NARRATIVES OF SUCCESS: INDONESIAN RURAL YOUTH AS SUCCESS SUBJECTS IN A SCHOOLED SOCIETY  By  Isabella Tirtowalujo              A DISSERTATION  Submitted to  Michigan State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of  Curriculum, Instruction, and Teacher Education Œ Doctor of Philosophy  2016ABSTRACT  NARRATIVES OF SUCCESS: INDONESIAN RURAL YOUTH AS SUCCESS SUBJECTS IN A SCHOOLED SOCIETY  By  Isabella Tirtowalujo Using the case of one rural community in Lampung province, Sumatra, Indonesia, this study explores rural youths™ life aspirations. The research focuses on the voices of youth and adult members of a rural community to understand differing narratives of success. I utilize the conceptual framework of narratives of success to denote the ways in which subjects, through a logic of narrative, knit together definitions of success and paths discursively constructed as leading towards a good life and successful adulthood. Two particularly strong narratives of success emerged from the study, including different narratives of success through schooling and a narrative of success through labor migration. My study shows that youths navigate through multiple narratives of success, where some narratives may be constructed as dominant or minor, while others are either complementary to or competing with one another. Further, utilizing Michel Foucault™s theory of subject and subjectification as an analytical framework, I discuss the ways that rural youth participants are fiinvitedfl into procedures of success-subjectification, and in their agency, establish differing subject-positions against particular narratives of success. The study seeks to recognize local narratives regarding schooling, success, and the good life that shape rural youths™ various aspirations. I depart from the assumption that youths and families decide courses of action on the basis of differing notions of a good life and what a successful transition into adulthood looks like, which may but does not necessarily involve continuing participation in schooling. This dissertation explores the complexity of local contexts that shape youths™ educational, employment, and even migratory aspirations.                      Copyright by ISABELLA TIRTOWALUJO 2016        v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS    A decade ago, I was inspired to enter the field of Education and Teacher Education while working alongside undergraduate students at a teacher preparation program in the suburbs of Jakarta who were then in their late teens and early twenties. At a relatively young age, some of them were already eloquent in articulating their commitments to creating a better Indonesia and future through education one student at a time, even when it meant entering contexts that still to this day present many challenges: rural schools. These youths inspired and led me to ask the difficult questions that had over the span of about ten years evolved into this dissertation. I am forever grateful for their extremely contagious passion. This research would not have been possible without the youth, teacher, and adult participants who welcomed me into their midst and were willing to help me see through the window into their thoughts, experiences, and world. I am extremely thankful to my four hosts who welcomed me into their homes and lives, the teachers who allowed us to be vulnerable in the interview space, and the youths, who with much courage were all carving their paths forward despite obstacles that came their way. The youths I encountered through the studyŠCitra, Putri, Hery, and othersŠwere among the individuals I returned to frequently in my mind during the difficult days and nights of drafting the dissertation, as I realized again and again how important it was to tell their stories, and how humbled I was to know that my own growth and success was made possible by their stories of perseverance, heartbreaks, and struggles in overcoming life obstacles that I and many privileged others never had to go through in our lives. They keep my wonderings, passions, and commitments alive for a better and more critical understanding of  viunjust systems and structures that perpetuate expressions of marginalization, and what responses and actions are needed. Dr. Lynn Paine, my advisor and chair of my dissertation committee, has provided me with much guidance throughout the different phases of the dissertation project. Lynn has supported me through her friendship and encouragements when I doubted my own abilities. She asked extremely good questions that furthered my thinking toward productive ways to progress with the analysis and writing of the dissertation. Lynn is undoubtedly the person who has made the biggest impact in my professional and academic growth while at MSU. I am also extremely thankful for the support and guidance of my committee members, Dr. Laura Apol, Dr. Amita Chudgar, Dr. Kristin Phillips, and Dr. Avner Segall. Their various questions and encouragements along the way pushed me to be a better researcher and thinker, and to produce better research and writing. I want to thank my fellow dissertators, writing partners, colleagues, and dear friends who made this journey never a lonely one: Gerardo Aponte Martinez, Abraham Ceballos, Natasha Perez, Lorena Gutierrez, Amal Ibourk, Iwan Syahril, Sarah Riggs Stapleton, Sakeena Everett, Dwi Yuliantoro, and many others in the MSU College of Education. My conversations with each of them clarified the thinking behind the paragraphs in this dissertation. I am also grateful for the support and friendship I found in the MSU and East Lansing community, including folks at the East Lansing All Saints Episcopal church, the Global Educators Cohort Program (GECP) family, the LATTICE family, the MSU PERMIAS family, and the Sawyer-Koch family, especially Barb, Don, and Leah. They have become home away from home for me.  viiA special gratitude and love goes to my family. I am who I am now largely also because my parents are who they areŠwonderful, loving, and wise individuals. Their love grounds me. Both their direct and indirect support sustained me throughout the PhD journey and dissertation writing. My partner, Alex Lilley, has also supported me through the roughest moments during the mad dash to the finish line, and for that I am extremely thankful. Lastly, I express my gratitude to MSU and the College of Education for their generous and crucial support to my research through the Dissertation Completion Fellowship.    viiiTABLE OF CONTENTS    LIST OF TABLES .................................................................................................................. xi  LIST OF FIGURES ............................................................................................................... xii  CHAPTER ONE .......................................................................................................................1 Youth within the Development Discourse ................................................................................1 Introduction ..........................................................................................................................1 Purpose Statement ................................................................................................................7 Conceptualizing and Defining Youth ...................................................................................9 Youth in Indonesia and Contemporary Indonesian Youth Studies: Review of Literature ............................................................................................................................................. 10 Contemporary Indonesian youth studies ........................................................................ 10 Literature on Indonesian rural youth ............................................................................. 13 Layout of Dissertation ........................................................................................................ 14  CHAPTER TWO .................................................................................................................... 19 The Study: Frameworks, Contexts, and The Mechanics ....................................................... 19 Modernity, the Rural-Urban Tension, and the Postcolonial Condition ............................ 19 Modernization theory & schooling ................................................................................. 19 Modernity and rurality: Implications on the imagination of rural spaces and identities .......................................................................................................................................... 21 Modernization and postcoloniality: Critiquing developmentalism ............................... 23 Conceptual Framework: Success, Discourse, and the Subject .......................................... 24 Success ............................................................................................................................. 24 Success discourse ............................................................................................................. 26 The Study: Research Site, Data Construction, and Analysis ............................................ 27 The research site .............................................................................................................. 27 Fieldwork: Three villages, four hosts, and five weeks.................................................... 29 Site selection..................................................................................................................... 32 Lampung Christian School ........................................................................................... 33 Rural and private education in Indonesia .................................................................... 34 Data construction ............................................................................................................ 35 Interviews ..................................................................................................................... 35 Observations ................................................................................................................. 36 Reflections on methodological decisions for data construction .................................... 38 Data analysis .................................................................................................................... 40 Reflections on methodological decisions and data analysis .......................................... 42  CHAPTER THREE ................................................................................................................ 45 Youths™ Success Identities and Definitions of Success ........................................................... 45 Success in Bahasa Indonesia ............................................................................................... 47 Success Identity of the Entrepreneur ................................................................................. 49  ixEntrepreneurship as alternative to labor-intensive work .............................................. 51 Entrepreneurship, knowledge, and commodities ........................................................... 53 Entrepreneurship and the economy................................................................................ 55 Success Identity of the Professional/Occupationalized Self ................................................ 56 Teacher success identity .................................................................................................. 58 Gendered occupation-based success identity .................................................................. 61 A Family-Relationship Based Success Identity .................................................................. 62 Care .................................................................................................................................. 62 Forms of care: Gendered articulation of a family-relationship based success identity . 64 Children and youths™ work: Care as extending home-life roles and expectations ........ 66 Filial piety: Making parent happy and obedience over personal preference ................ 70 Marriage: Gendered spousal experiences and expectations .......................................... 