Abstract
The present research analyzes the mobilities of young people from the periphery of Rio de Janeiro towards a renowned university situated in a central region of the city. Focusing on a case study with four students, we carried out an in-depth investigation of the dynamics of their professional trajectories. Their personal identifications and values, their future career expectations and the pressures and the demands of attending such a university were investigated. Three focus groups meetings were organized with these students. The results show that the displacement from home to the university, social and racial segregation, and arduous academic demands are factors that pose enormous difficulties to these students and require intense psychological work on their part to persist in their educational investment. Intense conflicts with regards to living up to their ideals characterize an agonistic pathway in their educational endeavor. On the other hand, the prestige of the university, family influence and the belief in upward social mobility were found to support these young people’s decision not to give up. This contradictory dynamic, riddled with uncertainties, mobilizes these young people to find a way to permanently renovate their personal stakes in higher education.
Highlights
In this study, we analyzed how young people from the peripheral areas of the city of Rio de Janeiro construct their career and educational expectations as they attempt an educational movement towards a prestigious university
Our analysis focuses both on what the internal psychological labour carried out by young people to meet the demands imposed by the university consists of and what are the relevant aspects that contribute to sustain this movement towards a renowned educational institution
The physical displacement towards the university, the first-time experience with higher education studies, and even the social distance between scholarship and non-scholarship students were some of the adversities mentioned by the young people when attending an educational institution whose history has targeted the middle and upper class students
Summary
We analyzed how young people from the peripheral areas of the city of Rio de Janeiro construct their career and educational expectations as they attempt an educational movement towards a prestigious university. Recent public policies have expanded student enrollment vacancies in higher education, contributing for tertiary education to emerge in the horizon of lower income young people’s possibilities, often coming from urban peripheries These new educational mobilities take place within a contradictory dynamic, as they combine the impoverished and peripheral settings from where the young people originate and the valued well-off spaces which they attend. In this direction, Farrugia (2014) argues that locality is a factor that entails unequal experiences for young people, as different locations provide different possibilities and courses of action We can see this dynamic in Jensen’s study (2006) in which the author surveyed middle-class urban youths in Copenhagen to show how these young people understood mobility as a right that they exercised when moving around the city. We scrutinize the subjectively experienced contradictions and conflicts that emerge as these young students enroll in this educational institution, and how their expectations develop towards their future professional life as they participate in this institution
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Schedule a callMore From: Canadian Journal of Family and Youth / Le Journal Canadien de Famille et de la Jeunesse
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