Learning to do careers differently: challenges, tensions, and possibilities

Éditeurs invités

• Alexandra Bristow, Open University
• Katharina Chudzikowski, University of Bath
• Nadia deGama, University of Aberdeen
• Axel Haunschild, Leibniz University Hannover
• Olivier Ratle, University of the West of England
• Sarah Robinson, Rennes School of Business
• Angelika Schmidt, WU Wien

Synthèse

Around the world, careers are becoming increasingly normative and prescribed as people are losing autonomy and following neoliberal scripts. Many operate under unsustainable expectations and workloads in the name of relentless productivity, excellence and perfection. Careers can develop into a source of suffering, impacting on work/life balance, wellbeing, career sustainability, and career outcomes, stifling innovation and diversity and making working lives increasingly unhealthy. Careers thus have the capacity to act as instruments of oppression and exclusion, as dominant career trajectories and what counts as 'career success' are defined by the powerful, marginalising those who do not fit the mould.

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Thèmes proposés

• How can we learn from critiques of dominant career narratives and critiques of mainstream approaches to career research, education, and development?
• What are the effects and implications of career performativity, functionalism, managerialism, linearity, and individualism, and other dominant career norms?
• How can we draw from other theories, such as post-colonial theory, or indigenous knowledge from the South to give an alternative voice and challenge the normative prescriptions and career scripts surrounding learning about and enacting a career?
• What are the key power asymmetries, contradictions and tensions at play, and how are the dominant narratives of career success resisted? Which strategies of resistance are effective in which contexts, and why?
• How can we learn to practise careers in more empowering, inclusive, creative, and caring ways? What individual and collective learning is involved in crafting alternative career trajectories?
• What are the alternatives to the dominant narratives of career success? How can these alternatives be enacted, sustained and modelled?
• How does the valorization of career success overlook the opportunities of learning from failures?
• What are the key challenges, tensions, and possibilities, and what conditions and support mechanisms might such alternative career practices need?
• How can we learn to research and teach careers differently? What new critical conceptualisations, educational approaches, or research methodologies are required?
• How can writing differently facilitate learning and thinking about careers in new ways?