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Contextualizing agential possibilities in the work space: Young Moroccan's accounts of their everyday realities
Abstract
Morocco, similar to other countries in the MENA region, is witnessing its largest cohort of young people in its history. In conjunction, the nation is experiencing high levels of unemployment, comprising up to forty percent of its urban youth population. In my field study, I focus on the agential practices and challenges young individuals from urban underprivileged neighborhoods in Morocco confront in the realm of work as they describe their everyday paths to becoming. In this paper, I argue that disadvantaged youth are not passive in the face of their relative work precariousness and unemployment. They daily negotiate their contexts entangled with their agential possibility. In analyzing this dynamic, I present the various tactics and strategies young people deploy to pursue and navigate the workspace. In doing so, I employ a critical realist approach to avoid traditional arguments concerning youth agency as a synonym to empowerment, resistance and self fulfillement. Instead, I explore other dimensions of youth expression of agency that can be found in acts of deliberate personal disempowerment or endurance, as well as in other practices that do not always challenge existing work structures. In this paper, I aim to contribute to a deeper empirical understanding of the exercise of bounded agency among youth from underprivileged neighborhoods in Morocco as they confront the realities of the job market and as they learn to forge their professional identities. Hopefully, too, this paper can provide a more leavened depiction as to how agency, structure, and work concur in these young people's lives.
Discipline
Political Science
Geographic Area
Morocco
Sub Area
None