Paper short abstract:

This paper explores a two-year comparative ethnography of schooling in inner-city London and New York City. Using the concept of quantum personhood, I focus on how secondary school students give meaning to their lives, providing a critique of ‘aspiration’ as a framework for imagining the future..

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the findings of a two-year comparative ethnography of schooling in inner city London and New York City, focusing on how final-year secondary school students give meaning to their imaginings of the future. I present a series of ethnographic vignettes that elucidate the multiple and contingent nature of futurity imagined by the young people in the ethnography, with examples of the ideas, opportunities and constraints that shape the futures that they hope to inhabit. This involves a comparative analysis of the similar and divergent ideological framings of the future that emerge in schooling in the post-financial crisis cityscapes of London and New York. I present this alongside an account of how young people make sense of and shape these ideologies to fit the realities of their own precarious and uncertain lives, and often in conditions of considerable disadvantage. Using the novel concept of quantum personhood, I draw on metaphorical language and imagery from quantum physics to provide a critique of the ways in which 'aspiration' is presented as a coherent framework for young people to imagine the future. The future-gazing nature of everyday life in these schools provides a rich array of ethnographic examples that show the complex tensions inherent to quantum reckonings of personhood. I show how for these young people the future is conjured, electron-like, in relational, contingent and multiple ways, within but also beyond the boundaries of a more coherent, unilinear imagining of how persons make sense of their existence in space and time.