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Paper short abstract:

'Poverty of Aspiration' suggests people living in poverty lack ability to hope or work toward a future, passing responsibility onto parents and children rather than institutions and structures. Counterpoint is offered here via children's auto-ethnography on nostalgia, hope and transformations.

Paper long abstract:

'Poverty of Aspiration' suggests that people living in poverty, "whether because of "[b]ehavioural biases or internal constraints such as myopia [or]lack of willpower" also lack ability to hope or work toward a future. This idea has been heavily critiqued in recent years because it passes responsibility for a presumed lack of aspirations onto parents and children, shifting responsibility away from government and schools. In attempts to move this debate beyond political and economic rhetoric, I focus here on how pre-teens conceive of 'present' and related horizons via ethnography created in the Anthropology By Children (ABC) project. The children's photovoice work discusses abstractions including 'nostalgia' and 'future' alongside their more immediate demands for replacement of broken playground slides, better social integration between year groups, and aims to create their own YouTube channels, undermining tropes of ambition-failure and unsettling preconceptions of what aspiration is and performs.

In Lambek's definition of horizons, "acting in the present always supposes orientations with respect to past and future […]They are outer limits but they are not limitations." Glissant offers a specific Imaginary: how each sociality perceives and conceives of 'world', including the mute possibilities of deep intergenerational pain. The children's audio-photographic archives speak to both: their challenges in Britain 'now' while looking forward to transformation. Rather than focusing on grand narratives of imaginary-horizonal thinking, I foreground small moments, reflecting on how hope renders visible to students unimagined pathways, connecting existing potential with practical conduits, providing alternate views on valuation and aspiration of young British people.