In this editorial article we frame how young people in Asia are reworking rapidly changing socio-economic, cultural conditions and constraining political structures to create possible successful futures and achieve their aspirations. We critically engage with interdisciplinary debates that conceptualise youth futures and provide an overview of current literature on this topic. Using the intense dynamism of the contemporary Asian region as a lens, we examine the complexities of education and employment landscapes young people are attempting to navigate or avoid; and highlight the implications this has for understanding the nexus between education and employment. Finally, this special issue highlights work by Asian and Asia-based scholars and is part of an intellectual project to make Asian young people more visible within Geography, Anthropology and related disciplines. The collection serves as a showcase of inter-disciplinary scholarship focusing on the complexities of young Asian lives in relation to education and employment.
In large parts of Asia, the spread of formal education, combined with rapid urbanisation, consumerism, and shifts in the regionās volatile economies and labour markets, have sparked young peopleās imaginations about what they consider possible and desirable livelihoods and lifestyles. Participation in secondary and tertiary education not only extends youth as a life phase, but often also carries with it social status. Additionally, schooling often changes young peopleās expectations about the kinds of jobs they value and their idea of themselves as educated persons. While many Asian youth have the possibility of aspiring towards very different futures than their parents could have imagined at the same age, the routes into such futures can be more risky, demanding and insecure. What are the possibilities and realities of an expanding education system for young Asians? What kinds of employment futures can young men and women aspire to and where do these aspirations come from? What aspects of agency and tactics are young people creating in times of opportunity, contraction and rapid change?
These questions are pertinent at different scales for all young people globally. They are very much of our time and pondered by governments, educationalists, employers, communities, families and young people. Differential geographies and education and employment landscapes impact upon young people unevenly in relation to access, opportunities and success in Asia as well as elsewhere. Nevertheless, across the world, young people are remarkable in their persistence to find, create, adapt and make their education and employment experiences work for them, unfortunately with mixed results. The geographical focus on Asia is intended to add new insights to the literature on this topic,1 but we are convinced that these insights will echo beyond the Asian context and that readers will find resonance with their own geographically located understandings of young peopleās aspirations for education and employment.
This special issue of Childrenās Geographies brings together emerging scholars from interdisciplinary backgrounds in cultural anthropology, human geography, sociology, and development studies to better understand the kind of futures that young people aspire to in Asia. It includes an article by Trent Brown, Timothy Scrase and Ruchira Ganguly-Scrase (published as an independent article)2 and began life as an Asia Research Institute funded workshop held at the National University of Singapore in May 2014. Participants theorised the promises, realities and problems that young adults (aged 12ā30) tackle in relation to education, training and employment. For some, there are many more opportunities for higher education and stable employment, offering prospects for upward social mobility, new consumer lifestyles, and relatively smooth transitions into partnerships, marriage and future family life. Other young people may benefit from better and longer periods of education, but find that there is no space for them in the workforce and so they remain un- or underemployed in relation to their educational qualifications.
The articles in this collection address these issues through qualitative and ethnographic research on youth lives in Cambodia, China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Laos, Nepal, and Singapore; drawing East, South and South-East Asia together. This collective of nations shares very many borders (for example, China borders 14 other Asian countries) that have allowed the transference and confluence of people, politics, language, culture and cuisine across and between these sub-regions, but have also maintained complex diversities. Hence, it is vitally important to stress that the region is highly heterogeneous with: differential histories; colonising, colonial and post-colonial experiences; complex geopolitical positions; varying political structures through time and across space; and fascinating arrays of languages, scripts and cultural and religious practices.
