Producing 'Positive' and 'Secure' Educated Subjects

Presenter:

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Abstract

Despite its professed goal of investment in the knowledge economy, the Pakistani higher education domain is heaving under budget cuts under IMF conditionalities, and beleaguered with crumbling infrastructure and rising fees. Moreover, universities have also increasingly come under the ‘security ambit’, with recent national security policies casting university students as ‘captive audience’ to be ‘secured’ through ‘soft measures’. My ethnographic project examines the various interventions to steer students towards “healthy,” “positive” and “productive” activities as well as the performative and political function of the ‘development’ discourse that underpins them. In the continued absence of ‘student unions’, banned three decades ago, how do these initiatives structure the terms of engagement for the university student, and what are the stakes of this state-led ‘positivity imperative’ (Sukarieh 2011) in the time of terror? I explore how an assemblage of state-sanctioned youth initiatives seek to build ‘resilience’ and ‘secure’ students by co-opting them into a neoliberal, technocratic and sanitized form of national engagement. In this university space laden with neoliberal desire for the aspiring and precarity for the political conscious, my paper will focus on how different activists inhabit and create space - by performing ‘silences’ and participating under the “public/official transcripts” (Scott, 1992) – in order to engage in prefigurative politics. I will use insights to reflect on the ‘ambiguities’ of domination (Wedeen 2015) and the ephemerality of contestation that maintains an oppositional consciousness (with or without) translating into political action.