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This article examines the ways in which educated yet unemployed young people attempt to configure ways of being productive in a small hill town in North India. Young people who do not migrate to large urban centres from this township are the subject of contradictory discourses: in some moments they are seen as an antidote to the ‘problem of migration’, but in other moments they are ridiculed for not making good use of their time. Both discourses suggest a present wherein young people are not productive. Drawing on ethnographic material gathered over a ten-month period, this article frames youth sociality as a mode registering a sense of productivity and navigating unemployment. I argue that while hanging out at a computer shop, young men were distancing themselves from notions of idling and creating masculine youth cultures in which they sought to situate themselves as productive young people. I make this argument by unpacking exchanges between these young men and by analysing the tangible ways they helped the shop function. I also draw debates about youth sociality into dialogue with theoretical insights from rural geography to illuminate how educated youth attempt to imbue rural and peri-urban space with new possibilities. I show how educated youth attempt to reanimate rural space and forge affirmative rural futures by emphasizing their connections with Indian modernity. Attending to the ways in which educated yet unemployed youth attempt to situate themselves within productive relations is set to become of increasing importance given the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.

This article critiques productivist and wage-centric conceptualisations of labour by analysing the labouring practices of jobless degree holders in the Indian Himalayas. I draw on ethnographic material to illuminate how young men developed forms of unpaid labour that centred skills associated with their educational credentials. Educated youth were able to produce positive reputations through their labour and made sense of their activities as making a social contribution to others. Yet their labouring practices also affirmed dominant modes of masculinity and reinscribed patriarchal gender relations. While jobless degree holders were excluded from the kinds of jobs they desired, I argue that they were able to yield status and respect by embodying competencies that white collar jobs demanded. Situating jobless degree holders within productive relations creates scope for illuminating how they attempt to assert their productive capacities in the face of long-term unemployment.

A significant about of educational research has foregrounded the challenges international students face while living learning abroad. While “challenge centric” research has been productive for highlighting the needs of international students, it has tended to reify international students as a vulnerable group in need of intervention. This approach has often downplayed international students’ agency and has not fully moved beyond the boundaries of deficit thinking. This article discusses the implications of framing international students as a vulnerable group before offering some conceptual starting points that might orient future research in more productive directions. It suggests that foregrounding the agency of international students offers a promising mode of reanimating research, and briefly discusses the methodological, conceptual, and political implications of doing so.

This paper draws on ethnographic material to analyse how unemployed youth create work in the private educational sector. It shows how a set of educated young men, who moved from rural areas to a north Indian city to find work, are seeking to create jobs after an extended period of unemployment. Having attended coaching clinics and private tuition centres to prepare for white-collar jobs, they draw on the experience, knowledge, and skills they have gained to create work in those same institutions. They do so by running errands and creating services for institutions, as well as undertaking administrative duties and teaching classes. Our main argument is that young men creatively engage with notions of enterprise to make an income and acquire a measure of respect. Studies of enterprise culture and neoliberal subjectivity formation often emphasise how individuals shore up their own value by competing with others and promoting their own interests. But we highlight how youth also maintain their value by making sense of their strategies in terms of assisting other young people. At the same time, however, their practises work to reproduce gender norms and class inequalities.

Increasing numbers of young people are migrating across the Global South to pursue tertiary education and find employment. In north India, though, as elsewhere, migrants are often unable to realize...

Utilising qualitative research methods and drawing upon theories of social reproduction, this article examines how ethnicity intersects with students’ experiences of education in Darjeeling. The research explores how young men’s aspirations articulate their ethnic identity and their associated political demands. It shows how ethnicities are fostered within friendship groups on college campuses and also discusses young men’s criticisms of the Gorkhaland movement, offering a nuanced and textured account of ethnic struggles in this area. It is shown that young men draw upon education to develop ethnic identities that bridge caste divides and conceal class inequalities. The research sheds new light on how ethnicities are constructed amid the tensions of globalisation and regionalism, education and development.

This article explores the meanings that lower middle class male youth ascribe to education in Dehradun, the capital city of the north Indian state of Uttarakhand. By utilising qualitative research methods it highlights the contradictory nature of these meanings: young men are ambivalent toward education when discussing their experiences, yet optimistic when idealising education and imagining their futures. By interpreting these viewpoints through the theoretical framework of Pierre Bourdieu, I argue that these meanings reflect social, political and economic change in general and contradictions embedded in the education system in particular. While education has historically been used by the Indian middle classes to realise advantage and consolidate privilege, development discourses conceptualise it as a means of achieving social justice and realising equality. Struggles over the meaning education have important social implications for lower middle class young men: although they are excluded from education which they consider to be worthwhile, their discontent is mediated by hegemonic understandings of education. Highlighting these contradictory meanings can be seen as an important contribution to debates about education, development and the Indian middle classes.