The Extended Lives of Youth Aspirations: COVID-19 and the Shifting Paths and Dwellings of Potentiality for Indonesian Vocational High School Graduates

• In Event: Promising Scholarship in Education Research: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research

Abstract

The Extended Lives of Youth Aspirations: COVID-19 and the Shifting Paths and Dwellings of Potentiality for Indonesian Vocational High School Graduates

Framed by accounts of the ongoing lives of a group of vocational high school graduates in Indonesia during the COVID-19 pandemic, this presentation shares preliminary ethnographic findings on “the extended lives of youth aspirations.” In dialogue with the literature on uncertainty (Johnson-Hanks 2005) and precarity (Allison 2012), as well as hope (Miyazaki and Swedberg 2017) and optimism (Berlant 2011), the presentation addresses the questions: How do young people make sense of their futures when understandings of the potential destinations they hope to reach, and the paths that lead them there, are both being contested and revised? Under what conditions do certain ideas of potentiality dissipate while others endure? In my two-pronged discussion on (1) how aspirational ideas shift across a period of great uncertainty to influence the decision-making processes of young people; and (2) how young people make efforts to endure the anxieties and confusion they face and conjure new possibilities of the future as they navigate such uncertain and unprecedented terrains, I identify the concept of potentiality as a central component of both processes.

Author

• Jessica Peng, University of Pennsylvania