiss 2004). Such paradoxical visions of youth whereby young people are seen to be simultaneously the makers and the breakers of future society have generated considerable debate about the social implications of young people’s collective actions (Honwana and de Boeck 2005; see also Bucholtz 2002).
The theoretical foundations of the existing body of literature on youth agency can be traced back to at least as far as the beginning of the twentieth century (for example, Hall 1904). Particularly influential in this context has been the work of Karl Mannheim ([1923] 1952). In an essay published in 1923, Mannheim presented a sociological analysis of the role of the younger generation in processes of social and cultural change. He specifically drew out the problems and advantages of generational shifts. Mannheim emphasized that each generation approaches and assimilates into its socio-historical environment anew. That is, it comes into a ‘fresh contact’ (Mannheim [1923] 1952: 293) with the shared cultural material. As long as the norms and habits passed on by the older to the younger generation function satisfactorily, the younger generation tends to internalize these ideas unwittingly. However, at times when the established value system is no longer reconcilable with the new situation, the younger generation is likely to critically review the cultural heritage. On the one hand, this means that in the process of transmitting established social norms and cultural beliefs from one generation to the next, some of the knowledge of previous generations gets lost. On the other hand, changes in how different generations approach their social and cultural heritage are essential for a society to adjust to new structural conditions. Mannheim ([1923] 1952: 294) explicitly writes: ‘The continuous emergence of new human beings ... alone makes a fresh selection possible when it becomes necessary; it facilitates re-evaluation of our inventory and teaches us both to forget that which is no longer useful and to covet that which has yet to be won.’
The idea that young people’s agency emerges out of situations of friction and apprehension also resonates with Victor Turner’s (1969, 1974) description of young people as liminal subjects. In anthropological thought, liminality refers to the temporary state of being situated in between confirmed social statuses—a position which raises uncertainty but also exempts from social restrictions (see also van Gennep [1909] 1960). In the liminal phase of youth, individuals are therefore seen to be uniquely poised to be highly inventive and to rethink established social norms as they are in the process of re-marking their place in society. Indeed, these early works signify a departure from previous psychobiological research into youth. Young people’s experiences and practices are no longer reduced to a developmental phase in the life course between childhood and adulthood but are analysed in relation to complex processes of social change and reproduction. This conceptual move inspired researchers from across the social sciences to pay more attention to the agency of young people.
A central theme of this scholarship on young people’s agency has been the signifi cance of youth subcultures as critical sites for processes of social and cultural production. Particularly infl uential in this respect has been the work of researchers associated with the Centre of Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS), at the University of Birmingham, in the 1970s and the 1980s. Th e CCCS scholars, contributing to a collection of working papers titled, Resistance through Rituals (Hall and Jeff erson 1975), argued that youth subcultures emerge within and, in fact, against the power relations around which social life is organized. With elements of Marxism forming the central theoretical pillar of a series of studies produced at the CCCS, deviance—whether in terms of certain activities, styles, or use of specifi c spaces—was seen as a way by which young people set themselves apart from the dominant culture and, hence, could challenge the status quo. Rather than viewing youth solely as future adults, the work of CCCS scholars made evident that young people produce something on their own that is of value for them, if not in the long term, then at least at the time. Empirically, the studies by CCCS scholars remained exclusively focused on young people’s lives in post–World War II Britain. In terms of their theoretical contributions, however, the work of
CCCS scholars became a major point of reference for youth studies, directing attention to acts of rebellion and resistance, along with creativity, as hallmarks of young people’s agency.
The assertion that young people’s actions need to be understood as active efforts to advertise their individuality and to gain more independence is further underpinned by an extensive body of literature on young people’s lives in the late twentieth and the twenty-first centuries (for example, Bynner, Chisholm, and Furlong 1997; Furlong and Cartmel 1997; Heinz 1987, 2003; Roberts, Clark, and Wallace 1994; Shanahan 2000). The burgeoning interest in youth research was spurred by public concerns over growing levels of instability and uncertainty regarding young people’s transition from school to work. As a result of the economic recession in the 1980s in Europe and North America, youth unemployment rates increased significantly. At the same time, the expansion of the service industry raised expectations for educational qualifications in those countries. On the one hand, these changes in the education and labour markets allowed some young people, and especially young women, to seize on a range of new opportunities that had been largely unavailable to their parents. ‘Standard biographies’ specific to a person’s gender and class were seen to be replaced by ‘choice biographies’ (for example, Brannen and Nilsen 2002; du Bois-Reymond 1998). However, young men from a working-class background seemed to lose out on these developments. Linda McDowell (2003), for example, found that the machismo and resistance associated with male working-class culture, alongside a fairly poor education, put working-class young men at a disadvantage in the changing labour market of northern England. McDowell moves on to argue that young men did not despair despite the fact that they failed to upgrade their skills and were excluded from more well-paid jobs. Rather, these young men maintained a strong dedication to hard work, which in turn enabled them to obtain relatively stable forms of employment and to build committed relationships. Taken together, these studies imply that young people’s efforts to achieve independence have become more complicated, as young people can no longer rely on previously well-established pathways. Instead, they are increasingly required to construct their own routes through formal education and into the labour market, thereby drawing from a wider set of opportunities—whether by choice or not.
