The emergence of large numbers of educated unemployed people across the world remains a major social challenge. Research on unemployed young people has tended to emphasise a lack of agency. Many studies depict jobless youth as aimless and detached from their social and spatial situation. This paper uses an account of the practices of educated unemployed young people in Uttar Pradesh, North India, to challenge this depiction. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in 2004/2005 and 2022/2023 in Meerut City, by the first author and second author, respectively, the paper documents the capacity of jobless youth to adapt to employment scarcity over the first quarter of the twenty-first century. In 2004/2005 young people were often involved in cultures of waiting and passing time. Eighteen years later educated unemployed young people were much more focused on preparing for government employment. This adaptation has occurred in part through young people developing so-called 'libraries' across Meerut, which offer spaces in which they can study, socialise and 'prepare' ('taiyari') for government admissions tests. In documenting a shift in young people's activity and agency, the paper makes three contributions to wider human geographical work. First, it highlights a need to consider how non-elite sections of society can come to develop social agency over time. Second, the paper illuminates the potential of supplementary educational initiatives to serve as geographies of support. Finally, the paper discusses the value of long-term research in a single place that can connect social change to shifting strategies on the ground.

There has been a rise globally of concern among young people with issues of survival, life, and viability. This paper introduces the Special Issue on Viable Youth Futures at the Journal of Youth Studies. It sets out the conceptual underpinning of the special issue and summarises the papers included in the collection.

This paper draws on one year of field research by the primary author in Gopeshwar, North India, to discuss how young men develop ideas of personality development in a university setting. We argue that the young men studied here followed an agenda of developing entrepreneurial selves that differed from pedagogies of neoliberal enterprise in other parts of India. Contrary to widespread calls to overcome provincialism, young men in Gopeshwar tended to arrange their pedagogical programmes around cultural practices that they considered to be 'authentically' regional, especially through emphasising regional sociality, the Garhwali language, and spirit possession as a means of cultivating entrepreneurial selves.

This paper examines the everyday efforts of a young man in rural Uttarakhand to develop success within the market economy. It draws on ethnographic field research over a twenty-year period in the North Indian village of Bemni to highlight how apparently 'individualistic' efforts to acquire success typically depend on the mobilisation of social resources, an idea we develop through the concept of 'collaborative neoliberalism'. We also highlight the importance of religious and cultural practice and the complex geographies of young people's efforts to achieve success. In addition, we highlight the value of a long-term perspective on mobility, and the significance of particularly intense periods of collaborative practice in addressing 'blockages' in people's strategies to seek economic success.

Scholars have increasingly paid attention to addressing food insecurity and environmental concerns through redistributing surplus food. Some scholars argue that surplus food initiatives may inadvertently reinforce existing structures that generate food waste and, to some extent, reproduce social inequalities and the power of corporate entities. However, there have been relatively few studies of whether and how surplus food initiatives provide value in people's lives. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted with volunteers participating in Food Centre, an Australian university-based food initiative redistributing 'rescued' groceries, this study highlights the value of surplus food initiatives and how young people interpret them. While young people were sceptical about these initiatives for their potential to reproduce existing inequalities, they also suggested that such initiatives offered spaces for learning and socialising. Firstly, the surplus food initiative provided a space for students to ease some of the emotions they felt while accessing food relief. Participants also viewed the Food Centre as a platform for disseminating practical knowledge on recycling and reshaping societal perceptions of waste, aligning with their ethical commitments. In addition, the food rescue initiative provided a social space for young people to build community. Thus, surplus food redistribution schemes may not unsettle dominant food systems, but they might provide meaning to marginalised young people.

This paper uses field research conducted in Himachal Pradesh in 2021-2022 to analyse the efforts of Kinnauri young people to critique and address social and environmental crises in their region. The expansion of capitalism, poor governance, and climate change are contributing to major environmental loss and social crises in Kinnaur, Himachal Pradesh. Young people with origins in the region are becoming important in critiquing this process, especially at the everyday level and through social media. They focus especially on how Kinnauri 'existence' has been 'hollowed out' and fragmented through social and environmental change. At the same time, Kinnauri young people seek to repopulate and integrate 'existence', especially through identifying particular symbols - or metonyms - that express the possibility for recuperating social and environmental life. In making these points, we offer a case study in how a marginalised indigenous community is actively and creatively responding to capitalist intensification and climate change through building new viabilities.

