Thesis summary and substantive contributions:

In my Introduction, I outlined my motivations for exploring this particular topic and the questions to shape my research process and product. Following this, Chapter Two described the context within which the research took place, paying close attention to the history of apartheid and the legacy it continues to have over contemporary educational, economic and social realities in South Africa. In Chapter Three I provided an overview of the literature to inform this work. By discussing the limitations of understanding ‘youth,’ ‘transitions’ and ‘identities’ as fixed categories, I argue for the contribution that poststructural theories can make to understanding the socially constituted and contradictory discourses which inform the race, classed, spaced and gendered positions that are available for young people to take up. My fourth Chapter expands upon how poststructural, feminist and postcolonial theories have shaped the ways in which I collected and grappled with my data. By providing a description of my research methods, as well as my fieldsite, I pave the way for an analysis of my data, which occurs in Chapters Five, Six and Seven.

Two of my analysis Chapters have responded to my research questions, in the order of which they appear. The first of these, Chapter Five, focuses on the school and the way it makes certain discourses available, as well as excludes others. My findings demonstrate how my participants, drawing upon the discourses circulating within the LO classroom as well as the general school environment, typically adopted an individualised approach to the future. Working within the discursive frame of individual responsibility and self-improvement available in LO, I argue that students appear to regard their potential success and failure as a measure of their very selfhood, a reflection of their personal capacity to move outward and upward beyond the constraints of their raced and classed locations within a rural township.

Although personal dreams and career goals varied, the value of university education arose repeatedly during discussions with teachers, matrics and post-matrics involved in this study, such that my participants felt ‘channelled’ into a university trajectory. My findings demonstrate how particular disciplinary practices were naturalised within the school environment, so that my participants’ invested in specific ideas regarding what it means to be a ‘good’ student and consequently, good citizen. While the school made limited discourses available to young people regarding what and how it is possible for them to be, my findings illustrated that these discourses often contradicted students’ actual experiences.

As my first analysis chapter demonstrates that students formed an association between a ‘good education’ and a ‘good life,’ my second analysis chapter, Chapter Six, seeks to explore how space was implicated in the production of my participants’ identities and understandings of the good life.

It argues that young people often have contradictory responses to different locations (such as the township they come from, or different institutions of higher education) and express future aspirations that seek to mediate these contradictions. While ‘class’ was not initially a concept I thought that I would be studying, it emerged as highly significant given that the lives that young people desired reflected classed positions which have been deemed valuable. Chapter Six looks at how stories of classed mobility intersect with narratives of escaping rurality. In c onceptualising class-making as a felt and embodied process (Skeggs, 2004), my findings illustrate how the affective impact of classed inscriptions are heightened amid the neoliberal discourses of self-improvement which isolate the individual as solely responsible for creating their own future. This illustrates how young, rural, black South African’s sense of place in the world, and sense of self in place, is produced through a geography of identification that is deeply embedded within negotiations of gender, class, race, and other social structures.

In understanding their lives as full of opportunities denied to the previous generation, born free South Africans carry the weight of parental hopes and expectations, which often centre on the dream of ‘bettering’ their own lives. Such ‘improvement narratives’ can be seen to offer students motivation, but this visualisation for a better life is tainted by its implied critique of the lives they currently live. My analysis shows how, while many young people express a desire for movement and improvement, these desires were not always at the expense of wanting to rid themselves of local attachments and the hope to retain connections to their homes, rural environments and cultural and religious traditions was widespread within my fieldsite.

In keeping with the poststructural orientation of this thesis, an important theme that recurred throughout this work is that the identities young people develop are internally divided. Their futures are not entirely scripted by the social forces that characterise their societies. In ‘a society deeply marked by its racialised past but also striving to make a different present and a new future’ (Walker, 2005:133), rural black youth are likely to make complicated investments in particular subject positions, in being and becoming one kind of person rather than another. While there are signs that young people’s subjectivities are able to ‘break the mould of apartheid’ and draw on discourses that are different from those of their parents, the re-making of identity is fraught with complexities and contradictions (Soudien, 2007:xiv). Chapter Six demonstrates how South Africa’s history of segregation, which I describe in Section 2.2, continues to influence the meanings and affects that young people attach to different spaces, be it the institutional spaces of higher education or their local shopping centre. By showing how ‘spaces’ remain racialised within South Africa, I argue that students’ race-based mappings of different places are not simply visions of elsewhere. Rather,

racialised understandings informed my participants’ sense of self, and are as much about self-definition as they are about imagining others.

Chapter Seven provides an extension of my analysis of race and identity, exploring the silences and contradictions to emerge in young people’s framings of their futures. It shows how, although the ‘new South Africa’ has a constitution centred around equality among people of all races and genders, racialised and gendered positions continue to have an often unacknowledged power over how young people think of themselves and their futures. Echoing the findings of Chapter Five and Six, this Chapter demonstrates how the public face of what is permissible to speak about often contradicts young people’s private realities. In exposing the silences surrounding ‘apartheid’, this Chapter shoes how, by perpetuating notions of individual responsibility and agency, the neoliberal discourses that pervade the post-apartheid schooling environment neglect to interrogate the role of history, politics and economics in the shaping of young South African’s trajectories. This leaves students dreaming of success but with little sense of how to locate themselves within a particular historical legacy, as well as how to navigate significant structural obstacles.

In exploring what it is that LO positions as the ideal future worth aspiring to, my research indicates the need to consider the gendered, raced and classed nature of the curriculum itself. Its understanding of ‘goodness’, while presented as universal in nature, is premised on a particular understanding of who the subject is. LO can be interpreted as a manifestation of a historically specific vision of schooling, a text which provides a specific understanding of success and silences rival epistemologies of knowing the world (Soudien and Baxen, 1997). The prioritisation of progression to university (and, by extension, professional careers) as the most acceptable

‘aspirations’ runs the risk of overlooking and ‘denying other futures and possibilities’ (Brown, 2013:7). It also means that, if students fail to reach these goals, their notion of themselves as inherently inferior becomes sealed.

Bourdieu and Wacquant’s (1992) concept of symbolic violence is useful for und erstanding the processes by which my participants accepted the discourse of emancipation through higher education, even when they did not have the means of gaining the necessary capitals to realise their aspirations. As mentioned in Chapter Three, ‘symbolic violence is ‘violence which is exercised upon a social agent with his or her complicity’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant 2004:272). In this context, symbolic violence is ‘constructed mutually by the persistence of apartheid’s social, political and economic structures, and by the tendency of a large group of subjects to accept the world as it is’

(Swartz et al., 2012:30). While time and increased exposures may challenge the extent to which my participants’ ‘accept the world as it is’, the majority of matric students in my study spoke about

apartheid only in relation to the past. Drawing upon the discourses proposed to them through their school and wider social arenas, they placed a heavy emphasis on the opportunities currently available to them, the power of positivity and a belief in their own ability to pursue higher education and be materially successful. My study shows how the discourses which are made available by the school and particularly exemplified by the LO curriculum incorporates forms of individual achievement from which most of the young people in my study, and South Africa at large, are structurally excluded. While LO potentially has the opportunity to open up a space for young people to address some of these challenges, this thesis argues that, by not providing a platform through which to discuss social structures, it paves the way for possible shame and disappointment.