Conceptualising youth futures and pathways into education and employment
In exploring these themes, we contribute to a growing literature in the anthropology and sociology of youth, the āgeographies of labourā (Buckley, McPhee, and Rogaly 2017) and the āgeographies of education and aspirationā (Hanson-Thiem 2009; Holloway, Brown, and Pimlott-Wilson 2011). This scholarship traces the promises and pitfalls of an expanding higher education system for young peopleās pathways into work in a comparative, global context. It emphasises the role of education as a contradictory resource in young peopleās lives (Jeffrey, Jeffery, and Jeffery 2008; Levinson and Holland 1996). On the one hand, participation in secondary and tertiary education broadens young peopleās horizons and offers knowledge and skills for social advancement. It is a key site for social reproduction and for governments, young people and their families to imagine different and better futures (Holloway, Brown, and Pimlott-Wilson 2011; Stambach 2017; Waters 2015). Education also works to inculcate notions of social, civic and political responsibilities (often less so of civic and political rights) expected of young men and women within their nations. On the other hand, the pursuit of formal schooling can result in disillusionment or stasis in contexts of high graduate un(der)employment and intensify existing inequalities based on class, caste, race and gender (Bourdieu and Passeron 2000 [1997]; Jeffrey 2010a; Woronov 2015). Globally young peopleās employment prospects have been a major area of concern against the backdrop of a neoliberal shift towards flexible accumulation (Harvey 2007), irregular work, and rising youth unemployment (Anagnost, Arai, and Ren 2013; Brinton 2011; Jeffrey 2010a; Lukacs 2015; Sukarieh and Tannock 2015). Consequently, the question of how young people are exiting education and moving, or not moving, into paid work and future livelihoods has received much attention from academics and policy makers alike. We are forced to ask, in such circumstances can young people access jobs, housing and start families of their own and achieve the social markers of adulthood as they move through the life course?
By illuminating how young adults navigate uncertain āpost-education landscapesā under conditions of economic prosperity and stagnation (Anagnost, Arai, and Ren 2013; Lukacs 2015; Sukarieh and Tannock 2015), we learn how young people and society experience and re-evaluate the meanings of schooling and being an āeducated personā (Brinton 2011; Jeffrey 2010a; Morarji 2016). These studies move away from a tendency in international academic and policy debates to view youth primarily for their potential as future workers and consumers, or to use Western patterns of the ātransition to adulthoodā as an implicit yardstick for youthful lives in other parts of the world (Hansen et al. 2008, 4). As has become increasingly clear in Western contexts and even more so in Asia, the assumed coherence of a linear progression through normative stages of school, work, marriage and family life does not correspond with the realities of young peopleās lives (Johnson-Hanks 2002; Skelton 2002; Valentine 2003). Scholars in youth studies rightfully insist that school and work are not just important for young peopleās futures, but also for many other aspects in their present lives, including leisure, personal relationships, family and community (Wyn and White 1997, 114).
While youth researchers take issue with some of the normative ideas surrounding the ātransition to adulthoodā, elements of this framework have been transported to other parts of the world. For example, linear models of youth development about how young people move through chronological time connect well with equally linear narratives about development and progress (Jeffrey 2010b, 12ā13). Ideas about normative and standardised youth biographies are also institutionalised in laws and school systems (Cole and Durham 2008, 4) and in the minds of many young people and their families who reference ideas about standardised life biographies and adult respectability even if they cannot or do not always want to fulfil those in real life (Amit and Dyck 2011, 19; Cook 2016, 3)
In other words, youth researchers face a dilemma of how to engage with the element of ātransitionā in youth. The tension is about recognising that young people do get older and move through different life phases and that ideas about ātransitionā shape the institutional context in which young people grow up, without assuming that ātransitionā is the defining feature of young peopleās lives in the present (Wyn and White 1997, 94). Therefore, we examine the aspirations of youth on their own terms, without assuming that the transition to adulthood is the driving force behind these aspirations. We use the notion of ātransition regimesā (du Bois-Reymond and Stauber 2005, 63; Wyn 2014) to highlight the institutional contexts (education systems, labour markets, legal and welfare regimes) and normative expectations (cultural values, gender ideologies) that categorise young people along institutional and biographical turning points in their lives, such as leaving school and entering work. Such transition regimes interact with young peopleās motivations and personalities (and that of their families) to influence their education and work trajectories, mobility and pathways to the future. We reflect on the risk of treating certain normative, middle class goals as universal aspirations and question the ideological underpinnings of contemporary discourses around the role of youth in contemporary Asia. For more insight into ātransition regimesā see Chun-Yi Sumās (2018) focus on the hegemonic logic of more-than-the-formal curriculum for potential employment success in China and Colin Smithās (2018) concept of young peopleās development of alternative transition regimes in Japan.