Many minoritised and marginalised populations, including young people, are debating what constitutes a ‘survivable life’ and, in turn, how life can be arranged so that it is more than just survival. Notwithstanding these trends, however, there is little scholarly work on local discourses and practices of life and viability. This paper addresses this gap by examining the spatial and temporal process through which young people imagine and build viable lives in an area of the Indian Himalayas. We highlight the importance for these young people of building life as ‘ jeevan ’, an idea particularly associated with survival. We also highlight the significance they attach to protecting a wider, ‘ puri life ’ (‘whole life’), a process that affords opportunities for enjoyment and ethical fulfilment beyond survival. This account of life thought ‘on the ground’ provides a basis for reflecting on Agamben's (Homo sacer: Sovereign power and bare life. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press; 1998) arguments about the prevalence of ‘bare life’ in the contemporary world.

This paper examines the social action of young people in the north Indian village of Bemni, drawing on field research over a 20 year period. We argue that a cohort of young people in Bemni in the period 2004-2014 tended to focus on key issues of survival in their social action, what they often termed 'lifelines', related especially to infrastructure and schooling. A second cohort of young people involved in social action between 2015 and 2022 combined this focus with a concentration on issues of social inequality and ethical questions of how to sustain the social, environmental and spiritual/cultural fabric of their village. Building viability in this context involves simultaneously 'thinking in' to reflect on core issues of survival and 'thinking out' to consider how to integrate this quest for survival in relation to broader ethical concerns about society and cultural/spiritual practice.

Student food insecurity has been a major social problem across the world. Building on interview-based research, this paper examines students' experiences of food insecurity in Melbourne during the Covid-19 pandemic and associated lockdowns. It places particular emphasis on young people's agency and students' 'relational' understanding of food insecurity. Students experienced food insecurity in relation to other domains of life, such as work and health. In addition, students understood food insecurity in relation to how they are positioned with respect to axes of social inequality and in relation to a wider food system. In developing these points, we offer reflection on ground-level social action and relationality relevant to geographical and wider social science understanding of progressive food activism.

Scholars are increasingly rethinking the urban, the rural, and the urban–rural binary. This article advances understanding of rural and urban imaginaries through examining how young people in a village in north India develop practices that they regard as “urban” to protect rural futures. Young adults (aged eighteen to thirty) in the village of Bemni, Uttarakhand, develop urban-style educational facilities and agricultural practices as well as performances of gender empowerment imagined as urban with a view to improving the functioning of their village and preventing migration to cities. Through analyzing these practices of “selective urbanism,” we point to the production of ideas of urbanism and rurality beyond the metropolitan and large city regions usually studied and the importance especially of the performance of urban fragments in people’s conceptions of rural futures. We also examine how value is attached to ideas of the rural and urban and how people deploy as well as problematize the rural–urban binary.

What is a viable life? This paper addresses this question with reference to viability as a concept and young people’s social action across the world. The notion of viability offers a framework for examining how young people ‘think across’ different domains of life – such as education, work, environment, politics and cultural practice – and develop ecosystems of practice that connect these domains together. In addition, the concept of viability draws attention to the alternative nature of these ecosystems of practice – how young people commonly use these ecosystems to ‘think against’ dominance – and how they also ‘think out’ to produce new ideas.

This article uses long-term research in rural Uttarakhand, north India, to intervene in anthropological debates on agency. In the period between the early 2000s and late 2010s, many young women in the village of Bemni successfully sought opportunities to pursue their own goals. We highlight the manner in which young women's agency is 'reformist'. This term is useful, in part, because it directs attention to the subtle and persistent nature of young women's action. Reformist agency also spotlights how operating within a set of norms can, in the long term, change those norms. At a broader and more diffuse level, we find that the idea of reformist agency is helpful in simultaneously connoting conformism and a measure of creativity. We also advance existing studies by highlighting one quite novel way in which reformist agency can work, via young women moving iteratively between acquiescing to patriarchal norms and pushing the boundaries of acceptable practice.

