Young People’s Hopes and Aspirations in a ‘Clever and Creative’ City During the Time of COVID-19

Abstract In this paper, we draw on the outcomes of a longitudinal, video-based study (2021–2023) of 40 + young people’s aspirations and their education, training and employment pathways in the regional centre of Geelong (Australia) — a ‘deindustrialising’ place being rebranded as ‘clever and creative’. In these contexts, there is much community, business and policy concern to develop the hopes and aspirations of disadvantaged young people for the jobs that will characterise ‘clever and creative’ futures. Many of these concerns focus on the production of an idealised, abstract ‘figure’ (Haraway 2008; Threadgold 2020) of the ‘aspirational young person’. Our aim, in part, is to unsettle these abstract ‘truths’ about young people and their hopes and aspirations by presenting a version of the stories of two young people, James and Emilie, who were interviewed in the first and second year of this project during 2021 and 2022. Drawing on posthumanist and feminist studies of techno-science, we will argue that young people’s hopes and aspirations are more productively understood as being shaped by a range of human and non-human others, in multispecies ‘entanglements’ (Haraway 2016), and as emerging from the embodied, affective dimensions of historical disadvantage and crisis that are reproduced in neo-liberal capitalist economies.