Human geographers and social anthropologists have further advanced this debate by contributing insights into young people’s lives in other parts of the world. These studies establish that lingering political or economic crises amplify young people’s struggle to map out potential future pathways. In places as diverse as Ethiopia (Mains 2012), Senegal (Ralph 2008), Papua New Guinea (Demerath 2003), and India (Jeffrey, Jeffery, and Jeffery 2008), the expansion of modern education systems coupled with a stagnant labour market has left a large number of young people without any tangible prospects for an adequate employment that would allow them to build a financially secure future. Political regulations sometimes exacerbate the struggle young people face. In the case of Rwanda, for example, the government launched a housing reform which significantly complicated young people’s efforts to build a house in proximity to their rural home communities—a life achievement which is closely tied up with local notions of proper manhood (Sommers 2012). In a similar vein, young people in Lusaka, the capital city of Zambia, felt that social adulthood was beyond their grasp as they struggled to accumulate the resources necessary to move out of their parents’ homes (Hansen 2005).
Whilst these studies tend to focus on male youth, the problems they outline have direct implications for young women. In many societies in Africa and South Asia, young men’s financial independence is thought to be a prerequisite for obtaining a socially acceptable marriage, having children in that marriage, and providing for the family (for example, Lukose 2010; Masquelier 2005). For young women, it is particularly important to secure a favourable marriage arrangement and attain motherhood because they are likely to have even fewer opportunities to obtain other social markers of seniority, in the form of higher levels of education, professional employment, or positions of public responsibility (Stambach 2000). However, as young people’s private lives become enmeshed in the uncertainties arising from daunting economic prospects and political instability, it seems impossible for young men and women alike to foresee whether and when they will be able to gain recognition as full adults. It, therefore, has been argued that societies in the Global South are faced with the imminent danger of producing ‘an entire generation of failed adults’, which is vulnerable to manipulation and exploitation
by political forces, including militant and criminal groups (Sommers 2012: 193; see also Dore 1976; Verkaaik 2004; Vigh 2006).
Other scholars working with young people in the Global South have mitigated such ominous depictions of youth, arguing that young people may respond to unpromising circumstances in a creative, and not destructive, manner. There is now plenty of evidence to suggest that unemployed young men engage in strategic forms of waiting in order to mediate the severe lack of job opportunities (Jeffrey 2010b; Mains 2012; Newell 2012; Ralph 2008). Other studies imply that young people’s resourcefulness sometimes simply resides in their ability to survive. This point emerges forcefully from Kate Swanson’s (2010) account of young beggars in Ecuador. Swanson describes how young people have responded to the decline of the rural economy by migrating to the country’s largest city to beg. Through begging, these young people are able to build supportive social networks and accumulate sufficient money to finance their schooling. Hannah Hoechner (2011) makes a parallel observation in her study of Qur’anic students in Nigeria. She shows that traditional Islamic education, in combination with begging or menial work in urban areas, constitutes an important coping strategy for the sons of poor rural families and enables these young men to deflect attention from the fact that they are socially excluded. The image produced by such accounts is one in which young people are seen to be highly capable of appropriating dominant structures and of negotiating situations of adversity.
Studies of youth in Nepal largely resonate with this broader debate about youth agency, with the country’s younger population often being ascribed the role of society’s ‘change agents’. In a study of Nepali student politics, Amanda Snellinger (2005, 2009, 2018) illustrates well that youth activism is a key theme in the discourses and programmes of various, often competing, political forces, which seek to mobilize the country’s young population for their own benefits. Against the backdrop of the politically tumultuous period between 2003 and 2008, Snellinger argues that youth came to be conceived of as a liminal stage. The Nepali politicians she spoke with explained that young people’s ‘hopes are based in tradition and aspirations of the previous generations but their flexible perspective allows them to conceive possibilities their parents did not’ (Snellinger 2005: 20).
