Escovando histórias a contrapelo: narrativas de jovens sobre as suas trajetórias sociais e profissionais na “cidade das oportunidades”

Abstract

This thesis aims at evaluating life trajectories of poverty-ridden youngsters in the city of Sobral, State of Ceara, based on their experiences within the job market and according to their reality, while searching to understand how such practical knowledge is summoned to help with their social and professional projects. The research tries to investigate thoroughly how those youths have been designing their professional experiences to tackle daily challenges related to tensions generated by the qualification effort raised not only by the job market but by the city itself. It is, therefore, an attempt to understand how young people relate to work, here identified as “young people from the periphery of the job market” considering their insertion experiences, promoted or not by the State, regular or not, and marked by short-term and precarious aspects. It is an analytic construct directed towards determining how youngsters perceive the job market at a time when they are experiencing formation processes fomented by public policies aimed at placing poor young people in the job market. The research aimed at young people as the investigation’s subjects, at different loci: training agencies that also act as a go-between, highlighting the Social Development Secretariat (SDS), the Technology and Economic Development Secretariat (STDE), the Productive Inclusion Agency of Sobral, the National Service for Industrial Training (SENAI), projects for insertion of young people in the job market, citing specifically the Projovem Worker, the Projovem Adolescent Worker, The First Step and The Young Apprentice, and in the street spaces of downtown Sobral where informal jobs are found. The path followed by the research was based on determining the institutional version of facts that take place within the ground where youths write their first professional experiences; and evaluating their professional trajectories, circumscribed by the job market, to measure their expectations and projects as delineated by their narratives. It is a qualitative effort of ethnographic inspiration that deals with narratives from youths and government agents whence a methodological path was devised based on direct observation, systematic appointment on field journals, analysis of photographs, and interviews involving the groups. The main lines and chapters of the thesis are developed around the ethical interpretation of facts found in the professional narratives of poor youths and government agents found together in the same social tissue. The resulting analyses considered cross-crossing of theoretical and methodological inputs that came mostly from investigation of Walter Benjamin, Gilberto Velho, Howard Becker, Machado Pais, Larrosa Bondia, Claude Dubar, François Dubet, Pierre Bourdieu, Ülrich Beck, Giovanni Alves, Márcio Pochmann, among other. The histories told here by young people aim at rescuing the struggle for work, recognition and engagement as circumscribed to non-linear trajectories from young people in the periphery of the city of Sobral, State of Ceara, showing the extent of current and past repression that is intentionally forgotten and hidden by those that face daily struggles and now tell about them.