In exploring the diversity of young Asiansā experiences with education and work, the authors in this special issue adopt a flexible analytical approach in thinking about when and how education, work and consumption become important at certain moments in young peopleās lives (Johnson-Hanks 2002). With this collection we make two key contributions, combined with other valuable insights into the context of young people, education and employment in Asia. First, we āgive voiceā (Appadurai 2004) to young people in Asia, and focus in on their everyday lived experiences through a range of empirical data gathered through working with and listening to the young people themselves. This allows us to explore the socio-cultural, political and spatial issues and concerns they face, and begin a conversation about youthful futures that go beyond socio-economic and demographic data. Our articles show how the opportunities and limitations associated with consumer lifestyles, educational change and labour market restructuring take place at different speeds and in highly geographically and socially uneven ways in contemporary Asia. We also highlight how key social divisions around cultural, class, caste, gender and generational lines shape young peopleās orientations to and participation in consumption, education, and work.
Second, we extend the theoretical conversation by paying attention to the ideological work that went into spreading ideas about higher education in the first place and into mobilising young people in the economy (Lukacs 2015, 383; Sukarieh and Tannock 2015). Current youth cohorts are forced and exhorted to be more flexible, entrepreneurial and mobile under a neoliberal ethos that assumes individual merit and responsibility for human capital development (Anagnost, Arai and Ren 2013, 12ā13). This often means that failures in relation to work, income or security are seen as young peopleās own inabilities rather than part of structural political-economic shifts or neglect. Whether through microcredit schemes aiming to foster youth entrepreneurship in post-conflict Nepal (Snellinger 2018) or state efforts to socialise Singapore engineering students into creative innovators in the knowledge economy (Chia and Cho 2018), this collection shows how youthful lives are implicated in national attempts to position countries favourably in the competition for jobs and global talent (Brown, Lauder, and Ashton 2011).
Yet equally important, we analyse instances where young people do not identify or comply with efforts to reduce them to economic actors or where predetermined ideas about learning, productive personhood and success do not match with complex local realities. Several articles illustrate how young people define their own conditions and explore possibilities for meaningful education, jobs and income through social relations with peers and the adults around them. Sumās contribution (2018) details studentsā frustrations with the quality of teaching in a Chinese elite university and their desires to remedy this situation through participation in extra-curricular activities as potential avenues for self-improvement, friendships, meaningful skills and social experiences. As these and other contributions in our special issue illustrate, young peopleās everyday tactics do not so much focus on resistance, but rather resilience and reworking (Katz 2004) of ideologies or contradictory situations over which they have little control, and this includes normative ātransition regimes.ā For example, Snellingerās analysis of the contradictory practices of entrepreneurship schemes in Nepal (2018) illustrates how young men are expected to demonstrate resilience and adaptability in order to overcome state neglect. Brown, Scrase, and Ganguly-Scrase (2017) show how young people try overcome the geographical marginalisation of their city, Darjeeling, alongside the impacts of globalisation and neoliberalism, through reworking education opportunities combined with migration in order to attempt to achieve their dreams. Taken together, these studies provide insights that will help to ādelink the strong association of aspirations with material wealth, educational qualifications and professional employment to explore the range of potential futures that children [young people] aspire to realiseā (Holloway, Brown, and Pimlott-Wilson 2011, 4, our insert). Indeed in the Viewpoints article on youthful politics in Taiwan Hsieh and Skelton (2018) show that young Taiwanese actively identify themselves with cultural values and lifestyle qua...