74 Success Defined ................................................................................................................... 77 Success and the economics of aspirations: Sufficiency, stability, and security ............. 78 Success as achieving self-reliance, building a sense of efficaciousness, and independence ................................................................................................................... 80 Good social standing and earning respect as successful................................................. 81 Success as the ability to care for and be close to family ................................................. 83  CHAPTER FOUR ................................................................................................................... 85 Narratives of Success through Schooling ............................................................................... 85 Success through Schooling: Dominant and Minor Narratives .......................................... 86 A dominant narrative ...................................................................................................... 86 A minor narrative ............................................................................................................ 89 Markers of schooling: Narratives of success operationalized ........................................ 93 Homework and teacher presence .................................................................................. 94 Grade promotion and retention .................................................................................... 96 The national examination ............................................................................................. 99 Critical Voices and Gaps within a Narrative of Success ................................................. 102 They don™t have skills: The limitations of the dominant narrative ............................. 103 Those who succeed are those who get an opportunity: The limitations of the minor narrative ........................................................................................................................ 106 One narrative, two stories: The case of class difference .............................................. 110  CHAPTER FIVE................................................................................................................... 116 Narrative of Success through Labor Migration ................................................................... 116 Labor Migration in a Changing Regional, National, and Local Economy ..................... 117 TKIs in East Lampung regency and labor migration aspirations among youths ....... 121 TKI work, placement, and application ......................................................................... 123 fiWorking as a TKI Can Really Help Us Become Anything:fl Narrative of Success through Labor Migration ................................................................................................. 128 Success as economic empowerment and accumulation of capital ................................ 132 Gaining respect and increasing social status within the community ........................... 135 Labor migration as a family matter.............................................................................. 137 Labor Migration (Not) for All: Complementary and Competing Narratives of Success ........................................................................................................................................... 139  x Costs and hidden risks behind the potentials of labor migration ................................ 143  CHAPTER SIX ..................................................................................................................... 146 Success Discourse and Youths as Success Subjects .............................................................. 146 From Narratives to Success-Subjectification: Reframing Youths™ Narratives of Success ........................................................................................................................................... 151 Success discourses, subject, and subjectification. ......................................................... 153 Invited into subjectification .......................................................................................... 159 Self-subjectification, choice, and agency....................................................................... 164 Final Story for Reflection: Subjectification and a Question of Moral Obligations ........ 170 Conclusion and Implications for Further Research ........................................................ 173  APPENDICES ....................................................................................................................... 177 APPENDIX A: Sample Interview Protocol for Youth .................................................... 178 APPENDIX B: Sample Interview Protocol for Teachers ................................................ 180  REFERENCES ...................................................................................................................... 182     xiLIST OF TABLES  Table 1            List of Youth Participants .................................................................................. 37 Table 2            Number of TKIs by Gender per-5 year Period between 1996 Œ 2007 ................ 119 Table 3            Number of TKIs by Gender 2010-2013 ............................................................ 120 Table 4            Number of TKIs from Lampung by Gender 2010-2013 .................................... 122 Table 5            Number of TKIs from Lampung Province by Destination Country between 2011- 2013 ................................................................................................................. 124  xiiLIST OF FIGURES   Figure 1            Percentages of youth and adults who had completed school by level of school, age, sex, and urban-rural residence in Indonesia in 2010. Reprinted from The Monograph Series No. 2: Youth in Indonesia, by Adioetomo et al., 2014. ........... 4  Figure 2            Recruitment poster for a flight attendant training program in Indonesia ............ 71  Figure 3            Number of TKIs by Gender 2010-2013. Reprinted from 2013 Placement and Protection of Indonesian Overseas Workers, by BNP2TKI, 2014 ................... 120  Figure 4            Recruitment poster for a flight attendant training program in Indonesia .......... 163  Figure 5            Recruitment of poster advertising opportunity to become a TKI in South  Korea.............................................................................................................. 163  1 CHAPTER ONE     Youth within the Development Discourse  It™s true that many parents here do not give guidance [to their children about their education]. The difference between here versus the city of Jogjakarta [is], for instance, here you may see gedung houses [tall brick houses, signaling that it™s newly built or renovated], but the owners are mere high school graduates. While in Jogjakarta the houses may be modest and everybody goes around on bicycles, but they all go to university. That™s the difference, the educational awareness–Oh yes, about 80 percent of the young people in this village urbanize to the cities, Tangerang, Jakarta, some go to [work in] Malaysia and other places abroad  (Village Secretary. Personal communication, June 2014).  Introduction As nations speculate and project the future of their economies within a global society, youth and adolescents have become central in their development agenda. Investments in the health, education, and overall wellbeing of children and youth are considered more important now than before in an ever-changing globalized knowledge economy. This manifests in the global youth discourses that center around building their capacities and ensuring their successful and healthy transition into adulthood and entry into the workforce (Adioetomo et al., 2014, p. i). Development and transnational agencies such as the UNESCO have called on governments to integrate these goals in their national development strategies (p. i).  For governments, a sizable youth demography is a double-edged sword. When the demography of individuals in productive ages far exceeds the non-productive populations, a country benefit from what™s been termed a fidemographic bonus.fl However, the youth bulge in the demography can cause overall economic strains if a majority of the youth population are low-skilled, unemployed, and unable to access educational services. Herein lies a shared global concern: youth unemployment and youth lacking appropriate skills and competencies to enter the workforce.   2 The rate of global youth unemployment has increased between 2007-2010 following the financial crisis of 2007-2008. It went from pre-crisis level of 11.7 per cent to 13 per cent in the year 2015 (ILO, 2015). And while there has been a widespread expansion of access to basic education in the last half of a century, the rates of youth illiteracy in many contexts around the world is still high, with net enrolment in post-primary education low. For example, in a recent 2014 report the UNESCO (2014) notes that poor quality education still leads to widespread youth illiteracy, where in low and lower middle income countries a total of 175 million young people, or one out of every 4 youths, are still not able to read all or part of a sentence (p. 34).  As the fourth largest country in the world with regard to its population, Indonesia™s youth plays a major role in shaping the future of the nation. In 2014, one in four of Indonesia™s total population is youth, comprising 61.8 million individuals (p. iii). In the past, through their political activism youth in Indonesia have turned the course of the nation™s history. For example, youth activists were key catalysts behind the liberation movement in the early 1900s towards independence in 1945. Also, university student activists ushered in the Reformation era marked by the toppling down of the Soeharto regime in 1998. At present, youth continues to usher economic and social changes, as they are important actors behind large social phenomenon, such as internal migration, urbanization, and de-agrarianization of Indonesia. It is the young who moves in search of employment in urban areas, leaving behind a rural future (Naafs and White, 2012, p. 4).  The success of a nation in managing its youth populationŠto turn a large youth population into demographic bonus, and not a threatŠis contingent upon effective policies and programs that can ensure that the youth workforce is trained with appropriate skills and that labor can be effectively absorbed in the form of employment with living wages. However,  3 widespread unemployment and underemployment in both urban and rural areas is among some of the challenges faced by Indonesian youth and the government (Tanu, 2014, p. 51). In 2012, 23% of urban and 33 % of rural youth between the ages of 15-24 were reported to be unemployed (p. 51). While more Indonesian youths are in education now than the cohorts that have come before them (Nilan et al., 2011, p. 711), transition into the labor market remains an obstacle for some groups of youths (Tanu, 2014, p. 51; ILO, 2015). The case is similar elsewhere in the world. Moreover, Australia-based political economist Christopher Manning (2010) notes that Indonesian secondary and even tertiary graduates struggle to find employment or are under-employed (p. 167).  While access to primary, secondary, and tertiary schooling continues to expand, Indonesia has yet to achieve universal primary education, with 92% of net enrolment in primary education per data in 2012 (World Bank, 2015). An equally great concern is that a significantly large portion of youth in Indonesia between 16-24 years old leaves school early. The net enrolment for junior secondary schooling is at 71 per cent, senior secondary at 51 per cent, and tertiary schooling at a low of 13 per cent (Adioetomo et al., 2014, p. 41). In other words, while only three in ten youth in Indonesia between the ages of 13-15 years are no longer in junior secondary school, one in two youth between the ages 16-18 year olds does not attend senior secondary school, and as many as seven in eight youth between 19-24 years old are not in college or enrolled in other forms of post-secondary schooling. When considering rural-urban differences (see Figure 1), data suggests that urban-rural gap for completion of both secondary and post-secondary education among 19-24 year old youth remains large (p. 50). According to a survey-based research conducted by Gyorgy Sziraczki and Annemarie Reerink (2004) for the International Labor Organization, Indonesian youths leave high school and college early because   4                                          Figure 1. Percentages of youth and adults who had completed school by level of school, age, sex, and urbanrural residence in Indonesia in 2010. Reprinted from The Monograph Series No. 2: Youth in Indonesia, by Adioetomo et al., 2014.    