Parents, permission, and possibility

Young women, college, and imagined futures in Gujarat, India

Bibliographic Data

ID8944286
AuthorsViresh Patel (0000-0001-8047-350X, University of Oxford, corresponding author)
Year2017
Volume80
Pages39-48
Publication date2017-01-23
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueGeoforum (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0016-7185 • E-ISSN: 1872-9398
PublisherElsevier BV (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1016/j.geoforum.2017.01.008
OpenAlexW2582827990
LanguageEN
Citations received19
References cited66

This article advances critical geographies of youth through examining the spatiality implicit in the imagined futures of young women in rural India. Geographers and other scholars of youth have begun to pay more attention to the interplay between young people’s past, present, and imagined futures. Within this emerging body of scholarship the role of the family and peer group in influencing young people’s orientations toward the future remain underexamined. Drawing on eleven months of ethnographic fieldwork, my research focuses on a first generation of college-going young women from socioeconomically marginalized backgrounds in India’s westernmost state of Gujarat. I draw on the “possible selves” theoretical construct in order to deploy a flexible conceptual framework that links imagined post-educational trajectories with motivation to act in the present. In tracing the physical movement of these young women as they navigate and complete college, my analysis highlights the ways in which particular kinds of spaces and spatial arrangements facilitate and limit intra- and inter-generational contact, and the extent to which this affects young women’s conceptions of the future. I conclude by considering the wider implications of my research for ongoing debates surrounding youth transitions, relational geographies of age, and education in the Global South

Construct (python library · Disadvantaged · Economic growth · Ethnography · Futures contract · Scholarship · Sociology · Anthropology · Children's Rights and Participation · Gender Studies · Rural development and sustainability · Youth Education and Societal Dynamics

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