In line with this political conception of youth, the National Youth Policy, which was published in 2010 and legally enacted in 2015, depicts youth as a ‘change-driving force’ with the capacity to realize the political, economic, and social transformations which previous generations have not accomplished (Ministry of Youth and Sports [MoYS] 2010).
This vision of youth as a source of hope for future change also resonates with Mark Liechty’s (2003: 246) description of Kathmandu’s youth as the ‘vanguard’ of the middle-class project to construct a ‘modern’ future. Liechty conducted his ethnographic research in the early 1990s, when a new propertied class started to emerge in Nepal’s capital city as a result of large-scale economic, political, and social transformations. These developments had direct implications for the younger population: young people’s lives increasingly evolved around new social institutions—colleges, offices, clubs, shopping malls— which brought together peers of both genders and from different caste and ethnic origins. In this context, Liechty (2003: 243) argues that ‘a new “in-between” domain of “youth”... opens up at the intersection of new patterns of education, labor, consumption and class formation.’ Against the backdrop of structural changes transforming the country’s educational and economic landscape, the English term ‘youth’ and the Nepali equivalent ‘yuba’ became less associated with the transition to adulthood than with an entirely new social category, constituting an important site for a new and different future (Liechty 2003; see also Snellinger 2013).
In practice, however, young people in Nepal seem to be mostly waiting for change to happen—be it on a personal, political, or social level (Liechty 2003; Snellinger 2009, 2010). For the established elite and the new middle class, investing in the offspring’s education has come to be a question of social prestige. From the perspective of the young people themselves, however, the class-specific privilege of prolonging their education in the absence of adequate job opportunities has turned into a social dilemma. Specific markers of adulthood, such as a salaried employment and, in extension to this, a suitable marriage arrangement, are increasingly hard to achieve. Liechty (2003: 211) hence concludes that a growing number of young Nepalis are trapped ‘in a kind of limbo’ as they try to fulfil the hopes and dreams of middle-class families, yet without much success. A
similar sense of deferment is also evident in the definitions of youth used in Nepali politics. Politicians, some of them aged 40 and above, have continued to act as ‘youth leaders’ because they are still waiting their turn to be promoted to the higher ranks of the party hierarchy (Snellinger 2009). Researchers working with young people in Nepal therefore broadly agree that young Nepalis are in situations of ‘radical uncertainty’ (Madsen and Carney 2011), as youth has emerged to be primarily a holding category for a surplus of ‘adultsin-waiting’ (Snellinger 2009).
The studies I have reviewed so far not only illustrate that the literature on youth agency has expanded enormously during the second half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century. They also epitomize the advances made in the way in which social scientists think about as well as work with young people. Perhaps most importantly, youth researchers have moved beyond narrow theories of socialization by emphasizing that young people are social agents in their own right (for example, Holloway and Valentine 2000b; James, Jenks, and Prout 1998; Willis 1977; Wulff 1995). This means that young people are no longer conceived of as passive recipients of the norms and values that adults try to pass onto them. Rather, due attention is now being paid to the perceptions of young people themselves and to the ways in which young people act upon the multitude of structuring forces and social influences that shape their lives. This conceptual move also reflects in calls for an active involvement of young people in research activities and other social processes, more generally (for example, Barker et al. 2009; Cahill 2007; Matthews, Limb, and Taylor 1999).
This significant progress notwithstanding, the visions of agency that emerge from the extensive body of literature on youth produced over the course of the past century tend to cluster around notions of youth as innovatively resourceful and a source of hope. There is, above all, a consistent concern to show how young people negotiate situations of uncertainty and adversity. In particular, attention is being directed to instances in which young people stimulate social change by breaking with established habits and beliefs and by creating new ideas and values (Ahearn 2001b; Bucholtz 2002). Youth agency is therefore commonly understood as an oppositional and inventive capacity which enables young people to assert their independence
against dominant social pressures and cultural hegemonies. In some cases, theorizations of youth agency can be traced back to the rise of romanticism in the nineteenth century, and particularly to the German romantic tradition of ‘storm and stress’ (France 2007; see also Hall 1904). Descriptions of youth as a period of ‘storm and stress’ suggest that young people go through a time of rupture and crisis as they transcend childhood identities and start to build their own future lives. Over the course of the twentieth century, young people’s personal growth has become increasingly linked to specific steps and achievements: completing schooling; securing a job; earning an income; and moving out of the parental home. It is commonly presumed that such accomplishments have to be achieved through an act of liberation from the familiar socio-spatial environment. From this perspective, young people’s personal growth is intimately linked to social change (see Durham 2008).
