Paper short abstract:

Drawing both on my fieldwork in academic career services and my experience in teaching anthropology, my paper shows how addressing the economic fears of students might help them to understand why they feel insufficient and to develop a critical perspective of social power relations.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing both on my fieldwork in German academic career services and my experience in teaching anthropology, my paper addresses the economic fears of students. I will show how my research findings shape how I teach anthropology. I try to unsettle taken-for-granted ideas about self, society and the job market as well as to reflect on the students own fears.

I will begin my paper by showing how academic career services try to enhance the "employability" of their clients while promoting ideals of self-government, self-marketing and self-reliance. Fearing to fail economically, students try to conform to these discourses and begin to rethink themselves along the lines of their marketable assets. Instead of relating economic problems to societal reasons or the lack of social capital, they feel insufficient and tend to blame themselves for not being economically successful.

In my teaching of anthropology, especially in my current course about precarious work I encourage the students to challenge these so called market-requirements as taken-for-granted ideas. To enhance the students ability to be critical and their sensitivity I use exercises promoting self-reflection, critical reading of ethnographic texts and ethnographic interviews. By focusing on the students themselves rather than on "others" or "objective" measures of economic success "in the real world out there", we might help students of anthropology to understand why they feel insufficient and to develop a critical perspective of social power relations.