This paper uses an examination of prefigurative politics – popularly imagined as ‘being the change you wish to see’ – to reflect on geographies of the future. We argue that prefigurative politics, which has become common since the mid-1990s, typically proceeds through multiple forms of improvisation. Successful prefigurative politics is usually institutionalised within organisations and movements and reshapes practices, discourses, and structures of power. We demonstrate how a focus on prefigurative politics can inform scholarship on the ‘anticipatory politics’ associated with dominant institutions and geographies of the future more broadly by highlighting ways in which people seek to enact visions of the future and illustrating the impact of these oppositional practices of future making. We argue that prefigurative politics could be a springboard for investigating means-ends alignment as a characteristic of political action and the present as a terrain of politics.

This paper draws on ethnographic material to analyse how unemployed youth create work in the private educational sector. It shows how a set of educated young men, who moved from rural areas to a north Indian city to find work, are seeking to create jobs after an extended period of unemployment. Having attended coaching clinics and private tuition centres to prepare for white‐collar jobs, they draw on the experience, knowledge, and skills they have gained to create work in those same institutions. They do so by running errands and creating services for institutions, as well as undertaking administrative duties and teaching classes. Our main argument is that young men creatively engage with notions of enterprise to make an income and acquire a measure of respect. Studies of enterprise culture and neoliberal subjectivity formation often emphasise how individuals shore up their own value by competing with others and promoting their own interests. But we highlight how youth also maintain their value by making sense of their strategies in terms of assisting other young people. At the same time, however, their practises work to reproduce gender norms and class inequalities.

Scholars are increasingly emphasizing the contradictory nature of schooling's social effects, often blending Sen's (2000) insights on education's empowering role with critical sociological work on schooling and inequality (e.g. Majumdar and Mooij, 2011; Morarji, 2014). This paper advances this literature through examining shifts in girls' education in Bemni, Uttarakhand, India. The paper draws on two periods of ethnographic research - in 2003-2004 and between 2012 and 2017 - as a means of tracking long-term changes in the nature of the contradictions that young women experience. In the 1990s and early 2000s there was a marked increase in girls' primary schooling in this village and Uttarakhand more broadly. But girls were largely excluded from secondary school, and patriarchal assumptions regarding women's work remained largely unchallenged. By 2012, however, young women were participating in secondary education, seeking paid employment, and felt empowered by their schooling. Nevertheless, key challenges remained. Educated women experienced underemployment, relegation into less favoured university courses, and difficulties navigating marriage markets. In making these points, the paper underlines the value of holding the theoretical ideas of Sen (2000) alongside critical approaches to education, but it goes beyond existing work on the contradictions of education in two key ways. First, it highlights the experiences and voices of young women in the rural Global South, about whom there is currently a dearth of substantive material. I show that the contradictions associated with education among young women are sometimes different to those experienced by men in similar settings (e.g. Jeffrey et al., 2008; Mains, 2012). Second, I argue that the contradictions associated with education can change over time within a single location - an observation that emerges from longitudinal ethnographic research of the type showcased here.

This article uses ethnographic research conducted in Bemni, a village in Uttarakhand, north India, to make a distinctive contribution to geographies of love. Building on fieldwork with young people between sixteen and thirty years old who work as "mediators" or "advisors" in Bemni in relation to premarital or extramarital affairs, I argue that practices and narratives of romantic love are strongly implicated in processes of social change. In the rural Uttarakhandi context, young people often use the idea of being specialists in "love" to bolster their own position and resolve conflict. I also provide a counterpoint to geographical youth research stressing the reactionary politics of marginalized young people. I show instead that in a region relatively unaffected by strong religious- or caste-based conflict, youth are able to ameliorate rather than exacerbate violent action, even while they reproduce aspects of caste, class, and gender inequality.

Podcast for The Policy Shop, in discussion with VC of UniMelb Professor Glyn Davis and Professor Craig Jeffrey. Insights into challenges faced by young people in India, based on long-term ethnographic research.