Western-inspired approaches to youth agency, which emphasize the liberation of the individual as a ‘self’ from structuring forces, are ubiquitous both in academic writing as well as in policy discourses. However, for my work with young people in Nepal, such an understanding of youth agency is only partially useful for several reasons. First, a tight focus on individual agency draws attention away from differences in people’s agency related to their social identities, including gender, caste/ethnicity, and class. In a study of poor and lower-middle-class youth in Madagascar, Jennifer Cole (2004) clearly shows that young women and men negotiate economic scarcity differently. Whilst young women could earn some money by engaging in sexual relationships with foreign visitors, young men were often left to survive through petty crime. These dynamics led to a change in local gender roles, wherein young men became increasingly reliant on their female partners and young women gained authority as the main breadwinners. Cole’s study illustrates well that young people try to cope with economic difficulties based on the specific kind of agency bestowed on them by virtue of their gender identity. Jane Dyson’s (2008) account of young people’s involvement in lichen collection in a remote part of the Indian Himalayas is similarly helpful. Young men, especially those belonging to a lower caste, worked particularly hard in the forest as a good harvest enabled them to support their families financially. In contrast, upper-caste young women
used the time in the forest for ‘fun activities’. These differences in young people’s work practices relate to gender norms imposed on them in more public spaces. Unlike young men, young women had few opportunities to have fun outside the forest because, in the presence of other members of the village community, it would have been socially unacceptable for young women to play games or fool around. Thus, Dyson’s observations not only illustrate how gender and caste inequalities play out in young people’s work practices but also highlight the spatial dimension of youth agency. In view of such findings, I suggest that more attention needs to be paid to the various ways in which young people may exercise their agency in different socio-spatial contexts as their practices are always shaped by social norms and expectations related to a person’s gender, caste/ethnicity, and class.
A second difficulty with pervasive conceptualizations of youth agency from the point of view of my interest in young people’s lives in Nepal is that young people’s actions are generally understood as efforts to achieve greater independence in order to demonstrate maturity. In many parts of the world, however, young people’s maturity and agency is measured in terms of less rather than more independence. For example, research on young people’s work routines in countries in the Global South shows that young people’s acceptance into adult society depends to a large extent on their ability to contribute fully to the maintenance of the household—be it in the form of domestic chores or in the form of paid labour outside the household (for example, Magazine and Sánchez 2007; Reynolds 1991). Samantha Punch (2002) makes this point explicit in her study of adult-child relations in rural Bolivia. She shows that young people were expected to accept more responsibility for their family and community as they grew up. In view of such local notions of maturity, young people’s involvement in the labour market cannot only be explained by financial needs, but also by their desire to fulfil the social obligations they have towards their kin. Other studies have further contributed to this debate by directing attention to the importance of friendship ties for young people. Based on research with middle-class young men in Bangalore (today’s Bengaluru), Nicholas Nisbett (2007) argues that unemployed young men were able to maintain a sense of middleclass status by sharing expensive consumer goods with their friends.
In this sense, relationships with peers are seen to open up possibilities for young people to acquire a sense of agency (see also Dyson 2010; Willis 1977). In all these contexts, young people’s actions are expressions of sociality. I, therefore, propose that it is necessary to critically examine the prevalent assumption according to which young people’s agency resides in their active efforts to become more independent in order to raise their social status.
This point of criticism relates to a third shortcoming, which weaves through a large share of the literature on youth agency. Starting with the work of CCCS scholars, studies of youth have been mainly concerned with deviant forms of behaviour and young people’s involvement in spectacular actions. The CCCS researchers were not unaware of this limitation. In the theoretical part of their collaborative work, they note that ‘the great majority of ... youth never enters a tight or coherent subculture at all’ (Clarke et al. 1975: 16). Nevertheless, notions of rupture and crisis continue to be a central theme in more recent studies of youth as well, especially, though not exclusively, of young people’s lives in parts of Africa and Asia. Critics have therefore noted that most youth researchers seem to have lost from sight, ‘the more mundane dimensions of everyday life’ for young people (Hansen 2005: 4; see also Cole 2010; Durham 2008). The majority of young people, however, remain firmly located in well-established social institutions—school, work, and family—that shape their daily lives, without necessarily questioning them. They are law-abiding, committed to doing well in school and at work, respectful of adults, and tightly connected to their families and friends (Ball, Macrae, and Maguire 2000: 93–104). Their behaviour, therefore, rarely raises any concerns about the future in which society is moving. Adults can feel reassured because the offspring appear to be in agreement with the cultural values and norms that the older generation aims to pass on to them. Precisely because ‘conformist’ youth are presumed to primarily reproduce the status quo, they generally receive far less attention in both scholarly and public debates (for example, Bucholtz 2002; Lave et al. 1992; Woodman 2013; Wulff 1995).
