Paper short abstract:

How do private school students envision and prepare for possible futures of self and state in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq?

Paper long abstract:

This paper focuses on how young people at a Christian private school in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq mediate between their family histories, their anxieties about the political and economic crisis Kurdistan, and their aspirations for the future. I examine how genealogies of the "self" inform the identity-transformation projects of Kurdistani youth embedded in patrilineages, confessional groups, education programs, and the Kurdistani quasi-state. The school is a productive site for studying family histories and youth futures in flux: physical, ideological, or moral displacements variously constrain and enable Kurdistani youth to envision a good life. Many of the school's staff, teachers, and students are "in transit," whether as internally displaced people, as returnees from the Kurdish diaspora, or as potential emigrants. Additionally, the school uses a model of "liberal" education encouraging critical thinking and self-reflection, such that teachers and students frequently discuss how to shape trajectories for self and for nation. In Iraq, and in the Kurdistan Region also, the state, confessional groups, and families tightly regulate identity based on patrilineal kinship, in which a person at birth inherits the religious and ethnic identity of his or her father and is then expected by state and society alike to remain in that inherited ethnosectarian category for life. The private school, however, offers a space in which youth whose lives are otherwise characterized by stasis or displacement can experiment with mobilities and become emplaced in new regimes of power and moral visions.