Workshop with Mercator Fellow Vitor Sèrgio Ferreira „Precarious transitions and new “dream jobs” among young people“

The workshop is only for members of the research training group. Mercator Fellow Vitor Sèrgio Ferreira (University of Lisbon) will focuse the following topic:

Currently, young people are compelled to deal with the insecurity and polyvalence that increasingly punctuate their transitions from school to work, sometimes feeling some dissatisfaction with the more normative configurations of that paths. A virtuous relationship between type and level of education, profession, salary, and social status is no longer taken for granted. A degree no longer guarantees access and progression in a specific career, or even a job corresponding to the qualification obtained. And this is a reality that young people and their families are increasingly aware of. In many cases, this set of conditions leads young people to seek alternative pathways to the official routes between school, training, and work. In the current context of disbelief that an academic degree fulfills dreams of stability, employment, and social mobility, academic promises compete with promises mediated by other social contexts, such as youth cultures and celebrity cultures. Against this background, the operationalization of the concept of “playbor” (Törhönen, et al., 2020) is of extreme heuristic value to empirically and analytically explore the integration of two traditions in youth studies that live relatively apart: the youth cultures and the youth transitions approaches.