Such interpretations, however, downplay the extent to which young people may exert their power not only by resisting against dominant pressures but also by abiding by established norms. Particularly instructive in this context is Deborah Durham’s (2008)
research with young people in Botswana. Durham found that the young people she worked with greatly valued connections with other family members, elders, and their home communities, and actively sought to strengthen these ties. It was through their involvement in traditional social networks and their ability to listen, understand, and obey that young people learned how to ‘get things done’ (Durham 2008: 176), that is, how to act effectively by exercising a measure of power. Durham, therefore, emphasizes that youth researchers need to move beyond simply stating that young people have agency and, instead, need to examine more closely what kind of agency young people might have and how their agency relates them to others and to their society (Durham 2008: 153). Building on such critical contributions to the field of youth studies, I seek to develop a fuller understanding of young people’s agency through my work with educated young people in urban Nepal. In particular, I aim to move beyond stereotypical ideas attached to youth by examining to what extent young people identify themselves with public discourses on the role of youth in Nepali society and with prevailing expectations about the younger population.
VitalConjuncturesofYouth
Central to the literature on youth agency are questions about young people’s educational and occupational pathways. Related decisions and practices are often seen to be of major importance for people’s chances of building a prosperous future life. Studies of young people’s progression through the education system and into the labour market have effectively described the workings of various forces of socialization, including the family, the school, the media, and the state, to name a few (for example, Coleman 1973; James, Jenks, and Prout 1998). As a result, social scientists now broadly agree that the category of ‘youth’ needs to be understood as a social construction because young people’s lives are always shaped by multiple dominant pressures and recursive interventions by adults (for example, Barker et al. 2009; Holloway and Valentine 2000b). Since the twentieth century, Euro-American models of how individuals should mature by completing formal schooling and entering the labour market thereafter have become manifested in people’s minds across the world
(Cole and Durham 2008: 5–6; Ruddick 2003). In recent years, however, the concept of youth transitions has attracted much criticism as it assimilates young people’s development to a unilinear progression through specific stages and implies that there exists a universal, normative set of behaviours and experiences through which individuals are integrated into adult society (for example, Jeffrey 2010a; Wyn and Woodman 2006, 2007). Consequently, any sort of deviance from this transitional process—whether because of young people’s own actions or because of conditions beyond their control—is likely to be interpreted as a sign of a young person’s inability to construct a successful future life. Whilst efforts have been made to account for non-linear transitions (for example, Hörschelmann 2011; Roberts 2007; Valentine 2003), the focus of transition literature remains on the acquisition of adulthood, that is, the end point. By contrast, I suggest that a thorough understanding of the complex and often uneven ways in which young people try to construct a future necessitates a shift in focus to the actual process of becoming. In my own analysis of the educational and occupational situations of young Nepalis, I therefore strive to adopt a contextually based approach that traces social patterns at the micro level, and hence allows me to capture heterogeneities in young people’s daily practices and in their narratives about their potential future lives.
Jennifer Johnson-Hanks’s (2002) theory of ‘vital conjunctures’ promises to be particularly useful for this purpose. Drawing from her empirical research in Cameroon, Johnson-Hanks problematizes the presumed linearity and universality of young people’s life trajectories. She demonstrates that young Beti women experienced changes in their social standing linked to marriage, motherhood, employment, and formal education at different ages. Furthermore, these potentially life-changing experiences did not occur in a predictable order but sometimes took place either in parallel to each other or not at all. Johnson-Hanks, therefore, proposes a theory of ‘vital conjunctures’. The term ‘conjuncture’ derives from the work of Pierre Bourdieu (1977) and refers to relatively short-term conditions that manifest social structure and shape the range of possible actions. With reference to young people’s lives, Johnson-Hanks suggests that particular attention needs to be paid to sites of vital conjunctures when structuring elements combine in ways which make it more likely that
