The subject of neoliberal affects: Rural youth envision their futures

This article contributes to debates about subjectivity formation in neoliberal times by analyzing the emotional geographies of students’ imagined futures. Drawing upon ethnographic research in a white, working‐class rural Ontario school, I examine students’ participation in The Real Game, a career education program that attempts to prepare grade 7/8 students for their adult futures. A curricular tool that espouses neoliberal tenets of flexibility, mobility, and self‐improvement, The Real Game offers a site through which to explore the interplay between governing discourses and student subjectivities. Bringing Ahmed's critique of happiness narratives to an analysis of student interviews, I demonstrate how neoliberal governance operates affectively. As educational discourses idealize the self‐reliant, future‐oriented subject, students are trained to internalize neoliberal uncertainty as a set of insecurities to be managed on an affective level. The distinctly spatial operation of neoliberalism is apparent in Fieldsville students’ future narratives, where dominant ideals of mobility conflict with local identifications and an allegiance to place. Students manage these pressures affectively, as they narrate their own movement and improvement through stories of hope, fear, and wonder. Thus, I argue that studies of the emotional geographies of education are integral to understanding how neoliberalism is lived in place.