Venue: Seminar Room, Australia India Institute, The University of Melbourne
Presenters: Viresh Patel
How do the aspirations of rural youth in contemporary India differ from older generations? To what extent are they able to live out their hopes for the future? This talk will focus on the everyday strategies of young men and women in India's westernmost state of Gujarat, paying particular attention to the fields of education, work, and marriage. With 356 million young people aged between 10-24 years, India's youth population is the world's greatest. The liberalisation of higher education across the country has engendered a wave of first-generation college goers from rural, lower caste, and lower class backgrounds. Yet paradoxically, whilst access to education in India among formerly marginalised communities has increased, the economic value of education has diminished. Thus young people living rurally find themselves navigating a precarious social and economic landscape, one that is markedly different to that of their parents' generation. In this talk I draw on 11 months of ethnographic research in order to interrogate the nature of social and generational change in rural India. Using a series of vignettes, I highlight the socially differentiated ways in which contemporary Indian youth are negotiating varying levels of personal, familial, and societal hopes and expectations.
Viresh Patel is a final year PhD Candidate in Human Geography at the University of Oxford.
from
https://events.unimelb.edu.au/events/6550-navigating-uncertainty-everyday-youth-strategies-and-generational-change-in-rural
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