H.03. Assembled Youths: Complex Biographies and Educational Trajectories For Uncertain Futures

This panel critically explores young students' biographies, learning and educational trajectories from critical approaches that place relationality, socio-materiality and inequality at the center, understanding young people’s processes of subjectivation as assembled within networks of relations and power asymmetries influencing their everyday lives and educational pathways.

Such relations are produced through the interaction between young students and different dimensions of the social life, such as institutional dynamics (i.e. schools and education policy) and territories (the spatial horizons of young people), and social structures addressed through socioeconomic, cultural, and gender axes of analysis (Threadgold, 2018). This makes youth trajectories deeply embedded in contexts of structural and institutional injustice.

Those relational dynamics constitute sociomaterial assemblages (Youdell & Armstrong, 2011) that are as productive as they are restrictive in shaping young people’s opportunities and constraints across unequal territorial contexts.Their past, present and future are rooted institutionally, socially and territorially and shaped by different national and international policy landscapes (Farrugia, 2013).

The panel seeks to reflect on the ways in which biographies, learning trajectories and educational transitions are relationally and structurally produced, addressing how different forms of affect influence such life courses, but also how the agency, identities and aspirations of young people actively co-constitute these processes within unequal socio-material conditions (Ball et al. 2013).

Young people’s forms of identity and agency, while socio-materially produced, may take different forms of resistance to neoliberal pathways of precariousness, challenging reproductive patterns and illuminating how injustice is experienced, negotiated and sometimes contested in their educational lives.