5 they either fido not like itfl or believe that fifurthering education will be of little use in their job searchfl (p. 51). In their EFA Global Monitoring Report 2013/4, the UNESCO (2014) states that education provides fisustainability to progress against all development goalsfl (p. 4). Moreover, David Baker (2014) notes that the present age is marked by a phenomenon of a so-called fieducation revolutionfl describing societies everywhere as characterized by: ever-greater proportions of successive cohorts of children and youth attend[ing] ever-longer and more sophisticated levels of formal schooling–[T]his massive regime of education has a powerful culture, transformed most individuals in the world, and created far-reaching consequences for all facets of society. Both the demographic and cultural impacts of the education revolution create what can be called a schooled society: a distinctly new social order where the practice and ideas of formal education are a central primary institution. (p. 6) Considering this idea, children™s and youth™s lives and futures are therefore largely imagined as organized by formal schooling. That youths would consider education and schooling irrelevant to their pursuit of successful transition into adulthood is, therefore, at odds with a dominant education-as-panacea perspective (Vavrus, 2003). This perspective has been iterated through various mission statements and reports published by intergovernmental organizations and development agencies such as the UN, the World Bank, USAID, the many others. If the schooled society fi[took] no prisoners, [where] all must compete in the highly cognitized environment of formal educationfl (p. 15), that means this faith in schooling created a set of shared and dominant understandings, expectations, and narratives of success and failures. Nations are highly monitored in their ability to ensure quality education for all. Further,  6 schooling is no longer a luxury but constructed as a necessity for participation in the society as a contributing citizen. As such, misalignment of individuals™ desires, aspirations, and performance as displayed by hosts of school-aged children and youth leaving school early may have its costs. I situate my dissertation within these massive and complex discourses surrounding youth. Youth are constructed as a generation that has the potential to usher nations into prosperous and thriving future. They also hold the potential to burden the economy, and even more alarming, serve as a threat to a nation™s social and political stability (Naafs & White, 2012, p. 8; Ryter, 2002; Tajima, 2004). I am interested in understanding rural youth™s aspirations and desire, which serve as the basis of their decisions during a time period in their lives where much transitions are expected to happen: continuation or entrance into upper secondary or high school, completion or leaving high school, entry into the workforce and/or post-secondary schooling. To understand this, I focus on gaining insight of how they define success and perceive what constitutes successful transition into adulthood. The events that occur during this period may shape much of their future activities, capacities, and opportunities as adults. In other words, what unfolds during these critical years may significantly shape the trajectories of a young person™s life with regard to future employment, development of economic capacities, the wellbeing of their families. I am particularly interested in how youth develop understandings of successes in light of the community or local context that situates their lived experiences. I focus specifically on a case where the community context features a relatively high proportion of youths who fall fioutsidefl of the hegemonic discourses surrounding their successes. This may be expressed in the rate of high-school aged youths who have left schooling that is higher or approximates the national rate of 49 per cent. This may also be expressed in a relatively high rate of youth unemployment. I offer the excerpt from an interview with the village secretary during my fieldwork at the  7 beginning of the chapter to evoke this sense of the setting, where there is a shared recognition that families within a community have low education fiawarenessfl or aspiration for the young. The excerpt also suggests that there is a recognition of how common it is to see youth leave the community to find work elsewhere, whether outside the province or the country. This provides a case where dominant discourses surrounding youth™s well-being and education within a particular locale differ from national, regional, even global hegemonic discourses.  Purpose Statement Using the case of one rural community in Lampung province, Sumatra, Indonesia, this study seeks to investigate and understand rural youths™ life aspirations. This rural community outside of Java provides a fruitful setting as a case of a community among many in Indonesia imagined or framed through education and development discourses as displaying low education aspirations. The study focuses on the voices of members of a community surrounding their conception of youths as leading a successful transition into adulthood. Very important in this endeavor is gaining insight from youths themselves about how they define success and what paths that can lead them towards achieving their notion of a good life or success.  Through interviews and ethnographic observations with members of this rural community, my study explores how members of this community imagine youth™s immediate futures in the context of perceptions of possible and preferable pathways to becoming (a successful) somebody (Wexler, 1992). The study™s purpose is to describe and explain what narratives of success are constructed by and for youth, both in light and despite of the ways the youth population in Indonesia is represented through statistics and numbers. By utilizing qualitative approaches to the inquiry, by including events, utterances, stories, and names of youths, I want to draw out the humanity behind the statistical representations of youth in  8 Indonesia. My goal is so that there can be recognition of local or counter narratives regarding success, education, the good life, and success that guide youths and families when they make decisions regarding the future of the young person and the family. Through this study, I hope to be able to provide insights into the complexity of local contexts that may contribute to depicting rural youths in specific ways, including at times from a negative light or a deficit perspective, such as the statistics of out-of-school youths, rate of completion for secondary schooling, and rate of unemployment. I depart from the assumption that youths and families decide courses of action on the basis of differing notions of a good life and what a successful transition into adulthood looks like, which may but does not necessarily involve continuing participation in schooling. My interest lies in reading aspirations, desires, and decisions as the articulation of subjects to the projects of fisuccessificationfl (Bradford & Hey, 2007), which construct recognizable desirable pathways from disadvantageous ones. This means while I am concerned with different versions of what it means to fimake itfl in this community, I am also interested in the ways that schooling helps form assumptions about what it means to become a successful somebody in this rural context. As discussed above, this is also in light of an encompassing or global discourse of the importance and potency of schooling in building the capacity of youths and preparing them for their futures. This study™s goal, then, includes to describe and explain the place of schooling within a rural community™s understandings of their youthŠincluding the youth™s understandings of themselvesŠas successful or otherwise. This dissertation is an investigation of narratives of success as indicative of a process of working through fia making of successful selves and othersfl (Bradford & Hey, 2007, p. 601). I examine how officialized discourses success associated with schooling are made sense of or negotiated by high-school age  9 youth and teachers. I am interested in what is in play as regards to the constructions of aspiration and images of success, and the promises made to rural youth regarding life with/after secondary schooling, when education is an activity around which youth™s lives are organized. Conceptualizing and Defining Youth In this section, I briefly summarize different frameworks of recognizing youth in both the social world and social science research. Studies on young people have focused on youth as transition, youth as identity, youth as action, youth as cultural practice, and youth as consumer and producer of culture (Jones, 2009; in Naafs & White, 2012, p. 3). However, the predominant framing of youth in social science research has been as transition. According to rural studies scholar Ruth Panelli and colleagues (2007), this is rooted in a filinear, transition-orientedfl (p.3) conceptualization of children, adolescents, and adults. Such a mindset positions them along a ficontinuum of agency, competency, and rightsfl (p. 3). Expressing this mindset, youth emerges as a period during which social expectations of transitions such as childhood to adulthood, school to work, and dependence to autonomy or self-reliance occur. Much research and data on youth conducted and published by governments and various large intergovernmental or development organizations reflect this dimension of youth studies. This study understands youth as such, in a transitional state of being. This study focuses specifically on youths between the ages 16-24 years old. This is the age range set by the Indonesian government describing typical ages for students in upper secondary (16-18 years) and post-secondary education. The age grouping in turn highlights a framing or recognition of youth as generation (Naafs & White, 2012, p. 4). The act of age-grouping of individuals done in and outside of research, by state and non-state actors, in policy, institutional, and popular discourses, suggests that age is fisocially constructed, institutionalized,  10and controlled in historically and culturally specific waysfl (Wyn & White, 1997, p. 10-11; in Panelli et al., 2007, p. 3). For example, while the Indonesian laws define fiyouth,fl or pemuda, as between the ages of 16 and 30 years old, the International Labor Organization (ILO) uses the United Nations (UN) age-grouping of 15-24 years. The latter has become the basis of statistics on educational participation and enrolment, as well as youth unemployment utilized in this chapter. Youth in Indonesia and Contemporary Indonesian Youth Studies: Review of Literature I situate this study within the intersection of several bodies of literature. Here, I will foreground two most relevant bodies of literature: research on contemporary Indonesia youth studies and research on rural studies of youth. I draw heavily from the empirical work of Lyn Parker and Pam Nilan (2013) on adolescents in contemporary Indonesia. I also draw from Suzanne Naafs and Ben White™s (2012) review of literature on Indonesian youth studies for the former, and from Panelli et al.™s (2007) scholarship on rural youth studies for the latter.  