Existential mobility and immobility through higher education
John Loewenthal*
Higher education may discursively promise the prospects of brighter, more mobile, global futures that are better paid and more fulfilling. Black and Walsh (2019) contrast this discourse to the disappointments, disillusionment, labour market struggles and debts that exist among contemporary university graduates. In this post, I share how the notions of ‘existential mobility’ and ‘existential immobility,’ developed by Ghassan Hage (2005, 2009), may help to conceptualise some of these contrasting consequences of higher education. The notion of ‘existential immobility’ is discussed in relation to ‘fateful aspects of aspiration’ (Loewenthal, Alexander & Butt, 2019), in which graduates feel beholden to their degrees.
In Hage’s (2005) research among the Lebanese diaspora (albeit in earlier, less perilous times), he argued that you cannot reduce migration to economic need. Rather, people may be seeking a sense of ‘existential mobility,’ a sense of going somewhere with one’s life. Different places might be perceived as launching pads for novel experiences, new identities and a different sense of self. This notion of ‘existential mobility,’ described also as a kind of imagined or felt movement (Hage, 2009), is helpful for considering how people may perceive and engage with higher education. A means of momentum for becoming someone else is what many university experiences advertise. Fakunle’s (2021) research on rationales for studying abroad comes to similar conclusions as Hage (2005), namely that people’s mobilities cannot be reduced to economic motivations. She found that while some students (and their parents) pursued degrees for instrumental economic purposes, there were other important ‘dreams’ and incentives, from experiential to educational to aspirational. These distinctions touch on longstanding debates about the purposes of higher education, such as between an abstract enrichment of character or a specific vocationalism in preparation for work (Roth, 2014).
The existential mobility of going to university might exist on both sides of this apparent divide. In the research projects on aspiration that I have been involved in, people have felt on the move because of their experiences in the present and their imagined futures. It has been clear to see how meaningful going to university can be. In the Urban-Rural Youth Transitions project (Alexander, Loewenthal & Butt, 2019), one student, thrilled to be moving to Manchester (UK), expressed, ‘I feel like real life is about to begin.’ In my doctoral research among students and graduates in New York City, I spent a semester participating in an undergraduate class entitled, ‘Literature, Art and the Path of Life,’ that used cultural texts to engage questions of being alive. In a moving end-of-semester seminar, the professor spoke of how scary life’s questions and endings may be, though reminded the class that they are not alone in their predicaments. Indeed, many such questions have been eternal to human beings. He said to seek company and guidance by speaking with others about such themes and consulting the plethora of cultural works that deal with them. The class was clearly moved and had been equipped with a ‘higher’ education to help make sense of, and make the most of, their lives.
However, paradoxical to this ‘existential mobility,’ a central finding from my doctoral research was a sense that people’s studies may behold them to a trajectory beyond their control. The phrase ‘fateful aspects of aspiration’ describes a situation where higher education, with any debts and expectations associated with it, binds people into a sense of feeling pigeonholed into a certain future (Loewenthal, Alexander & Butt, 2019). Hage (2009) develops a similar notion of ‘existential immobility’ which he terms ‘stuckedness,’ that is, a lack of agency or ability to seize alternatives. While there are more severe situations than being a university graduate, the theme of feeling ‘stuck’ was still prevalent in my research. An example of moving from existential mobility to existential immobility through higher education is illustrated through Evelyn, a respondent who made the exciting move from Arizona to New York City to study acting at her ‘dream school.’ After graduating, she wondered how she had made herself feel so ‘trapped’:
So, there’s a lot of times that I’m like, ‘what am I doing with my life? What have I done to put myself in this kind of debt where I feel like I’m really trapped.’ And I can’t, like, do a lot of other things. I really have to, like, do acting and be good at it, or I’m not gonna, like, get out of this hole. I can’t like travel or like, go to grad school or like do really anything because I kind of, like, put myself in this place where I really have to just start acting and then do well and make money. But I do – I had a really great experience. I really wouldn’t trade it. I met a lot of really great people. So, it’s worth it. But there’s a lot of times where I’m like ‘I don’t know what I’ve done with my life’. I’ve basically made it impossible for me to, like, do anything besides succeed at this point. Just a little daunting.
