Youth and Life Projects

This work is an intersectional study of the subjectivation processes of young students from working-class backgrounds and their life projects in public higher education. It is the result of research carried out in 2016 at the Recife campus of the Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE). It was supervised by Prof Dr Karla Galvão Adrião. A group of young university students from public schools took part. The aim was to analyse the processes of domination experienced by these subjects in a higher education institution. In this sense, their biographical journeys and the meanings of their life projects in the space/time of university were taken into question. The investigation of the processes of subjectivation was based on a micro-political dimension, as a biographical perspective, and a macro-political dimension, where the experiences of social oppression of young subjects were mapped by a fragmented student assistance network. Here, the experiences were expressed either by discriminatory dynamics or by affirmative practices in the university students’ journey.