"The Willful Girl": Performing Un/intelligible Aspirational Subjectivities in High-Stakes Curriculum

• In Event: 41.078 - Spirituality and Education SIG Paper Session

Abstract

Drawing on narratives from young migrant women in their senior year, this paper argues that neo-liberal imperatives congeal around young women from minority backgrounds in particular, through privileging upward mobility and deep engagement notions of educational ‘success’. It uses Ahmed’s (2014) notion of ‘wilful subjectivities’ to consider how these young women open a productive space for novel experimentation in their aspirations for tertiary study and upwardly mobile material and social conditions for the future. 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 for realising aspirations to one that highlights multiple processes of becoming within novel spaces of identification and belonging.

Author

• Shane Duggan, RMIT University