Across my research, there were people like Evelyn who felt affixed by specialisations and social expectations to persevere in a particular line of work. Debts and financial support from parents often exacerbated a ‘sunk cost fallacy’ of feeling psychologically bound to an earlier commitment. ‘It’s hard to kind of change what you’re doing’; ‘If I could do it all over again and be like 17 or 18, just starting college, I would have chosen a different field’; ‘I’ve sunk so much time into this. I’m not gonna retrain in Engineering,’ were all comments in my interviews that exemplified a broad pattern. The research of Finn (2015), Bregnbæk (2016) and Burke (2017) also documents such fateful commitment to work choices as a result of one’s studies. Perceived senses of fixity may run in tension with human desires and requirements to grow, develop, adapt and explore. Bateson (1989: 8) writes: ‘We hold on to the continuity we have, however profoundly it is flawed. If change were less frightening, if the risks did not seem so great, far more could be lived.’
What, then, can be done, beyond theorising such ‘fateful aspects of aspiration’? While there are many benefits to specialisation, there may be ‘stuckedness’ and educational regret (Roese & Summerville, 2005) if such choices are not the right ones or are made at the wrong time. An exciting field that might help people in their commitment to certain paths is the notion of ‘futures literacy’ that seeks to enhance people’s power to anticipate the future (Miller, 2018). Part of this endeavour may be re-thinking the chronologies, expectations and opportunities associated with different ages and how they are structured in society through schooling (Alexander, 2020, 2022). A re-imagining of how we expose young people to higher education and work, including through increased internships and scope for youth employment, may give more of an epistemic base to aspire through knowledge and experience (Loewenthal, 2019). There can also be enhanced infrastructure for people to learn and grow through work, and for adults to use further study later in life through pathways that they discover. With the right synergy, higher education may lead to enduring existential mobility, and not becoming stuck.
References
Alexander, P., Loewenthal, J. & Butt, G. (2019). ‘F*ck It, Shit Happens (FISH)’: A social generations approach to understanding young people’s imaginings of life after school in 2016-2017. Journal of Youth Studies, 23(1), 109-126. https://doi.org/10.1080/13676261.2019.1704406
Alexander, P. (2020) Schooling and social identity: Learning to act your age in contemporary Britain. Palgrave Macmillan.
Alexander, P. (2022, April). The future of school [Video]. Think Human Festival, Oxford Brookes University.
Bateson, M. C. (1989). Composing a life. Grove Press.
Black, R., & Walsh, L. (2019). Imagining youth futures: University students in post-truth times. Springer.
Bregnbæk, S. (2016). Fragile elite: The dilemmas of China’s top university students. Stanford University Press.
Burke, C. (2017). ‘Graduate blues’: Considering the effects of inverted symbolic violence on underemployed middle class graduates. Sociology, 51(2), 393-409. https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038515596908
Fakunle, O. (2021). Developing a framework for international students’ rationales for studying abroad, beyond economic factors. Policy Futures in Education, 19(6), 671-690. https://doi.org/10.1177/1478210320965066
Finn, K. (2015). Personal life, young women and higher education: A relational approach to student and graduate experiences. Palgrave Macmillan.
Hage, G. (2005). A not so multi-sited ethnography of a not so imagined community. Anthropological Theory, 5(4), 463–475. https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499605059232
Hage, G., (2009). Waiting out the crisis: On stuckedness and governmentality. In G. Hage (Ed.), Waiting (pp. 97-106). Melbourne University Publishing.
Loewenthal, J. (2019). Review of Aspiring adults adrift: Tentative transitions of college graduates, by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa. Educational Review, 71(6), 800. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131911.2019.1656931
Loewenthal, J., Alexander, P., & Butt, G. (2019). Fateful aspects of aspiration among graduates in New York and Los Angeles. International Studies in Sociology of Education, 28(03-04), 345-361. https://doi.org/10.1080/09620214.2019.1627898
Miller, R. (2018). Sensing and making-sense of Futures Literacy: towards a Futures Literacy Framework (FLF). In R. Miller (Ed.), Transforming the future: Anticipation in the 21st Century (pp. 15-50). Routledge.
Roese, N. J., & Summerville, A. (2005). What we regret most… and why. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 31(9), 1273‐1285. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167205274693
Roth, M. S. (2014) Beyond the university: Why liberal education matters. Yale University Press.
*Dr John Loewenthal is Teaching Fellow in Education at Moray House School of Education and Sport, The University of Edinburgh
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