What it means to be studying against the grain of neoliberalism in a community-based university programme in a 'disadvantaged area'
- Authors: Smyth, John , Harrison, Tim
- Date: 2015
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Journal of Educational Administration and History Vol. 47, no. 2 (2015), p. 155-173
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- Description: Australia is indicative of a country that is deeply confused and conflicted around a policy discourse of inclusion that is sutured within an existential context heavily committed to the tenets of neoliberalism. Nowhere is this more evident than in the case of higher education, in which the proportion of young people from backgrounds of 'disadvantage' has remained implacably stuck at around 15% for several decades. The research from which this paper comes is an innovative community-based university-provided programme for young people for whom university education was never a realistic possibility - because of family histories, interruption to their lives, of having undertaken forms of secondary education that prevented them from gaining university entrance qualification, or who had terminated their education before completing the secondary years of schooling. This paper explores the story of one young person in his first year in a university programme, as he struggled with obstacles and impediments of a higher education system and set of neoliberal policy discourses that remain deeply sceptical and antagonistic to his trajectory. © 2015 Taylor & Francis.
Emplacing young people in an Australian rural community : An extraverted sense of place in times of change
- Authors: Farrugia, David , Smyth, John , Harrison, Tim
- Date: 2014
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Journal of Youth Studies Vol. 17, no. 9 (2014), p. 1152-1167
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- Description: This paper explores the identities of young people in an Australian rural town in relation to contemporary discussions of place and social change. The paper responds to dominant narratives in youth studies which position individualised, reflexive subjectivities at the centre of a homogeneous, placeless modernity with an emplaced analysis of contemporary youth identities. Young people's narratives reveal an attachment to place created in community activities and day to day farm life, articulated in the language of the ‘rural idyll’. Narratives about imagined future lives articulate classed and gendered competencies and dispositions acquired in and through place, reflexively mobilised in life planning practices. Therefore, whilst substantial social changes are reshaping youth identities across rural places, young people's responses to these changes are forged in the way that identities are emplaced, as well as articulated in reflexive orientations towards their future lives. © 2014, © 2014 Taylor & Francis.