Contemporary Indonesian youth studies. Scholarship on youth in contemporary Indonesia is increasing in size especially within the past decade. Indonesian youth studies research cuts across different disciplines and thematic studies. The most researched topics include youths™ education, employment/labor or school-to-work transition (for example, Adioetomo, Posselt, & Utomo, 2014; Danu, 2014; Federman & Levine, 2005; Minza, 2012; Sziraczki & Reerink, 2004; A. J. Utomo, 2013; White, 2012; White & Tjandraningsih, 1992). Many also contribute to an understanding of youth and their religious identities, activism, and activities (for example, Hamayotsu, 2011; Hasan, 2010; Kailani, 2012; Kiem, 1993; Nilan, 2006; Rosyad, 1995; Sakai, 2012), as well as political activism and their involvement in political processes (for example, Hasan, 2012; Hassan, 2015; Lee, 2011a; Nilan, 2004). More studies  11have also explored youths™ sexuality, sexual behavior, and health (for example, Butt, 2007; Ford, Shaluhiyah, & Suryoputro, 2007; Harding, 2008; Holzner & Oetomo, 2004; Robinson & Utomo, 2003; Smith-Hefner, 2009). Lastly, youth studies focusing on gender issues have also proliferated (Idrus, 2013; Lee, 2011b; Webster, 2010).  The research on youth has largely focused on urban youths (Naafs & White, 2012, p. 4). This in fact reflects a tendency within the larger context global youth studies (Panelli et al., 2007, p. 4). Moreover, much of the research on Indonesian youth focuses on males. These studies on Indonesian male youth have framed and constructed their identities not only as movers and shakers who bring about political and social change (Naafs & White, 2012, p.7), or as the hope and savior of the nation™s economic development and prosperity, but also at the same time a threat to public safety, and social and political stability (p. 7). Research on Indonesian youth specifically relevant to this study frames youth as transition. White (2012) notes that as more youth prolong their education, their transitions from school-to-work as well as dependence on parental figures to autonomy and economic self-reliance are also prolonged (p. 1). As delineated above, large proportions of youth leave school early, and a vast majority of Indonesian youths do not attend post-secondary schooling. This may be associated to issues of unemployment and under-employment of secondary and tertiary graduates. Related to this, Parker and Nilan™s (2013) findings corroborate Naafs and White™s (2012) summary that in managing the risk of unemployment, Indonesian youth have resorted to relying on developing entrepreneurial and fisurvivalfl strategies (p. 11), exploring possibilities self-employment and working toward establishing themselves as entrepreneurs by opening or running small businesses (Parker & Nilan, 2013, p. 167). Naafs and White (2012) observe the increasing prevalence of fientrepreneurshipfl within national and policy discourses associated  12with youth development. This signals the government™s shift in the mindsets and policy approaches from providing jobs to inspiring and promoting entrepreneurship among young peopleŠa fineoliberal ideafl that youth should manage their own transitions and create their own jobs (p. 11). This shift serves as an important context for this study™s findings of youth™s entrepreneurial aspirations, discussed in Chapter Three. With regard to studies on aspirations of young people in Indonesia, one research involving 3,565 youth respondents found that education, family, and faith are among the features of a figood lifefl highest ranked in importance (Nilan et al., 2011, p. 714). The study provides important insight and context for this study, despite the authors™ intentionality of obtaining data from youths most likely to form fithe aspirational middle class of the futurefl (p. 712). In their discussion, the authors attribute strong value in family to a culturally predominant framing of one™s identity as based on one™s family-belonging or one™s place in society as rooted in one™s membership in the social unit of a family (p. 715). This means marriage and parenthood are also important goals for a majority of Indonesian youth, as they are a crucial marker of adulthood (p. 710). A discussion on family-relationship based success identity is included in Chapter Three. The study observed that respondents from locales that have a higher proportion of low-SES families, or places with significantly fewer private sector job opportunities were more ambivalent in ranking fiwell-paid jobsfl or fiinteresting jobfl than their counterparts from Solo, Bali, and JakartaŠlarger cities or metropolitan areas. As the authors indicated, economic contexts and structures influences the ways youth construct their work or career aspirations. These also significantly influence youth™s educational aspirations (p. 716).  While this study has contributed to knowledge regarding youth and adolescents aspirations in Indonesia, there is still a gap in our understanding of work, education, and life  13aspirations of large proportions of those who left schooling early. Literature on Indonesian rural youth. The literature on contemporary Indonesian youth studies has been growing, and yet not much is known about rural youth in particular. The works of Nilan and colleagues (2011), which incorporated youths from rural locations in their survey, Suzanne Naafs (2012), and Ben White™s (1992; 2012) are among the few exceptions. Summarizing what is observed among rural population of youth in Indonesia, White (2012) notes that one third of Indonesian youth between the ages 15-24 years living in a rural area are unemployed (p. 1). Moreover, while agriculture is still the biggest rural employer, more and more young people are leaving farming and rural futures (p. 1). White argues that the de-skilling of youth of their knowledge in agriculture largely through formal education, the social construction of farming and the rural life as downgrading or having a low status, the lack of governmental support for small-scale agriculture, and youth™s inability to purchase farmland are among the factors that contribute to this phenomenon of rural youth leaving and abandoning a future in agriculture (p. 10). Families also commonly encourage their young to migrate, whether to further their education or seek employment in urban settings (p. 9). Some of these findings are iterated in this study. This dissertation attempts to fill the gap in research focusing specifically on aspirations and narratives of success of a sub-group of youth in Indonesia, in light of experiences of schooling, working, and growing-up in a rural context. As mentioned above, rural places have a predominantly lower rate of participation in post-primary education, and relatively higher rate of unemployment. A better understanding into the lived experiences of rural youth and ways that aspirations and desires regarding the future are constructed may produce insights as to whether and how current structures and institutions designated to empower youth and support the  14development of youths™ capacities both succeed and fail.  More importantly, aspirations and decisions regarding immediate educational and work-related pursuits interact with and are shaped by socially constructed notions of the good or successful life as an adult. Discourses constructing ideas of success also develop understandings of what paths, steps, or processes are not only possible and achievable for youths, but also preferable. This is the study™s main point of departure. This study™s goal is to shed light on the multiple ways success is defined by rural youths and communities. The following research questions guide my inquiry: Ł What narratives of success are constructed for and by youth within this rural community? What definitions and imaginations of success and a good life are expressed? And what do the narratives construct as pathways that lead to success?  Ł What is the place of schooling within this community and youths™ narratives of success? And what local iterations of narratives of success through schooling exist within this rural community?  Ł In light of structural challenges and relatively observations of low enrolment of Indonesian youth in secondary and tertiary schooling in rural contexts, what may make any narrative of success associated with schooling problematic within this community?  Layout of Dissertation This dissertation is divided into three sections. The first section, Chapters One and Two, focus on situating the study in the larger global and national discursive context, and on the study itself. The second section, Chapters Three, Four, and Five focus on delineating the success discourses that construct the study participants™ different understandings, framings, and narratives about success. In the last section, Chapter Six, I conclude with a discussion on what  15new set of framework and questions are made possible in light of insights the study has allowed.  In this first chapter, I stage the issue underlying the study against national and global discourses that position youths and adolescents at the center of the development agenda. As laid out above, more and more states and social actors are invited to prioritize investing in the education and health of children and youths. Much of the rationale is lodged within a humanistic and economic discourse. This investment is crucial in ensuring youths™ readiness, participation, and contribution to the workforce, economy, and overall local and national development. Tension emerges when on the one hand larger cohorts of Indonesian children and youths are able to access health care, education, and enter the workforce, yet on the other hand, staggering proportion of them are still not participating in education at the upper secondary level and tertiary level.  Chapter Two describes and explains underlying theoretical and conceptual frameworks of the study. I contextualize a global and national development discourse within the modernization agenda, and discuss implications for national and popular visions for education or schooling. I then offer theoretical considerations of how the firuralfl is constructed and placed within the modernization agenda, which again shapes visions of schooling in a rural context are drawn. I conclude the discursive setup of the study by providing a brief discussion on postcolonial perspectives and theory, which offer a critique of modernization agenda. I proceed by laying out the fimechanicsfl and reflections on methodological decisions shaping this dissertation. I discuss concepts that drive the study and how they inform data construction, analysis, and representation of findingsŠsuccess, narrative, discourse, and subject. I also include in this chapter ethnographic accounts on data construction and the fieldwork experience. The aim is to illustrate and provide detailed information on sources of data for this study, the study participants, the research site,  16and the processes of data construction and analysis. Chapters Three, Four, and Five focus on study participants™ success discourses. They feature both the voices of youth and adults, including teachers. To frame the discussion of success discourse, I invoke the metaphor of a journey utilizing terms such as itinerary, destinations or end goals, and routes or paths. For example, success discourse as represented or organized through a narrative of success lays out an itinerary of aspirations and desires or an imagined set of end goals. They in turn articulate versions of success, as well as paths that lead toward successful adulthood.  