Global Futures in East Asia: Youth, Nation, and the New Economy in Uncertain Times (Contemporary Issues in Asia and Pacific)

Global Futures in East Asia: Youth, Nation, and the New Economy in Uncertain Times (Contemporary Issues in Asia and Pacific) Read Online Free PDF Page B

Book: Global Futures in East Asia: Youth, Nation, and the New Economy in Uncertain Times (Contemporary Issues in Asia and Pacific) Read Online Free PDF
Author: Unknown
emotional experience and the real material conditions of their labor.
    In Chapter Four , Nancy Abelmann, Sojin Park, and Hyunhee Kim explore the production of affects in the context of higher education. A young college woman, whom the authors name Heejin, plots her course on a global stage through the deployment of the “brand capital” of the elite university she attends in Seoul. Her vision of the vital life, as one that is “not just comfortably enjoyed but more actively lived,” is an endless striving for competitive advantage that excludes the possibility of any point of rest or pursuit of contemplative realms of value other than the market-driven ones of the global economy. 13 For her, the world appears open ended, and her university degree promises to be a global passport to the future. She views the failure of others to set such goals and actively pursue them as a mark of their personal insufficiency—a lacking of spirit, discipline, and will—rather than ascribing them to more structural constraints such as class, gender, and nationality. And yet, some of the other students interviewed by the authors suggest that Heejin’s subjectivity is not universal. Others of her generation question the value of this perpetual striving, opting instead for other realms of value, leading not necessarily to economic rewards but to personal fulfillment and happiness.
    Both Nickola Pazderic ( Chapter Five ) and Yan Hairong ( Chapter Six ) offer us a sense of how happiness, in the form of a smile, is made into an imperative for those wishing to be recognized as employable labor value, but at quite different levels and locations of the labor hierarchy. Pazderic’s essay begins with a description of “Smile Chaoyang,” a university campaign to exhort students to embody a new formation of human capital defined as a form of affective discipline. His discussion can be put into the context of transformations to the political shifts in Taiwan as it moved from state-led developmentalism to democratization and the changing role of education in relation to these shifts. Pazderic explores how Taiwan’s unique positioning in the world system of nation-states as a U.S. client-state and poster child for developmental statism has both contributed to its miraculous economic rise and set its limits. He examines the impact of the global economy on the institutional context in which he teaches, a third-tier university specialized in training students for service sector jobs in a moment of uncertainty about the national economic future. Educational credentials now enter into a global circuit of value, institutions of higher learning become increasingly entrepreneurial to compete in a global market for tuition dollars, and faculty are under increasing pressure to publish their work in journals of international standing in a global standardization of academic credentialing. In other words, we see the restructuring of education in relation to the entrepreneurial state—Taiwan, Inc.—and its project to produce a “second miracle” to ensure Taiwan’s transcendence in the new global order. Education has become a profitable investment sector. It has become the primary service provider in the production of the new knowledge economy. The graduates of Chaoyang are encouraged to be the very embodiment of flexible labor, conditioned to accept whatever changed life chances the global economy might bring—with a smile. The objective of training in Chaoyang’s programs is to produce a labor force that is above average on the global scale of things. The smile effectively becomes a school brand. The student acquires the imprimatur of the school’s affective disciplines as a professionalized service worker.
    We see how the smile similarly figures into an economy of affects in Yan Hairong’s study of a Beijing school for training rural women as domestic workers. If the Chinese state promotes migration to the city in search of wage labor as a form of
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