Conclusions

Chapter Six connects the empirical analysis back to broader conceptual debates about youth, aspiration, and mobility and thus highlights the relevance of this research with a group of young people largely overlooked by scholars and policymakers. Through an in-depth analysis of young people’s time-space-strategies and their current positions within existing socio-spatial hierarchies, this book develops an understanding of young people’s expressions of agency in such a way as to move beyond restrictive stereotypes of youth. It also provides new perspectives on the limitations and the potential of politics of aspiration-building and throws light on the significance of spatial (im)mobility for people’s life chances.

Confronting the Present

Chapter Four unpacks the decisions that students made in relation to their university studies. Drawing on the concept of ‘vital conjunctures’, it investigates to what extent students identified with somewhat stereotypical images projected onto the public university campus and explains how educated young Nepalis tried to negotiate numerous competing social pressures on an everyday basis. In an effort to comply with established notions of female and male respectability, the students made use of the campus in different and often unexpected ways. In shifting the focus of the analysis onto the reasons behind students’ absence from and presence on campus, the chapter calls attention to the spatial dimension of young people’s agency and, in so doing, advances our conceptual understanding of vital conjunctures of youth.

Putting Down Roots to Move On

Chapter Five moves the focus away from the campus onto other spaces around which students’ daily lives were structured. A close analysis of students’ occupational situations reveals that these young people were acutely aware of the difficulties involved in their attempts to carve out lucrative careers. It is argued that public discourses about the role of educated youth in Nepali society were part of this problem, as they tended to reinforce polarising depictions of youth as the panacea for and a menace to a prosperous future. Precisely because students’ efforts to ‘do good’ were much more low-key than prevalent representations of youth suggest, the contributions these young people made to the wider social good were largely overlooked. Modest appropriations of dominant educational and occupational strategies, however, allowed these young people to develop a sense of themselves as competent people and enabled them to maintain positive outlooks on life.

Fashioning the Future

Chapter Three explores the potential and limitations that educated young Nepalis associated with their university studies. Changes in the composition of the student body indicate that a growing number of students from social groups previously not represented at university now obtain academic credentials. Their participation in higher education gives reason to hope for a more socially just and prosperous future. In order to take full advantage of new educational opportunities, young people often felt compelled to relocate to the capital city or to go abroad. For the majority of these students, however, certain educational pathways associated with an upper social status remained out of reach. In identifying a number of social influences and structural constraints, which powerfully shaped young people’s educational trajectories and related future orientations, the findings presented in this chapter allow for a critically engagement with the concept of the ‘capacity to aspire’.

Preparing for the Future

Chapter Two situates the lives of Nepalis born in the 1980s within the history of the modern Nepali state and its ties to regional and global developments. Drawing on existing literature, it is argued that Nepal’s educated younger generation was seen to be particularly well prepared to take advantage of a range of new opportunities associated with educational expansion, a changing labour market, and international migration. Yet, these large-scale structural changes also caused much uncertainty, since long-established life paths were increasingly obscured. Educated young Nepalis, therefore, often struggled to reconcile pervasive discourses about a better future with the realities of their present-day lives in Kathmandu. The analysis presented in this chapter makes evident that the relevant debate about young people’s agency continues to revolve around dualistic categorizations, not least because it remains focused on specific subgroups of youth.

Moving from Present to Future

Chapter One locates this research conducted with public university students in Kathmandu within the conceptual debate on the role of youth in processes of social change. In bringing together different strands of research on youth, aspiration, and mobility, the chapter identifies important changes in the ways in which social scientists have thought about and, increasingly, have worked with young people in the twentieth and the twenty-first century. The discussion also shows that researchers have approached questions about young people’s agency from a rather narrow angle, as they have primarily studied instances in which young people are involved in acts of resistance or the creation of value, often in response to situations of adversity. Existing theorizations of youth agency, therefore, tend to reproduce rather than scrutinize pervasive visions of youth as agents of change and as a source of hope for a better future. In order to provide a new perspective, the conceptual approach adopted pays close attention to the varied nature of youth agency.