Skills development and social transformation: Critical ethnographies of skilling infrastructures

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

In recent years, national and transnational education actors have increasingly asserted an urgent need for investment in skills development, circulating discourses that position skills education and training as indispensable tools for expanding young people’s human capital and securing economic futures (Desai and Balagopalan, forthcoming). Across multiple contexts and levels of scales, educational stakeholders show concern over how they can close “skills gaps” by aligning skilling investments and infrastructures with ever-evolving labor market dynamics (Bakule et al., 2016). Alongside expanding investments in skilling curricula and programming, growing pressure mounts around a need for standardized tools for measuring, assessing, and comparing the impact of skills programs (Hoskins & Liu, 2019). Critical scholars have begun to grapple with the question of how current trends toward “skilling” connect with the demands of late-stage neoliberal capitalism for flexible, adaptable labor forces (Desai, 2020; Ng, 2018).

Contributing to these discussions, this panel attends to the complex tensions, contradictions, and negotiations that exist within and across diverse contexts of the global skilling landscape. The papers on this panel ethnographically explore the perspectives and everyday practices of social actors within skilling infrastructures, including students, teachers, and staff of skilling programs, as well as measurement experts who assess skilling programs.

Across these papers, the authors consider the ways in which skilling infrastructures not only seek to instill young people with specific skills and capacities, but also work to broadly discipline and reshape students’ bodies, desires, mindsets, and aspirations in nuanced ways. Moreover, the papers in this panel comparatively ask for whom and what purposes are certain skill areas, like soft skills (Peng), well-being (Miglani), and life skills (Desai and Casey), prioritized? Peng traces the circulatory production of an emergent figure of youth within the contemporary “skilling” context of Indonesia, examining both the everyday processes and experiences of “skills” cultivation and the broader politics that shape the making of a new form of neoliberal citizenship. Miglani examines a social-emotional learning intervention, Happiness class in Delhi, India, to highlight the pedagogical constructions and everyday, lived transactions of well-being, examining how student bodies emerge as the key sites where the pedagogy of well-being unfolds. Desai and Casey draw on ethnographic interviews with measurement experts who design tools for measuring and assessing life skills and social emotional skills programming across a host of international development NGOs and multilateral organizations, tracing the complex and contradictory anxieties, pleasures, and tensions that surround the creation of standardized measurement tools.

Finally, the panel opens up questions pertaining to the epistemic infrastructures that surround skilling programs. Altogether, this panel engages with the material, discursive, and affective dimensions of skilling infrastructures, as well as complex imperatives of social and cultural transformation with which skilling programs are interlinked.

Sub Unit

• Youth Development and Education SIG

Chair

• Karishma Desai, Rutgers University

Individual Presentations

• Figuring the “potentializing student”: Vocational education, “skilled” labor development, and ideals of youthhood in Indonesia - Jessica Peng, The University of Pennsylvania

• Well-being as a skill: Pedagogical constructions of social emotional learning - Neha Miglani, University of Southern California

• Tracing measurement anxieties and pleasures: The politics of measuring life skills - Karishma Desai, Rutgers University; Olivia M Casey, Rutgers University Graduate School of Education

Discussant

• Radhika Gorur, Deakin University