‘In the middle of things’: on educated un(der)employed young people’s pragmatism and idealism in rural Indonesia

Discussions about young people and their troubled education-to-work transitions in the global south usually concern urban case studies, in which young people are typically described as if they are outside the normal flow of things. By contrast, this current paper focuses on rural tertiary-educated young people (aged 20–30) on the island of Flores, East Indonesia. These young people try – and are enabled by their communities – to act as responsible community members through what they called ‘having semangat’, a term connoting commitment and spiritedness, being lively and passionate. The analysis of having semangat stimulates us to rethink the common link between young people and upward mobility, and contests an image of young people as potential social failures who direct themselves to the margins when they fail to comply with hegemonic ideals of success.