In Chapter Three, I lay out youths™ positive futures and imaginations of success as adults. Drawing on interviews with youths, I frame their discursive move when engaging with the notion of successful adulthood using the term fisuccess identities.fl I then provide a brief discussion of three particular success identities: the entrepreneur, the professional/occupationalized self, and the good family member. I discuss the social and cultural contexts situating these three success identities. I then offer a discussion of the ways these success identities articulate underlying definitions of success. These definitions of success as end goals or destinations within a fisuccessification projectfl set up a discussion in the subsequent chapters, which focuses on different routes or paths to success as represented in different narratives about success. Chapters Four and Five focus on two different narratives of success. In Chapter Four, I lay out a set of narratives of success that imagines schooling as a path toward success. I describe and explain two distinct narratives of success through schooling: one constructed as a dominant narrative and another as a minor narrative. Drawing heavily from interviews with teacher study participants, I reveal the different ways that schooling is fiput into discoursefl (Foucault, 1990, p.  1711). I discuss what fimarkers of schoolingfl serve as a point of distinction to establish what teachers in this school define as real schooling, as oppose to fishamfl schooling that they observe in fiotherfl schools in the community. These markers and distinction articulate teachers™ perception on the purpose and benefit of schooling, the role of schools, teachers, students, and families, and as such, two distinct narratives of success through schooling. To conclude the chapter, I use the stories of two youths to illustrate the ways that a narrative of success through schooling interacts with an individuals™ social locations within the society-at-large, especially their socio-economic background. Chapter Five highlights a different narrative of success. Drawing on both interviews with youth and teacher participants, as well as fieldwork notes, I explore a powerful narrative of success within this rural community, which involves youth™s labor migration. This chapter then provides a brief summary of the histories of export of labor and the Tenaga Kerja Indonesia (TKI). TKIs are cohorts of Indonesians workers who migrate abroad as overseas contract workers through government programs, which started in the mid-1980s. By doing that, I seek to establish labor migration as an artifact of its historical contextŠthe changing global, regional, and national economies, with implications on young people, their aspirations, and decisions related to their education, work, and life aspirations. Chapter Six as the concluding chapter brings together the study™s findingsŠdefinitions of success projected onto success identities, narratives of success through schooling, and a narrative of success through labor migrationŠin a discussion of the ways they articulate differing successification agenda-s or projects. I discuss a new set of framework rooted in Foucault™s theory of subject and subjectification afforded by the current analysis. I delineate three main implications or what the shift in frameworkŠfrom narrative of success to success- 18subjectificationŠwould allow. Firstly, utilizing Foucault™s theory of the subject, I display the ways that different narratives of success construct different success Subjects, or fisuccess-subjectificationfl procedures. Secondly, I discuss how discourses are not neutral but articulate power relations, which lead to youths being invited into particular success-subjectification procedures. Thirdly, I investigate the notion of youths™ self-(success)-subjectification, their agency, and the notions of choice in the face of individuals™ vulnerabilities as subjects to be constructed through specific success discourses. I then offer a brief exploration of a new set of questions that is afforded by this shift in framework.   19CHAPTER TWO    The Study: Frameworks, Contexts, and The Mechanics  I am interested in how a rural community makes sense and understands success and especially what it means for the lives of youths and adolescents, and the construction of their work, education, and life aspirations. I begin with a theoretical exploration of the rural context, particularly modernity, urbanity, and postcoloniality. Modernization theory provides a way into understanding the assumptions behind the social and private benefits of schooling. I then engage in a historico-political theorization of rurality to briefly explore the ways modernization agenda discursively constructs the firuralfl and what implications that has on rural schooling as an social enterprise. Lastly, I will include a discussion of postcoloniality theory as a way to explore tensions produced when assumptions behind the grand narrative of modernity and its agenda do not hold.  Modernity, the Rural-Urban Tension, and the Postcolonial Condition Modernization theory & schooling. Modernization theory portrays societies as going through a linear progression of development through a series of uni-directional shifts, from  fitraditionalfl or pre-modern to fimodernfl ones. As a grand narrative, modernization can be understood as having both a socioeconomic dimension and a cultural-pscyhological dimension. The socioeconomic dimension of modernization describes the development of societies through a shift from traditional agrarian-based economies characterized by subsistence level of productions, to industrial manufacturing-based, and more contemporarily, knowledge-based economies characterized by a capitalistic mindset. The latter, the cultural-pscyhological dimension of modernization describes a shift that happens at the level of the individual and their  20psycheŠtheir identities, values, and behaviors (Inglehart & Welzel, 2005; Inkeles, 1975).  Political scientists Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel (2005) have argued that socioeconomic modernization produces coherent changes in cultural values (p. 2). This manifests in shifts toward valuing individual autonomy, (gender) equality, and democratic values (p. 2). Furthermore, modernity theorist Alex Inkeles (1975) valorizes certain ways of being as symbolizing progress, for example, becoming an informed citizen with a sense of personal efficacy, being independent and autonomous in his relations to traditional sources of influence, valuing education and technical competence, and being open minded and cognitively flexible (pp. 325 & 328). In the process, some traits become associated with fitraditional,fl denoting backwardness and being behind the times.  Modernization holds that economic growth increases the nation-state™s ability to ensure the welfare of its citizens (Di Vittorio, 2006, p. 145). And as mentioned above, socioeconomic modernization leads to a shift toward valuing democratic ideals, a growing sense of autonomy and equality (Inglehart and Welzel, 2005). This is an important context for the expansion of education and in understanding schooling as a modernizing project. In light of images of modernity, education takes on a purpose of creating the modern man. Theodore Schultz™ (1961) human capital theory captures this notion of economic growth produced through investment in human resources, and hence, public education.  At the same time, modernity constructs particular imaginations of rural spaces and identities, as values and ways of being are reconfigured into the traditional-modern spectrum. Rural schooling becomes a context in which children and youth most clearly become subjects articulated inside the schooling-as-modernizing paradigm. The next section discusses the relationship between modernity and rurality. I illustrate the tensions that arise for rural schooling  21in an urban-centric society. Modernity and rurality: Implications on the imagination of rural spaces and identities. Modernization theory defines societal progress as the shift from a predominantly rural-agrarian society to a largely urban-industrial society, or urban-postindustrial society (Broberg, 2008, p. 165; Stoeckl, 2008, p. 26). Furthermore, Alex Inkeles™ (1965) study on traits of the modern man drew a direct link between rurality and distance from modernity in his use of the OM scale (or overall measure of modernity), which refers to measures of fiexposure to modernizing experiences and institutionsfl (p. 330) quantified in deciles. Observe the following note on the definition of the least modern decile of the sample population:  Those in decile 1 were rural [emphasis added] resident farmers with the least education, least contact with the mass media, and least urban experience. The more contact with the factory, the city, the media, and the school, the higher the decile position of the respondent (p. 330). Here, we can see how the traditional-modern continuum utilizes rural-urban concepts that align urban with modern and rural with least modern or traditional. Rural studies scholars Paul Theobald and Kathy Wood (2010) offer a historico-political theory of rurality, a genealogical analyses of current imaginations of the rural. They posited that historically during the era of European feudalism, rural interests dominated the political arena. The great turning point came with the rise of the bourgeoisie, groups of bankers, factory owners, skilled craftsmen, insurance dealers, and shipping magnates at the dawn of the industrialized era in England. This produced tensions as the middle class group vied for more control over the policy arena to further their interests (p. 19). As the status of industrialists and those whose occupations financially depended on manufacturing and trade increased, the social status of  22farmers and rural dwellers decreased. The authors note that by the second half of the nineteenth century this rural-urban status reversal was nearly complete, further solidifying the notion of the rural-urban divide. The scholars argue that urbanity as a conceptŠwith rurality as its conceptual fiotherflŠis a prerequisite to the birth of modernity (Theobald & Wood, 2010; Zijderveld, 2011). Rurality becomes associated with not only notions of lack and limitations, but also backwardness, and ignorance (Kannapel & DeYoung, 1999; Phillips, 2009; Pigg, 1992; Theobald & Wood, 2010), the antithesis of urbanity. Past and contemporary normalized cultural messages construct the rural identity as fiuncouth and unsophisticatedŠa hayseed, hillbilly, cracker, yokel, hick, or country bumpkinfl (Theobald & Wood, 2010, p. 18).  Contextualizing their scholarship predominantly in the Rural North and education in the U.S., rural education (RE) scholars have illustrated how rurality, urbanity, and modernity normalize certain narratives of success. Education reforms have in increasing degree framed accountability in terms of test-scores, privileging standardized curricula over accountability to the context of local people and places (Schafft & Jackson, 2010). Furthermore, while centralized common curricula are intended to endow all students intellectual and social capacities needed for living in a democratic and economically progressing society, they relay messages of marginalization and fisubparfl rural identity (Theobald & Wood, 2010). These generic capacities meant to be negotiable fianywhere,fl make the lesson to belong to an fielsewhere communityfl extremely powerful (Corbett, 2010). This is evident in the ways measures of success in schooling through test scores serve as proof that rural youth, like their suburban and urban counterparts, are up to the standards of other places, and even other societies (Howley & Howley, 2010). Values associated with cosmopolitan living and modernity are promoted to a much stronger degree, including in popular media, in education and through schooling. Schools have been the principal  23institutions where young people learn authoritatively to leave rural places, as lessons on identity prepare them with the willingness to embrace departure (p. 46). Accounts on rural youth leaving their communities are well recorded (Butler, 2008; Carr & Kefalas, 2009). As mentioned, similarly in Indonesia, it is the young generation who are moving and migrating to urban centers. Modernization and postcoloniality: Critiquing developmentalism. While a theory of rurality contextualizes tensions produced by the promises of schooling and success discourses that elevate urbanity and the development of modern aspirations, postcolonial theory offers a critique of modernization agenda by examining the politics of representations and discourses of developmentalism. Postcoloniality examines how development discourse positions Third World nation-states as temporally being fibehind the West–inhabiting a period that lay in the dim recesses of the history of the ‚developed™ worldfl (Gupta, 1998, pp. 9-10), and spatially at the periphery of the Euro-American axis center (p. 10). It historicizes and politicizes modernity and its ideologies, and examines the global process of governmentalityŠa regulating and controlling that are not centered on the nation-states nor appear through explicit manifestations of power of a colonizing government (p. 23).  