What now? Experiences of everyday unemployment among Black graduates in South Africa

Thesis

Governments and international development organisations have long advanced the idea that education is the best tool for achieving social mobility. This idea has also been internalised by people all over the world. However, for an increasing number of young people, especially (but not exclusively) in the global South, the link between higher education and work has become weaker and weaker. This thesis explores young people’s experiences of this increasingly global phenomenon in South Africa. In particular, I investigate the experiences of unemployment among young, Black university graduates in South Africa. The issue of graduate unemployment has received significant attention in media and social media spaces, presumably because it troubles the aforementioned link that has been made between education and jobs. In the academic literature, however, studies on graduate unemployment have mostly been limited to quantitative investigations of the causes of unemployment among graduates. In this thesis, I aim to take an approach to studying graduate unemployment that takes seriously the complex economic, social, moral and emotional experiences of unemployment.

The thesis uses eight months of digital fieldwork conducted during the Covid-19 pandemic, and related lockdowns, to examine the lives of the young men and the young women that I interviewed as they attempted to transition from education to the kind of employment that they aspire to. In order to develop a comprehensive and nuanced understanding of these experiences, I use “everyday unemployment” as a conceptual framework, where the everyday is made up of relationalities, temporalities, and digital spaces. The first empirical chapter (Chapter Four) focuses on the role that education plays in shaping these experiences of unemployment, highlighting the ways in which the ANC government’s own processes of futuring result in disjunctures between policy and discourse and young people’s realities. The second empirical chapter (Chapter Five), in an attempt to understand the ways in which these young people cope with and navigate unemployment, focuses on ordinary processes of future-making among youth. Under the themes of work, entrepreneurship and migration, I show how young people’s orientations to specific futures can help us understand their present. And, finally, the third empirical chapter (Chapter Six) brings together literatures on everyday temporalities of unemployment and relationalities to demonstrate the ways in which unemployment has significant consequences for heteronormative social reproduction and sociality for young people. The thesis, therefore, makes important and timely contributions to academic work on young people in waithood, higher education, future-making, everyday youth temporalities and relationalities.

Authors: Kale, MG

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-qxqx2z9oz
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: youth unemployment; relational geographies; temporalities; higher education; everyday life
• Subjects: Human geography