Paper short abstract:

This paper looks at the complex interplay between educational systems, neoliberal politics and the students strategies in imagining a future through their schooling experience in neoliberal urban Portugal.

Paper long abstract:

Education has been approached as a locus for the production and reproduction of social, political and economic subjects. Social mobility, development and the maintenance of cohesive political communities are seen as dependent on the shaping and re-shaping of educational systems. Our research focus on representations about the future from students at the end of compulsory education that have experienced the schooling process amidst what we regard as a neoliberal reconfiguration of the educative system. We consider the educational communities of public schools in Almada, a large post-industrial town in Lisbon Metropolitan Area, and the Portuguese national education system. Therefore, the research comprises an ethnography in the transitional moments between compulsory education and the productive integration of students in society: from the aspirations, strategies and projects of the individuals to those of the state (Baumann et al, 2004, Stahl, 2016). This paper analyses the production of a neoliberal ontology through education and school practices and its relation with future aspirations and the design of life projects or state policies. As we investigate how the agents produce representations of a future, we ask how do these dialogue with concepts of work and money and the domain of fantasy. Hence, we enquire about the emergence of new forms of subjectivity both as a consequence of the schooling process and of negotiations between agents and institutions in a neoliberal context.