Alchemists of the Revolution? The Politics of Educated Unemployed Youth

An increase in individuals' investment in schooling combined with a shortage of salaried employment has created a crisis of educated unemployment, which, while far from new (see Dore 1976) became much more common, visible and intense in the 1990s and 2000s in Asia (Jha 2004), Africa (Mains 2007), and Latin America (Levinson 2002). Educational levels have risen rapidly. But since the 1980s, economic change has typically failed to generate white-collar jobs within manufacturing and services (Kaplinsky 2005). The result has been endemic unemployment and "underemployment": involuntary part-time work, intermittent unemployment, and/or involvement in poorly paid labour (Prause and Dooley 1997: 245). Educated unemployment has created widespread anomie and is commonly identified as a root cause of political uprisings in South Asia, as well as in the contemporary Arab World. But scholars know little about the varied and changing politics of educated unemployed youth. Our goals for the project are thus:

1. To provide one of the first ethnographic examinations of educated unemployed young people's political practices in South Asia - a region especially affected by youth joblessness - in order to contribute to literature on educated unemployed youth, civil society, education, globalisation, and "youth" as a political category.
2. To develop a new paradigm for analysing the political practices of youth: a culturally and organisationally sensitive political economy approach that examines durable social inequalities as well as surprising cross-class mobilisation.
3. To move beyond media stereotypes of youth -for example as "heroes" or "villains" - to publicise the diverse and changing roles played by educated unemployed young people in processes of democratic change and engage with non-academics on this topic.

We will achieve these goals by conducting a comparative ethnography of educated unemployed youth politics in north India, Nepal and Sri Lanka that will become a model for future research. We will work with three experienced Post-Doctoral Researchers: Dr. Jane Dyson will work in north India; Dr. Amanda Snellinger will carry out research in Nepal; and Dr. Dhana Wadugodapitiya will work in Sri Lanka. More senior academics will support the research of the PDRs: I will work with Dr. Jane Dyson; Professor Jonathan Spencer, a distinguished scholar working in Sri Lanka, will work with Wadugodapitiya; and Professor David Gellner, a leading authority on Nepal, will work with Snellinger.

The research team will produce a series of high quality academic publications, including a research monograph and over eight articles in top academic journals across geography, anthropology, development studies, area studies, and political science, as well as broader comparative journals. We will also disseminate our findings via conferences to be held in Delhi and Oxford. Through such academic outputs, the proposed study will go far beyond the "case" of educated unemployed young people, transforming scholarly understanding of unemployed young people, civil society, education, globalisation, and youth as a political category.

We will achieve our wider impact goals through a programme of dissemination, collaboration, and network-building aimed at enrolling diverse constituencies in South Asia and the UK into our research, including policymakers, the public, students, and our research informants. We will set up a website, blog, Facebook page, and Twitter account through which we will report on the project and invite comment. We will also produce newspaper articles and radio programmes in the UK and South Asia that disseminate our findings to the wider public. In addition, we will engage closely with NGOs, government officials, and ministers, through individual meetings and a conference in Delhi. We will also enrol our informants in the research process, for example via field workshops that we organise in each of the three main research sites.

Our project will benefit the following non-academic users:

1. The public. Through this project, we will improve public understanding of youth and politics in the global south by offering in-depth insights into the political practices of educated unemployed youth. We will move beyond media stereotypes of educated unemployed youth - for example as "the problem" or "panacea"- by charting in ethnographic detail how they navigate economic and political uncertainties.

We will achieve this goal by constructing a website, blog, Twitter account and Facebook page for the research; writing blogs on the London Review of Books and The Guardian; developing short insightful pieces for BBC Radio Four's From Our Own Correspondent; producing a documentary on educated unemployed youth in south Asia for BBC Radio Four; and collaborating with journalists in the publication of articles for local newspapers and South Asian newspapers and magazines (see Pathways to Impact for more details).

2. Local NGOs and government officials. Our research will benefit policymakers and practitioners by providing new material and insights on educated unemployed youth in markedly different social and political contexts. We will publicise out findings, seek feedback, and develop ideas for future policy with a range of NGOs and government officials (detailed in Pathways to Impact).
Prior to our field research we will construct a list of NGOs in our regions who are interested in issues around youth, unemployment and politics, and we will use this to expand our set of contacts. We will visit NGOs and officials during the main period of fieldwork. We will also invite interested parties to a research conference in Delhi. In the longer term, we seek to build lasting connections with policymakers and practitioners, for example through developing a field course in which students can do internships in local NGOs and through the production of action-oriented summaries of our research findings that NGOS and officials can act upon. We will also work to disseminate our findings and explore comparative opportunities with NGOs working with unemployed youth in thre UK (see Pathways to Impact for more detail).

3. Local people. Participants in our research will benefit from the project by being able to obtain in-depth material on how their own lives are related to those of people in other parts of South Asia and the world. In C. Wright Mills' (1959) terms, we will encourage young people to develop a "sociological imagination" wherein they compare and contrast their own experiences and strategies with those of young people in other settings. We will disseminate interim concluding statements at "field workshops" in each of our research areas. All those who participated in our research will be invited to these events, and we will encourage critical discussion of our ideas, methods, and analysis. We will also organise an international conference in Delhi on the politics of educated unemployed youth. In the long-term, we will produce an accessible, non-academic book on the individual lives of nine of our informants, which we will also arrange to be translated into South Asian languages. We will then provide copies of the book to all of our key informants in India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka.

4. Students. Students will benefit from this project by being able to take field-based courses on youth and politics in South Asia. We will design a course on this theme for Oxford University, and also link this to courses at Delhi University, Nepal Institute of Social Sciences and the Humanities, and Colombo University. In the longer term, we will introduce an outreach component into the courses we teach so that students can volunteer in local NGOs. We will also examine how we might introduce reciprocity into the Oxford field course, so that Indian students can come to the UK.