As societies and nation-states are articulated in relative economic-terms to each other, fiunderdevelopmentfl also becomes a form of identity (p. 11). Furthermore, as rurality and schooling are implicated by narratives of development, being fiuneducatedfl or fiunder-educatedfl also become forms of identity. According to Akhil Gupta, postcolonial conditions display experiences of modernity that are imbued with a sense of self-awareness of a temporal lag and spatial marginality (p. 11). In light of this, postcolonial theory provides fertile soil for an exploration of success discourses and schooling in a rural context in Indonesia. It allows for a reading of the subtexts behind decisions such as enrolling, attending, doing well in, completing,  24leaving, or failing high school. Having theorized the contextual background of the rural site, I now delineate this study™s conceptual frameworks. Conceptual Framework: Success, Discourse, and the Subject  Success. This study hinges on the concept of  fisuccess.fl Studies on success surrounding the experiences and lives of high-school and college-age youth feature different entry points. Researchers have looked into perceptions, definitions, and understanding of success, or in other words, what constitutes symbols of success and what they signify. This is a perceptual dimension of success. Studies explore individual or group perceptions of success by understanding how certain values, experiences, behaviors, and outcomes are desirable or preferable and associated with success. Many delineate different meanings of success as conceived by different groups of youth (see for example, Anagnostopoulos, 2006; Di Vittorio, 2006; Inglehart & Welzel, 2005; Inkeles, 1975).  Success is productive. Success in its multiplicity of meanings constructs aspirations, motivations, and expectations. Therefore, it is productive, in that, aspirations, motivations, and expectations articulate orientations and drive personal, social, moral, and even political agendas. Success produces desires that point toward it and are the bases of enactment and embodiment. Studies have looked into motivations and aspirations of various groups of youth, especially minority students on the basis of socio-economics, race, gender, and rural-urban residential status (see for example Anagnostopoulos, 2006; Del Franco, 2010; Kiyama, 2010; Ley, Nelson, & Beltyukova, 1996; Rao & Hossain, 2012).  Success is enacted and embodied. There is a behavioral aspect of success. Behaviors and actions constitute fidoingfl success. This is illustrated by Peter Demerath™s study (2000) in a case  25of an anti-academic student culture in the context of two high schools in Papua New Guinea. The author found that students associate certain behaviorsŠincluding language use, dress, consumption of goods, and, academic practice (p. 216)Šwith academic success, which in fact signaled a fiselling outfl to Western ideologies of individualism. In this case, behaviors such as academic disengagement communicated interpretations of schooling and the ideal persons individuals are suppose to be. Therefore, success, is intimately also linked to identity. Success constructs identities in relation to its definitionsŠthose who are successful and those who fail. This is illustrated in a study by Dorothea Anagnostopoulos (2006) on the promotion (and demotion) policy in the context of two urban high schools in the US. In the study, students were found to engage in what the author terms fiboundary workfl (p. 7), a process of socially demarcating self and others, during which students ficonstitute their identities in their everyday lives as they produce and interpret similarities and differences between themselves and othersfl (p. 9) surrounding ideas of school success, defined within the contexts of the use of standardized testing in schools and a district promotion policy.  Images of self and others surrounding the idea of success also have a temporal dimension. Success is articulated through time, especially in future orientations, for example, positive or negative futures (Schmid, Phelps, & Lerner, 2011; Schultz, 1961), aspirations (Bradford & Hey, 2007; Theobald & Wood, 2010; Zijderveld, 2011), appropriate futures (Demerath, 2000; Kapoor, 2002), and future security (Gupta, 1998; Rao & Hossain, 2011; Zijderveld, 2011). Time provides the space for individuals or groups to fiwork outfl success, which constructs the idea of difference between the points of fithenfl and finow.fl  Bridging the present time and future is the idea of a pathway, a route, or a corridor. An understanding of success in terms of pathways or routes that lead to it allow for analyses of two  26things: 1) the elements that construct the paths, and 2) the possibility a multiple routesŠfor example, preferable to non-preferable ones, conventional to alternatives ones (see for example, (Gupta, 1998; Rao & Hossain, 2012). Studies on youth and success do foreground sociocultural, historical, and policy contexts, communicating an awareness that perceptions, desires, behaviors, identities, future-orientations, and pathways associated with success are highly contextual and are in fact historical, political, and sociocultural artifacts. While my study explores the many facets of success reviewed above, my study embarks from a framework of understanding success as discourse. Success discourse. This proposed study uses a main conceptual framework of success discourse. Interpreting Foucault, Lynn Fendler (2010) proposes that discourse is a network of filanguage, actions, laws, beliefs, and objects that make our lives understandable (p. 16). This follows that discourse frames intelligibility through things said and those concealed (Foucault, 1990, p. 100). And while discourse is a fiproduct of collective thought and actionsfl (Fendler, 2010, p. 36), however it is sorted or filtered by ideologies and is, therefore, power-laden. Britzman (2000) similarly posits that individuals are fieffects of language, knowledge, power, and historyfl (p. 36). Informed by this understanding, I am interested in the fidiscursive factfl of success or what, as Foucault (1990) would say gets fiput into discoursefl (p. 11) and linked with success. This study explores the play of discursive elements and how successŠand a host of other possible thingsŠis put into discourse by and for rural youth. My focus on success discourse highlights my attempt of investigating the ways individuals become social subjects in whom are inscribed fisocial dispositions that carry the force of the wider social hierarchies of powerfl (Bourdieu, 1995, p. 18; in Bradford & Hey, 2007, p. 600). The subject becomes a primary fisitefl in which socio-cultural and political messages  27embedded in discourses of schooling, education, development, and progress converge and are worked out. I also seek to remain aware of ficompeting discourses of experiencefl (Britzman, 2000, p. 32) that shape youths and adults™ telling of definitions and narratives of success. The Study: Research Site, Data Construction, and Analysis The research site. This study is based on a month-long fieldwork conducted in a rural community in the East Lampung regency, in the province of Lampung. This district will henceforth be called by its pseudonym, the Pesanggaran district. Located in the Southern tip of the Sumatra island, the Lampung province is a major transportation and economic hub for the flow of both people and goods to and from Java and Sumatra. Lampung stretches over about 13,600 square milesŠabout the size of Maryland. Lampung™s mountainous land is crisscrossed by multiple rivers like strands of arteries that nourishes and irrigates the farmlands, giving families, the government, and large private corporations their palm oil, rice, cassava, cocoa, pepper, coffee, corn, and sugar cane. The wet season peaks around the month of January, while the driest months are around July-August. Lampung has historically been the destination of state-governed migration programs, providing context for the predominantly Javanese communities that now populate the province. The Dutch government was the first to facilitate the migration of Javanese from Central Java into Lampung starting in the early 1900s (Khoiriyah, 2014, p. 132). Between 1905 till 1969 there were about 433 thousand individuals who migrated to lampung and via government transmigration programs (Kementerian Desa, Pembangunan Daerah Tertinggal dan Transmigrasi, 2005, p. 1). Economic and political demographer Geoffrey McNicoll (1968) records for example that the proportion of Java-born population in Lampung rose from 26 percent of the local population in 1930, to 40 percent of the rural population of Lampung by  281961 (p. 53). And during Soeharto regime and his New Order governmental agenda under the Pelita I Œ V development programs, about 740 thousand more individuals from densely populated areas all over Indonesia migrated to Lampung. This resulted in the construction of whole new regencies, districts, and villages, including the East Lampung regency and Pesanggaran district (Kementerian Desa, Pembangunan Daerah Tertinggal dan Transmigrasi, 2005, p. 2). Migrants who participated in government transmigration programs responded to the incentives of free landŠportions of which were procured by the government from indigenous Lampungese communitiesŠ food for one year, and other types of assistance (Tajima, 2004, p. 13). Yukhi Tajima (2004), who studies ethnic-based conflict in different regions in Lampung province notes that this resulted in differing accesses to resources between predominantly Javanese migrants and indigenous Lampungese. This is an important context for my discussion of Lampungese youth™s labor migration in Chapter Five. Lampung™s demography of working-age individualsŠdefined by the Indonesian Statistics Agency as 15 years old and aboveŠis about 3.7 million (BPS, 2015), which is about 46 per cent of the entire population of 8 million people. This means that while at present, the non-working populationŠchildren and youth below the age of 15 yearsŠcomprise of over half of the population, the province™s population-curve is fibottom heavy.fl A predominantly young population holds great potential of contributing to demographic bonus within the next decade or two. This also means ensuring effective and appropriate investment in children and youths™ health, education, and well being is and will continue to be pressing for the Lampung provincial government.  Per data for 2013, the net enrolments of children and youth in Lampung at junior secondary, senior secondary, and tertiary education are at 75 per cent, 54 per cent, and 15 per  29cent respectively. These are all higher than the national average. In many ways, in comparison to 14 other regencies within the province, East Lampung™s fireport cardfl regarding its rates of youth employment and education denotes an fiaverage.fl The regency™s rate of net enrolments for junior and senior secondary school are only slightly lower than the provincial average; net enrolment rate for junior secondary is at 70 per cent in comparison the provincial average of 75 percent, and the enrolment rate for senior secondary school is 51 per cent in comparison to the provincial average of 54 per cent (fiAngka Partisipasi Murni–,fl 2015). However, East Lampung youth does have the fourth largest proportion of 16-18 years oldsŠsenior secondary age youthŠwho are no longer in school within the province, and the regency has the third highest proportion of population categorized as poor, which is 17.4% (fiPersentase Penduduk Miskin–,fl 2015).  