| Summary: | <p>Existing research on education-to-employment transitions in complex and contested settings in the global South is consumed with the debilitating effects of the ‘crisis of youth’ and its negative outcomes in which many emerge un/under-employed. Young people are often depicted as in thrall to this predicament rather than probing their agentive capacities for affirmative action to move beyond the impasse. Consequently, few studies explore how youth transitions relate and respond to wider socio-economic and political transformation as young people set about changing the self and the situation.</p>
<p>Based on fieldwork conducted throughout 2015 and 2016 in a remote region of southeastern Burma/Myanmar emerging from decades of armed conflict, government restriction and underdevelopment, this thesis explores how a community of Plong Karen in the Karen State capital Hpa-an, engaging around alternative forms of higher education, are responding directly to local configurations of privation and possibility. By shaping the aspirations and agency of high school and university students to safeguard the legacy of this, this provision amounts to a formidable vision and vehicle of social change.</p>
<p>Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, I bring a concern for temporalities into conversation with socio-spatial mobilities to explore ways in which young people navigate their structured positions and exploit the possibilities around them before and into Myanmar’s political transition, and across the Karen borderlands into neighbouring Thailand. I explore how specific struggles and successes around education, shared by this particular social ‘generation’ across these time-spaces, have informed their capacity to act and the manner in which they are doing so. I suggest that these outcomes are stimulating broader socio-economic transformations within and beyond this community. Access to this education and the opportunities it promises, nevertheless presents young people with new and beguiling possibilities beyond the constraints and concerns of those communities, which remain marked by the spectre of intra-ethnic and religious tensions testing the identifications and affiliations of young people living and learning in contemporary Hpa-an.</p>
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