Cecilie Holdt Rude

In this thesis I explore what negotiations arise in articulations of the ‘good life’ by Zimbabwean women who have attained higher education, but are struggling to find employment. Within a poststructural approach I have conducted qualitative in-depth interviews. I analyze my interviews within a historical and regional context, and through Judith Butler’s and Lauren Berlant’s ideas on gender norms and cruel optimism. I argue that the modern promise of progression and the neoliberal individualization process in Zimbabwean society place the blame of failure on the individual and keep the women stagnate in their hope of becoming something ‘better’. I show how the dream of financial independence before marriage places the women in high dependency within other relations and how they become marginalized as ‘unrespectable’ in society. I criticize the promise from international development organizations of prosperity and empowerment through education and urge for further focus and research within this issue.

In this internship report I have taken a look at my work with youth engagement at a UNESCO IIEP Policy Forum on “Engaging Youth in Planning Education for Social Transformation”. I have explored how we have perceived the concept of youth at my internship, how we have talked about it and how we have dealt with youth in our work. I analyse several episodes where youth are treated as vulnerable and adults-in-the-making, while being expected to be change-makers and actors at the same time. I discuss whether the youth concept might block the very idea of youth engagement by putting half the worlds population into a category of human 'becomings' and not yet to be taken serious. I suggest
that the categorisation on young people as 'youth' blind us from seeing the different complex issues which the 3 billion different people in the world might deal with.

Taking point of departure in Zambian education system, this project investigates the idea of education as a means towards a modern society. Inspired by Professor James Ferguson and professor Fazal Rizvi, the project questions the idea of a progressive development towards a modern society and examines what happens when international education principles characterized by neo-liberalism, innovation and critical thinking are being implemented in the Zambian society. Taking use of Carol Bacchi’s ‘Policy as Discourse’, the project examines the agents involved in the process of making education polices, both the principles on Education for All from 1990, and two Zambian education polices from 1996 and 2005. The project concludes that from 1996 to 2005 Zambian education policies follow to a greater extent international agreed principles that cause challenges in the local society, and that it can be difficult to become a Zambian modern society when many stakeholders have different agendas.