"Too Much Studying Makes Me Crazy": School-Related Illnesses on Mount Kilimanjaro

Stambach, Amy

doi:10.1086/447525

Cited by 9 publications

(7 citation statements)

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“…These crises have been combined with a rapid increase in the proliferation of images of progress through formal education and entry into white-collar work and with a concomitant rise in levels of educational credentialism. As Dore (1976) predicted long ago in his analysis of a diploma disease, the combination of rising education and declining opportunities for secure salaried em-ployment has increased feelings of frustration, inadequacy, and failure among young people in many parts of the Third World (Miles, 2002;Silberschmidt, 2001;Stambach, 1998).…”

Section: Cross-learning Possibilities: Global Geographies Of Youthmentioning

confidence: 99%

Youth in a Comparative Perspective

2004

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Neoliberal economic and social changes are radically transforming young people’s experiences of youth and early adulthood in many parts of the world. Young people face a greater range of uncertainties than perhaps in any previous era. This introduction sets out some of the key themes within recent social science research on young people as well as illustrating the contribution to these debates of the articles included in this special issue. The value of interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary work that analyzes young people’s transitions from the perspective of both the First World and Third World are highlighted. Particular emphasis is placed in this introduction on the need to foreground an understanding of social inequalities and the discourses and spaces in and through which inequalities are reproduced, contested, and transformed.

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Section: Cross-learning Possibilities: Global Geographies Of Youthmentioning

confidence: 99%

Youth in a Comparative Perspective

2004

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“…While appreciating the complexity of youth cultures, much recent evidence suggests that un/underemployed young people in postcolonial contexts are particularly likely to embrace identities construed as ''traditional'' or ''indigenous'' in their attempts to maintain their status (e.g., Oni 1988;Levinson 1996;Stambach 1998;Demerath 1999). In an analysis of youth cultures in Papua New Guinea, for example, Demerath (1999Demerath ( , 2003 shows that young people reacted to a hostile job market by rejecting notions of formal education as progress and cultivating, instead, village-based identities.…”

Section: Underemployment 4 Youth Cultures and Educationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Notes 1. Recent research in Latin America includes Levinson (1996Levinson ( , 1999, Punch (2002), for parallel accounts from Africa see, for example, Katz (1993Katz ( , 1998, Stambach (1998), Silberschmidt (2001), Bryceson (2002), Watts (2003); for Asia see especially Heuzé (1996), Parry (1999b), Osella and Osella (2000), Manderson and Liamputtong (2002), Miles (2002), Harriss-White (2003), and Chopra, Osella, and Osella (2004). 2.…”

Section: Acknowledgmentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…During the 1980s and 1990s, scholars uncovered further evidence of violence (Sykes 1999) and psychological disorders (Stambach 1998) among young people in postcolonial settings frustrated by their failure to obtain secure employment. These signs of discontent have been accompanied by the introduction of state and nonstate regulatory frameworks that control young people's public, as well as their private, behavior (e.g., Katz 1998) and associated efforts in both the First World and Third World to pathologize young men (Stambach 1998;McDowell 2003). 6.…”

Section: Acknowledgmentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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“A Useless Thing!” or “Nectar of the Gods?” The Cultural Production of Education and Young Men's Struggles for Respect in Liberalizing North India

Jeffrey

Jeffery

2004

Ann Assoc American Geogr

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Drawing on fourteen months' ethnographic field research in western Uttar Pradesh among educated Dalit (ex‐untouchable) and Muslim young men, this article uncovers a crisis in educated people's access to salaried employment in rural north India. Against the grain of other studies of youth underemployment in postcolonial settings, we argue that educated Muslim and Dalit young men have reacted to their exclusion from secure white‐collar occupations by embracing education as a form of embodied cultural distinction rather than seeking out “traditional,”“indigenous,” or “village‐based” identities. Young men elaborate on education's value with reference to a system of differences between moral, civilized, developed “educated” people and immoral, savage, underdeveloped “illiterates.” Education has become a type of discursive “scaffold” upon which people display their ideas about morality, development, and respect. These narratives are compromised and contested and highlight differences in the ability of Muslim and Dalit young men to maintain an image of themselves as educated people. The extraordinary durability of local ideas of development (vikās) in the face of poor occupational outcomes and local variations in young people's ability to maintain development identities point to the importance of the cultural production of education as a field for comparative geographical enquiry.

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“…The notion that new entrants to formal education overestimate the transformative power of formal schooling was germane to Dores (1976) celebrated analysis of a diploma disease affecting the developing world. There is evidence of continued rising educational credentials in many parts of the global South, including South Asia (e.g., Dube 1998), the Middle East (Miles 2002) and sub-Saharan Africa (Silberschmidt 2001;Stambach 1998). Nevertheless, much of recent comparative education research points in the other direction.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

When schooling fails

Jeffrey¹,

Jeffery²,

Jeffery

2005

Contributions to Indian Sociology

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Scholarly discussions of formal education in the global South are increasingly moving away from a narrow focus on human capital to consider the meanings that people attach to ‘being educated’. This article advances current debates on the social construction of educational value in South Asia by examining how educated Chamar (Dalit) young men reflect on their education in the face of poor occupational outcomes. Since the 1960s, Dalits’ investment in formal education in rural Uttar Pradesh (UP) has seen a marked rise, in part through emulation of higher castes. The pro–Dalit Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) has also been instrumental in promoting a vision of empowerment through formal education and entry into white–collar employment. Our research in rural Bijnor district suggests that the most recent generation of high school and college graduates amongst the Chamars has failed to find salaried employment. Some young men respond to this exclusion by reaffirming their faith in the BSP's model of progress and establishing them–selves as local political figures (netas). Other young men voice a growing alienation from the BSP's vision of empowerment and speak of themselves as people ‘trapped’ by education. Nevertheless, both these sets of young men continue to value education as a source of ‘cultural distinction’, sign of their ‘modern’ status, and means of challenging caste–based notions of difference.

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"Too Much Studying Makes Me Crazy": School-Related Illnesses on Mount Kilimanjaro

Cited by 9 publications

References 0 publications

Youth in a Comparative Perspective

Youth in a Comparative Perspective

“A Useless Thing!” or “Nectar of the Gods?” The Cultural Production of Education and Young Men's Struggles for Respect in Liberalizing North India

When schooling fails

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