Inciting youth mobilities: insights from an elite university scholarship program

Abstract

ABSTRACTHigher education is imbued with discourses which promise young graduates the ability to be globally mobile actors capable of securing numerous market goods as well as contributing to the public good. These discourses are amplified by elite university scholarship programs which aim to foster economic and cultural leaders while adopting a highly exclusive process in selecting their participants. Drawing on ideas of youth geographies and mobilities, we foreground the experiences and aspirations of eight students involved in one such program in a large Australian university to reflect on how they navigate the incitement to become a global actor and the costs or complexities of becoming that actor. We conclude by arguing that more critical understandings need to be brought to the growing geographic mobility of young people in pursuit of, and as a product of, their higher education.