How Young People Build Viable Futures in a Russian Arctic Monotown
The article, ‘Vocational Pathways to Viable Futures: Narrative Construction of Agentic Selves in a Russian Arctic Monotown’, published in the British Journal of Sociology of Education, draws on 65 interviews with students aged 16–20 from all five local VET institutions: two technical colleges, a medical college, a teacher training college, and an arts college. The researchers explore how students make sense of their educational choices and imagined futures, and how different VET programmes shape the possibilities they perceive as realistic and meaningful.
The researchers identify four distinct trajectories. Technical VET is associated with predictable entry into industrial employment and staying in the town; medical VET offers a step-by-step route into healthcare and potentially higher education; teacher-training VET provides a way to stay while building a socially recognised career and maintaining high-achieving academic identity; and arts VET supports creative and more counter-normative trajectories, often involving plans to leave the town.
The authors argue that these pathways show how agency is constructed through narratives, rather than simply determined by the opportunities available to young people. Students draw on shared cultural repertoires of hard work, care, academicity and creativity to make their educational choices meaningful and their futures plausible. At the same time, social background and place shape access to these repertoires and to different ‘capacities to aspire’.
Agency is best understood not as a trait that some groups possess and others lack, but as a narrative construct assembled under conditions of pronounced structural constraint.”
The study challenges the idea that vocational education is simply a second-best or ‘Plan B’ option. In a highly constrained environment, VET institutions function as infrastructures for building viable futures: they can support staying in the town, gradual educational mobility or plans to build a life beyond the local industrial economy. Yet, social background and place shape young people’s access to the cultural repertoires and resources through which different futures become thinkable and attainable.
Vocational routes thus not only channel youth into locally available jobs but stabilise socially recognisable biographies and make ‘staying’ a legitimate, achievable future in a hyper‑peripheral, mono‑industrial labour market.”