The Emergence of Life Politics among Neidiban Tibetan College Graduates and its Implications for Pedagogy

Abstract

By focusing on education-to-work transitions, this article aims to unveil how the emergence of life politics (Giddens, 1991) among newly graduated neidiban Tibetan college students contributes to a more complicated and contradictory, yet nuanced, identity crisis and (re)construction against the socio-cultural landscape of contemporary China. Drawing on qualitative data collected from fieldwork, the article examines in detail these graduates’ reflexive perceptions of, and aspirations for, their study, work and life from a life course perspective, and how their perceptions and aspirations reflect a disrupted or coherent sense of their biographic chain, which resulted from their neidiban educational trajectories. Towards the end of the study, the article appropriates the concept of culturally sustainable pedagogy (CSP) proposed by Paris (2012) to discuss the implications of this case study for the neidiban schooling pedagogy.