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Paper short abstract

Centring young Nepali women’s experiences of busyness, waiting and stuckedness as they dream of and labour towards a mobile future as flight attendant, this paper attunes to the question of how to carry on if what one desires remains out of reach despite the time, money and labour already invested.

Paper long abstract

What kind of dreams variously positioned young women can weave (Nep. sapanā bunnu) has been changing over the past few decades in Nepal. Drawing on ethnographic research on young women’s quest for mobility and hopeful futures in Kathmandu, this paper attunes to the question of how to carry on if what one dreams about remains out of reach or seems to keep moving further away despite the time, money and labour already invested. To this end, I explore temporal experiences and rhythms of intense busyness, waiting and stuckedness as they are experienced by young women with a high school degree who dream about and labour towards a mobile future following their training at private cabin crew institutes with the aim of becoming flight attendants.

Many trainees whom I accompanied in the months and years after their training during various phases of their job search, a time initially characterized by hopeful anticipation for the future, eventually need to grapple with the fact that their dream of social and spatial mobility – epitomized by the image of flying for an international airline – remains unattainable. The acceleration and deceleration of time, I will show, appears to be at the heart of experiencing an existential sense of immobility while holding on to the dream of flying and coming to terms with low-level service jobs in the meanwhile. Finally, even after landing a supposedly dream job as a flight attendant, a deep sense of immobility might persist and shape everyday working life.