The Cruel Optimism of Higher Education: Incitements to “the Good Life” in Jordan

• In Event: Deconstructing Young People's Engagement in Education: Post-Foundational Approaches

Proposal

A recurring debate in the field of comparative and international education examines the relationship between schooling and social life. In policymaking circles and nongovernmental agencies, where the focus is often on a technocratic improvement of outcomes, education is often equated with the means for individuals to realize upward mobility and transform their individual and community lives. Critical appraisals of schooling, however, may counter that the idea of “improvement” through education cannot be understood without acknowledgment of broader structural forces, often referred to in aggregate as “neoliberalism,” that have shifted the burden of responsibility and well-being towards the self-assertion of the individual. Both approaches, it seems, may be at risk of giving too flat or disembodied an account of the ways in which people actually experience and make sense of being educated, and how being educated is powerfully bound up with feelings of self-worth.

As Hall (2007: 1) argues, the idea of neoliberalism as a totalized system, “of which everything is always already somehow a part, in not helpful in the effort to approach a weighted and reeling present.” Exploring the idea of how youth are attached/invested in becoming educated while inhabiting a “reeling present” is the key point of departure and topic of investigation for this paper. In Jordan, massive migration driven by conflicts in neighboring states have exacerbated economic hardships in a state where youth represent an outsized percentage of the unemployed. Differentiated access in admissions, political surveillance of students, and other institutional barriers within higher education institutions contribute to a sense of educational disquiet, where the means of securing the future seem ill-equipped to confront the challenges of the present.

Drawing on the insights of scholars working with the concept of affect—or modes of attachment, attention, and agency (among others)—and in particular, Lauren Berlant’s (2011) notion of cruel optimism, this paper examines the emotional investments of university students to the idea of “being educated” in a sociopolitical context defined by economic and political precarity, or where a sense of crisis has become the norm. The idea of cruel optimism is useful in that it "turns towards thinking about the ordinary as an impasse shaped by crisis in which people find themselves developing skills for adjusting to newly proliferating pressures to scramble for modes of living on" (Berlant, 2011: 8). Cruel optimism, expressed as investment in fantasies that do harm, draws attention to how life is “disorganized” by late capitalism. It is useful as a conceptual lens in that it builds upon a Foucauldian focus on the self as a technology of governance to combine it with attention to the affective experience of attachment without promise.

The paper is informed by an inductive and longitudinal qualitative investigation that examines the processes by university students in Jordan navigate their school-to-work transitions in a context of political volatility and socioeconomic uncertainty. While much of research on school-to-work transitions in the Middle East is driven by quantitative methods and positivist research designs (e.g. (Assaad & Krafft, 2014; Assaad, Krafft, & Salehi-Isfahani, 2014; Barsoum, 2004; Binzel, 2011), my analytical focus is on the affect laden moments of transition—graduation, job-seeking, the feelings of starting or leaving relationships behind—moments that simultaneously create feelings of a shared reality, and the exploration of interiority and one’s place in the world. The sources of data are interview data and limited participant observation of twenty university students enrolled different institutions of higher education in Jordan. The interviews were conducted annually with participants over three years, from 2014-2016, and traces the movement of two participants to lives outside of Jordan during that time. Focusing on the perspectives of 8 key informants as they transition from university to entering the labor market, the interviews provide insight into how becoming educated is constitutive of and constituted by desires for a good life, and the various ways in which Jordanian youth draw upon this resource meet their aspirations in socioeconomic uncertainty.

While analysis of the data is underway as of this submission, preliminary findings suggest that the promises of education, articulated by past generations and present discourses of social mobility in the “global economy,” produce both ambivalence and attachment. The youth in this research remain committed to completing their studies, and often supplement them with other forms of training and professional experience to gain an edge. Despite these investments, they are nearly unanimous in acknowledging that the experiences of higher education are not likely to place them in closer proximity to idealized and gendered notions of the good life.


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Author

• Roozbeh Shirazi, University of Minnesota