Locality, mobility and labour market citizenship: reflections of Finnish vocational students in social services and health care

Abstract

In the current economic order, the basic duty of citizens is to find placements in the internationalising labour market. Internationalism has been a common educational objective throughout Europe. Previously associated as a feature of middle-class subjectivities and academic education, it is implemented in the agenda of vocational education as well. In this article, I analyse how vocational students in the Finnish educational context of social services and health care see their future in the presumed internationalising labour market. The analysis is based on three years’ ethnographic fieldwork in one vocational institute of social services and health care. The dataset consists of field notes, the interviews of students and teachers, and documents produced by the institution and organisations involved, and in this article five case studies are presented in order to make visible the multiple ways in which young people make sense of their placements in the global labour market. This analysis suggests that the imagined futures of the vocational students are mainly tied with the local context. However, the global labour market is involved and in some cases actively mobilised with their subject formations, and makes the negotiating between individual desires, resources, dependences and interdependences in everyday life even more complex than it used to be.