Notes on the making of an aspirational space-time in the U.S. public university

Drawing on ethnographic analysis of experimental undergraduate career workshops at a U.S. public university, we consider what galvanizes aspiration formation for precariously situated young people working toward post-graduation life. We see students' notions of life-to-come as encompassing spaces of family, community, and higher education, and shaped by burdens of obligation as well as material blockages. In turn, we theorize students' affects and expressions of aspiration as both indeterminate and mobilizing. We argue for an approach to aspiration that recognizes the non-linear potential of the aspirational practices of students within non-elite HE contexts. By inviting students to contemplate difficult conditions and crises and resist formulaic or rushed career solutions, our workshops have offered liminal space for imagining and pursuing futures grounded in personal and collective experience. In such an approach, students deliberate together on how their lived experiences and educations inform personally authentic life trajectories, even as they grapple with ambivalence, anxiety, and refusal in ways that betray underlying affects of aspirational (im)possibility. Our experimentation with cultivating this space of care reveals how such spaces enable forms of future-making that synthesize divergent lived experiences and may produce an integrated aspirational praxis even as outcomes remain open-ended.