The subject of neoliberal affects: Rural youth envision their futures
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article contributes to debates about subjectivity formation in neoliberal times by analyzing the emotional geographies of students’ imagined futures. Drawing upon ethnographic research in a white, working‐class rural Ontario school, I examine students’ participation in The Real Game, a career education program that attempts to prepare grade 7/8 students for their adult futures. A curricular tool that espouses neoliberal tenets of flexibility, mobility, and self‐improvement, The Real Game offers a site through which to explore the interplay between governing discourses and student subjectivities. Bringing Ahmed's critique of happiness narratives to an analysis of student interviews, I demonstrate how neoliberal governance operates affectively. As educational discourses idealize the self‐reliant, future‐oriented subject, students are trained to internalize neoliberal uncertainty as a set of insecurities to be managed on an affective level. The distinctly spatial operation of neoliberalism is apparent in Fieldsville students’ future narratives, where dominant ideals of mobility conflict with local identifications and an allegiance to place. Students manage these pressures affectively, as they narrate their own movement and improvement through stories of hope, fear, and wonder. Thus, I argue that studies of the emotional geographies of education are integral to understanding how neoliberalism is lived in place.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it