Affectivity and aesthetic creations: social intervention with unqualified young adults

Abstract

Unqualified young adults who take part in second-chance education schemes face increasingly complex routes in entering the job market. As such, it is essential for professionals in socio-employment intervention to know these individuals’ expectations and their capacity for agency, in order to improve support. This article explores how these young adults adapt to a growing demand for qualifications that is excluding them from the working world. This exclusion, we conclude, is encouraging new forms of symbolic resistance, practised by young adults in social terms: the affective and the aesthetic. The author’s interest in these responses arises out of the increasing disorientation among professionals involved in education programmes. These professionals are unable to understand the diverging paths preferred by these young adults to the homogeneous routes offered to them for purposes of social integration. After analysing the adolescents’ artistic and aesthetic creations, we conclude that two factors stimulate their resistance to the limitations placed on their prospects for success. First, there is an institutional variable that indicates a planning of training itineraries that these young adults perceive as leading them toward under-qualification and into a precarious and unstable job market. Second, there is a resistance to this exclusion, drawing upon an imagined construct of success and social mobility belonging to a globalized youth.