Conference Program

This contribution presents an ongoing study on students' utopias, conducted as part of a postdoctoral research project at the Université Paris-Est Créteil (UPEC) under the supervision of Séverine Chauvel. It engages with this panel's central questions by approaching professional teacher identity not from the perspective of practitioners already in the field, but from that of students whose social imaginaries sketch, in negative, a redefinition of the symbolic and relational foundations of the teaching profession.
The study seeks to understand how utopian imaginaries are grounded in ordinary experience, placing actors in situations of incongruence between their ideals and their practices (Mannheim, 2006). Conducted with students at UPEC — 25 interviews completed out of a target of 50 — enrolled in social science programmes preparing for careers in local government, community education, and teaching, it draws on the photo-elicitation method (Bigando, 2013; Michelin, 1998). Photography plays a central methodological role: it ensures grounding in participants' everyday lives by inviting them to capture and objectify what they perceive daily without always putting it into words (Bajard & El Miri, 2024). Participants are asked to take a series of photographs documenting an everyday situation — an object, a landscape, an interaction — that provokes, to them, either attraction or repulsion. These photographic acts allow them to identify situations that are often "seen but unnoticed." This grounding work then leads to an elicitation interview, during which participants explain the reasons behind their photographic choices and articulate, from their individual and sensory experiences, as-yet-unrealised social aspirations. Photography anchors lived experience; the interview reveals its meaning by making visible the forms of social imagination that underlie it.
Unlike strategic projections on plausible professional futures — shaped by parental expectations and competencies (Duru-Bellat, 2024) — students’ imaginaires here go beyond instrumental rationality and career strategies. Yet, these imaginaries remain predominantly positive, echoing findings from youth studies which show that young people tend to maintain a strong sense of optimism about their personal futures, grounded in perceptions of resources, agency and individual responsibility (Keating & Melis, 2021). In this sense, students’ utopian aspirations resonate with liberal and neoliberal valorizations of individual agency and self-realisation (Visanich, 2020). At the same time, they articulate an internal critique of this model, particularly with regard to the role that teaching should play in supporting collective emancipation rather than merely individual success. It is precisely within this critique that emerges a reimagined conception of teaching. Teaching thus occupies a singular place in these imaginaires. Students project onto it a vision of the teacher grounded not in statutory authority, but in relational authority (Aspelin, 2023), sustained by the capacity to foster critical reflexivity and to accompany students' emancipation.