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Social Issues Of The Young Middle Class

Decent Essays

Anshul’s ethnography represents young people’s ability to navigate social issues and structural barriers with creative improvisation of the resources available to them. This resourcefulness shows that young people amidst neoliberal change are not passive consumers, but strategic negotiators and tacticians (Jeffrey 2010; Klenk 2010; Dyson 2014). The young middle-class can take these risks because of the safety nets they assumed and built using Bourdieu’s multiple species of capital. But they are nonetheless substantial personal risks made not for narrowly self-optimizing gains but rather towards improving social issues. Gooptu (2013) has identified, new narratives of enterprise “marking an epochal shift…which lies in the creation of the new Indians” that are: “the do-ers, who are endowed with what might be called aspirational capital and imbued with ‘passion’, ‘self-belief’, and the ‘conviction’ that ‘no dream is distant’” (3). Gooptu writes that these do-ers, “do not place blame on political systems or infrastructure; instead they take the responsibility themselves, roll up their sleeves, and plunge into action” (3). The young entrepreneurs demonstrate different forms of agency, less in the form of resistance as the activists in other chapters take, but more of a proactive form of agency, as improvisation and resourcefulness. Many of the young social entrepreneurs I met resemble the ‘new Indians’ and ‘doers’ who do not resist prevailing structures and unequal systems, but

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