Conference Program

This paper examines the early education-to-work transitions of young people living in highly industrialised urban and rururban territories in Chile, focusing on how institutional arrangements, territorial political economies, and socioeconomic precariousness shape the horizons through which future trajectories are imagined and enacted. In the territorial contexts studied characterised by deep levels of industralisation (mining and forestry in the cases of this research) the relationship between schools and companies operates as a key structuring mechanism in the organisation and expectations of youth transitions. Rather than functioning as neutral pathways facilitating mobility, these institutional linkages are embedded within historically produced territorial inequalities and labour market configurations that structure the opportunities available to young people.
The analysis conceptualises these dynamics through the notion of territorial assemblages (Tamboukou, 2008b; Youdell & Armstrong, 2011), understood as the contingent yet durable configurations of institutions, economic relations, spatial arrangements, and affective dynamics that organise everyday life in industrialised territories. These assemblages are thus simultaneously productive and restrictive: they generate aspirations, expectations, and narratives of opportunity, while also reproducing structural constraints that shape the limits of social mobility.
Empirically, the paper draws on a three-year longitudinal qualitative study that follows the subjectivities and early educational-labour trajectories of 30 young people enrolled in secondary education in two industrialised territories in the country: the Chilean north, the Antofagasta region, characterized by the desert and the historical and wide presence of the copper minning industry; and La Araucanía region in the green south, the territory with the largest Mapuche indigenous population in the country, and the forestry industry. The Chilean State, the Indigenous Peoples and the Forestry industry have held a deep conflict for the ownership of the land. The research traces their experiences from their final year of secondary school through the first two years following graduation, paying particular attention to how aspirations, expectations, and decisions regarding education and work evolve during this critical transitional period.
The findings suggest that young people’s expectations for the future are deeply territorialised. Their aspirations and projected trajectories are shaped not only by individual preferences or educational performance but by the specific institutional and economic configurations that organise local opportunity structures. Industrialised territories often sustain powerful discourses of development, productivity, and employment that circulate through schools, families, and local institutions, producing expectations of stable employment and upward mobility. However, these narratives frequently coexist with persistent forms of labour precarity, limited educational mobility, and highly stratified access to post-secondary opportunities. As a result, the early transitions from school to work or further education are characterised by a complex interplay between aspiration and constraint.
The analysis therefore points to the importance of understanding youth transitions not simply as individualised processes of choice and decision-making, but as outcomes produced within territorially embedded institutional and economic arrangements. By foregrounding the territorial and political-economic dimensions of youth transitions, this research contributes to broader debates on education, labour, and social reproduction in industrialised regions.