About 476,000 people out of 1 million resident of the East Lampung regency are working age, among which 50% work in agriculture sector. While the proportion of those working this sector has decreased in the past five yearsŠfrom 59.7% in 2011 to 50% per 2014Šagriculture still employs the largest proportion of the working population (East Lampung Center for Statistics, 2015, p. 70). The second largest sector is perdagangan or trade, employing about 17% of the East Lampung working population. Related to this, the majority of trading activities are done both informally and through small enterprises. In year 2012, 270 out of 301 registered tradersŠa disproportionate majorityŠ are classified as fismall enterprisesfl (p. 236) or small-scale retailers. This serves as further context within the discussion of youths™ entrepreneurial aspirations. Fieldwork: Three villages, four hosts, and five weeks. I arrived in the Pesanggaran district in late May, as it was about to get hotter. The air was fairly humid and the mid-day sun aggressive. However, the morning air always felt cool, especially through the wind in my face  30and hair as I sat on the passenger seat during my morning motorbike ride from the fiteacher housefl to Lampung Christian School (LCS). For the first ten days during fieldwork, I stayed with four teachersŠmy first hostsŠwho were renting a house owned by the family who lived next door. The bike-ride to and from the teacher house and LCS was a cruise along a patchy asphalt main road that connects a few villages in the Pesanggaran district, including the three predominantly Javanese villages where I conducted fieldwork: Bolang, Batuanten, and Bakulan. The district has a population of 66 thousand people and is made up of 17 villages. The road ran alongside the irrigation canal built during the Dutch colonial era. We passed rows of village houses, small stores, mosques, an Islamic kindergarten school, a couple of churches, and a traditional market. There was a big lot where women would park their motorbikes and bicycles and load up the wooden carts perched on the back seat of their bikes with different kinds of vegetables, fishes, fruit, tempeh, tofu, breads, and shrimp, rice, and flour crackers. All the contents were then neatly divided and packed in clear plastic bags, secured airtight with thin rubber bands. Some would carry heavier loads on their bikes of basic household needs bought in bulkŠsacks of rice, containers of oil, and packs of sugar and flour. Women in colorful hijabs chattered and were busy with their hands. At a different time, Ibu Ika, my second host, the principal of LCS with whom I stayed for slightly longer than a whole week during my fieldwork, took me to the market with her one morning. Surely, the marketplace and traditional market trading was visibly a domain for women in this region. About 10-12 minutes into the bike ride, the rows of houses started to open to up to stretches of farmland that went vast as far as the eye can see. Some patches had neat rows of short paddies with their tips emerging from the muddy water, while others are dried up, post-harvest. Different patches of field had corns with differing heights, which according to Ibu Nia,  31my third host during the field, signaled the differing times they were planted, and may indicate how diligent or invested different farmers were. fiSome fertilized less often, and others used lower qualityŠcheaperŠkinds,fl she explained. Ibu Nia would know. She has worked the family farms with her late husband for decades. Since Bapak passed away just a year prior to my stay with her during fieldwork, Ibu Nia and her two teenage and youth adult daughters, were left to do the bulk of the physical work. Putri, her eldest, mentioned that farming does not provide individuals and families with much financial leverages nor help young people gain social mobility. This became important context for the notion of pluriactivity among members of this rural communityŠwhere individuals would engage in multiple types of income-generating activities, the most common would be both farming, opening and running a small business, being a government employee or working in a private corporation. Pluriactivity characterizes my fourth host, Bapak Amran. Pak Amran and his wife own farmlands, factories that process the natural resources, and one mid-sized department store selling everything from stationeries, clothing items, accessories, to household items, toiletries, and snacks. The store, Artumorro, employs a dozen young employees and Pak Amran provides housing for them, as well as organizes annual outing trips for the entire staff. Both Pak Amran and his wife are also Pegawai Negeri Sipil (PNS) or government employees with a civil servant statusŠa status associated with a fisuccess identity,fl as discussed in Chapter Three. Between the both of them, they run the farm-based business, the department store, and work full time, while raising their six-year old daughter. The house where the family lives stands tall along the main road alongside the canal, but hidden behind a few stalls or small stores selling pulsa or cellphone minute-cards. This is where I stayed during the last week of my fieldwork. The size of the house, the number of cars and businesses they own, and the places they™ve visited as displayed in over- 32sized framed pictures on the walls of the department store and house, all screams wealth. They were surely unlike many of the families in the community. They are the one percent of this district. What I refer to as the ficommunityfl constitute the three villages: Bolang, Batuanten, and Bakulan. They are situated adjacent to one another and are in fact a part of a geographical cluster of four villages in the Northwest side of the Pesanggaran district, connected through a main road that stretches alongside an irrigation canal that flows East-West. Bakulan is the furthest West of the three and borders with a different district. Bolang, next East to Bakulan, is historically Pesanggaran™s local central government. It now serves as the district™s capital and is visibly the center for economic activities for the cluster of four villages. The traditional market mentioned above is located here in Bolang. Batuanten, the most East of the three, is where LCS is located. While there are four villages within the cluster, the three villages situated my research activities, mobility, and stays during the fieldwork. With the exception of the focus group interview, and one phone-interview conducted while in Jakarta, all interviews and observations occurred in these three locales. All study participants included in this study either lived, went to school, or worked in these three villages. Site selection. The interest in and selection of the research site is due to a pre-existing relationship I have with teachers and staff at LCS. Furthermore, I am personally connected to one student in this school via a child sponsorship program, positioning myself as, in the words of Kevin Burke, an fiinterested (if not interesting) partyfl (p. 4) when it comes to youths™ aspirations and narratives of success through schooling. During a prior experience of sponsoring adolescents for their schooling, I observed that one of sponsored student ended up dropping-out after grade 11, while another sponsored student failed the National Examination at the end of his grade 12.  33This experience fueled my interest in understanding local contexts and realities faced by teachers and students in rural schools. A prior interview experience in the same site provided further insights into tensions surrounding schooling in a rural context, including accounts of whole-cohort failing the National Examination, and a crisis of faith in schooling. Lampung Christian School. The LCS is a part of a network of 44 K-12 schools and two universities under one private faith-based education foundation, or a yayasan pendidikan, henceforth referred to as simply the Foundation. Through its internal teacher preparation systems, pre-service teachers are trained in universities under the Foundation and are then assigned to teach in schools within this network as well as a dozen other mostly Christian partner schools. While the Foundation™s Jakarta central office makes administrative decisions with regard to recruitment, training, and professional development of administrators and teachers, the individual schools in 24 cities all over Indonesia are responsible for recruiting students in their particular locales. And while some schools under the Foundation are located in urban centers and are able to recruit students from families with a range of middle- to high-socioeconomic background, a majority of the schools are located in rural and remote areas, are less-resourced, and serve students from families with lower SES background. The LCS serves a small minority of Christian families in the predominantly Muslim villages around it, even though it also welcomes students of various religious backgrounds. Many families who live outside the village and even district send their students to LCS. These students would stay in Batuanten village and rent a room in houses around the school. While predominantly Muslim, there is a small degree of religious diversity within the Pesanggaran district, with about 65 thousand individuals identified as Muslims, 600 as Christians, 44 as Hindus, and 87 Buddhists, as well as 65 mosques, 26 churches, and 2 temples.  34Rural and private education in Indonesia. Indonesian private schools, more appropriately imagined as non-governmental schools, are predominantly faith-based. Some are Islamic schools called madrasahs officially governed by the Ministry of Religious Affairs, while others are known as yayasan schools (Bangay, 2005), referring to schools under the management of non-profit organizations and governed by the Ministry of Cultural and Education. While private schools in many other international contexts including the United States, Europe, and Africa tend to be associated with high status and fees, and cater to students coming from middle- and higher-income families, Indonesian private schools predominantly serve poorer communities (p. 168). An Asian Development Bank (1995) report noted that private junior secondary schools are often the only available schools especially for rural and economically depressed areas (p. 3; in Bangay, 2005, p. 171). The rural school selected for this study falls under the category of a yayasan school established purposefully in a rural area to address access issues for this rural community. Operating under a mindset of managing constrains and limitations, the Indonesian government heeds to recommendations of international agencies, such as the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank, of focusing investment in primary education. This is evident in the different proportions of public-private schools in Indonesia for the three stages of K-12 schooling: primary (grades 1-6), junior secondary (grades 7-9), and senior secondary (grades 10-12). While only 9% of all primary schools are private (13,229 out of 146,826), 52% of all senior secondary schools are private (6,084 out of 11,654) (Ministry of Education and Culture, 2012). In the Lampung province, 56.3% of senior secondary schools are private.  In terms of the number of secondary schools relative to primary schools, it shows a major disparity of 146 thousand primary school and only 11 thousand senior secondary schools. This  35suggests that access to further education beyond primary education declines. When combined with the realities of urban-rural disparities, rural youth who make it to senior secondary are in fact minorities. Data construction. Ethnographies and qualitative researchers employing ethnographical approaches do not fiproduce timeless truthsfl (Denzin & Lincoln, 2005). The varieties of entry points into my participants™ lives serve not to establish some sort of objective validity, but as an attempt to transform the world I seek to understand into series of varied representations (p. 3). The many interviews and interview moments mainly driving the data construction express a preoccupation with fispeaking subjectsfl traversing and rearticulating discourses, and displaying fithe extent to which others have entered into [their] own wordsfl (Keane, 1997, pp. 685-686).  Interviews. Data for this dissertation is mainly drawn from interviews with 16 youth participants from the community and six teacher participants from LCS. The youth participants were recruited mainly as I interacted with neighbors and individuals living in the vicinity of where I was staying. In addition, I met a few youth participants through my hosts and other participants. For example, the first two youth interviewees worked or lived close to the teacher house. Four other youths lived around the area where my second hosts, Ibu Ika and her husband, Pak Kar, rent. Another two were students at LCS, and five other were youths gathered from the area by Pak Amran, host number four. One youth who lives in Jakarta was introduced to me by one of the focus-group interview participants. I attempted to represent youths with varying backgrounds, including accounting for gender, faith-background, and whether or not they were still in school (see Table 1).  The interviews began the second day of my arrival in Pesanggaran. The evening prior, the neighborhood experienced the occasional blackout, which started around 6:30 pm, as it was  36already getting dark. My teacher hosts and neighbors agreed that different areas or regions must take turns experiencing blackouts, as fithere isn™t enough power.fl The blackout pushed me out of the house onto the neighbors™ porches, where I met the owner of the house the teachers were renting, and conveniently then recruited my first youth study participant. I managed to set up a time to interview her the next day. The study uses semi-structured single/pair and focus-group interviews. Five youths participated in a focus-group interview. Appendix A displays a set of protocols used for focus group and single/pair interview with youth. I brought into all the interviews questions on each of the dimensions of success discussed above: perceptual, productive, temporal, identity, and so on. These were mapped onto interview questions for all both youth and teacher participants.  Interviews with the six teachers at LCS occurred during the first two weeks into the fieldwork, as teachers were leaving in the middle of June. No typical teaching and learning activities inside the classroom occurred during my stay as the academic year was coming to a close. The grade twelve students had already taken their National Examination in March, and the rest of the students had already done their school end-of-the-year exam. Some were doing their remedial work. All but one of the six teachers are novice teachers who had recently graduated from a teacher preparation program based in a private university in the suburbs of Jakarta. As explicated above, LCS and this private university are a part of the same network of educational institutions under the Foundation.  Observations. This study relies also on participant observation in its conventional term, as an observation of human activities and the physical settings in which the activities take place (Angrosino, 2005). Common observations in educational research include observations on teaching or classroom interaction during class periods, interactions in the hallways or lunch  37   Table 1   List of Youth Participants Name Age Sex Activity  In-school? (Y/N) Marital/family status Faith back-ground Citra 20 F Working in the village: Trading - Runs the family sembako store N Married w/ child (single parent) Christian Reyhan 24 M College + Entrepreneur: runs a small copy center Y Married w/ child Islam Gus 19 M Working in the village: employee at a copy center N Single Islam Rinata 21 F Working in the village: employee at a retail shop N Single Islam Cahaya 18 F Working in the village: employee at a retail shop N Single Islam Zai 22 F Looking for work N Single Islam Olyd (18-20) F College + Teacher at the Islamic school Y Single Islam Gisi (17-18) M Waiting to go to college N Single Christian Stephen (17-18) M Waiting to go to college - Majoring in Nursing Y Single Christian Yanuar 17 M Entrepreneur: home industry - mushroom farming N Single Islam Febri 20 M Entrepreneur: home industry - fish farming N Single Islam Meiliana 20 F Working at home assisting parents with housework N Single Islam Yuanita 21 F College: Majoring in Economy Y Single Islam Adi 18 M Working at home assisting parents obtaining animal feed N Single Islam Apri 20 M Working at home assisting parents farming N Single Islam Elya 21 M Working: security guard for a private school in Jakarta N Single Islam *Pseudonyms          38rooms, or activities outside of the school. However, due to my interest in the social contexts of construction of youth aspirations and desires, my field observations includes a focus on my surroundings, the community at-large, and my conversations and interactions with various members of the community as represented and captured through field notes my stay in the community. I kept an electronic fieldwork journal where I would make several entries during the day, including any opportunity I had after every visit, interview, conversation, and random events that became productive moments for reflection.   Reflections on methodological decisions for data construction. Methodological decisions made prior to entering fieldwork and on the spot during my visit in the community have shaped what insights I™m able to gain. For example, my heavy reliance on interview data to serve as the basis of my analysis means that I was dependent on what youths were able to verbalize, articulate, and elaborate surrounding the topics that I inquired them about. Even though I was able to utilize notes from ethnographic observations to contextualize or corroborate patterns I saw from the interview data, I was largely dependent on what youths were able to say to draw conclusions on their narratives of success. What is important to note is that not all youths were equally able or willing to talk and expand at length. All 16 youths did not similarly include in our conversations references to relevant personal experiences and other stories that could provide me with a fuller picture of the meaning they were trying to convey. In my effort to anticipate this, I diversified the fientry pointsfl into what I wanted to understand from youths. For instance, as expressed in the interview protocol, I would ask them not only point blank about what they thought a successful or good life looks likeŠwhat kind of a person they envision embodies someone who is berhasil or successfulŠbut I also asked them specific examples of people in their lives whom they consider are successful individuals. For  39youths who were parents, I also asked what some of their aspirations for their children were, and what they thought they wanted their children to experience, be, and do in order to lead successful lives. And yet, it was clear that some youths in general are more able to express themselves more fully or carry out a longer conversation than others.  Related to this set of implications of the methods I employed, my analysis not only depended on youths ability to articulate their thoughts or willingness to elaborate and expand on what was said. It was also significantly shaped by the differing degrees of them having thought out what they view and define as success. Further, the shape of my data is tied to each participants™ ability to makes sense of what steps, processes, events, or actions can help them realize their definitions of success. Because I was specifically utilizing the concept of narrative of success, it positioned me more readily to draw conclusions from conversations with young people who were more clear and articulate about their aspirations and goals. In my analysis, I drew more readily from youths who had a better sense of direction for their future and some knowledge of what needs to happen in order to produce success-related outcomes This meant that due to the conceptual framing of the study, I was also less prepared to recognize youths™ narratives of success when they plainly stated that they weren™t sure about their plans for the future. I was also less able to draw from interview data with youths who, despite having a vision of what a successful adulthood look like, nevertheless were not able to speak much about what may help them achieve these goals. In other words, the questions that framed my inquiries were less able to help me gain insight from youths who were less articulate, not because they were shy or tended to be more quiet in the presence of strangers, but because they may not have thought through these questions in for themselves.  40Data analysis. The initial stages of data analysis involved transforming all data for the study into written text. This included interview with youth and teacher participant, and ethnographic observation. The process involved in transforming them into written text varied. While all interview sessions with teachers were audio-recorded, interviews with youth participants were not. As such, the first step of analysis of youth interview data occurred within not more than one to two hours after the conversations, as I transposed everything that was legibly scribbled on my fieldwork notebook into words in my electronic fieldwork notes.  As I read and typed up my notes after every interview, I am aware of my own role as the researcher and fiinstrumentfl mediating what can be known. Given the briefness of time between interview and transposition, as well as freshness of memory of the interview, there were times during this process when I would be able to reconstruct participants™ sentences verbatim, using key words and versions of shorthand writing in my notes. Other times, I would fill out almost-complete sentences that were otherwise missing various grammatical parts. However, a majority of the time, I kept the data as is and typed only what was handwritten, without additions. The boundary between when data construction ceases and analysis begins is in fact blurred. I interpret this as a part of an honest engagement with the implications, or constrains, of doing qualitative work where, as Britzman (2000) states, representation is always in crisis (p. 30), and the outcomes of any ethnographically informed work are production of textual identities, regulated fictions, and of knowledge that remains partial (p. 38). The first step of analysis of the teacher interview data was transcribing the interviews myself into its original language, Bahasa Indonesia.  Having prepared both types of interview data into written form, the analytical step involved multiple rounds of reading the electronic notes and transcription. I firstly focused on the  41data based on interviews with youths, before using the data based on interviews with teachers. I then wrote a set of memo-s on themes that emerged most strongly from the data, as I compare them with themes that emerged from preliminary analysis that occurred during fieldwork and was captured in my fieldwork journals. I also compared the themes with those built into my original interview protocols. Fieldwork journal from observations were consulted for context and corroboration, and became the basis of the ethnographic writing in this dissertation. While all interviews and conversations were conducted in Bahasa Indonesia, ethnographic observation dataŠor entries in my fieldwork journalŠwere in both English and Bahasa Indonesia.  From memo-s and notes developed for each interview data set, I developed a set of initial codes for analysis. I used MAXQDA, a text analysis software, to aid in the process of coding. This enables me to conveniently look up instances and contexts when certain words and phrases would be used, or the prevalence of certain ideas, perceptions or sentiments within the interviews. The exercise of sharing with and articulating to multiple colleagues what was emergent in the data also then helped me experiment with ways to organize the patterns that emerged. I occasionally returned to the research question as an expression of the frameworks and intent of the study to inform the decisions on the ways to organize and represent these patterns. A typological framework that became sustainably productive from the beginning stages of the analysis was the different ways that youth define or conceptualize success, as well as what are common post-secondary-schooling full-time engagements or fipathsfl that youths chose, that are associated with helping them realize their definitions of success.  The next stage of the data analysis involved writing and rewriting, and making decisions on how to best illustrate and represent the success discourses that shape youths™ aspirations and desires, and explain their decisions. I went back to each interview notes and transcripts, and  42consulted various bodies of literature that would inform my thinking and writing. In seeking to fireadfl discourses, I looked into the way things are framed, and for key and orienting concepts, reiterated words or terms, and eventually internal logics like puzzle pieces constructing a picture.  Reflections on methodological decisions and data analysis. Recall the ways that data construction for this study is dependent on youths™ ability to articulate their aspirations, definitions of success, and imaginations of successful adulthood. In addition, it is also dependent on them having thought it through for themselves. This has implications on data analysis. I was unable to equally draw from all of the interviews. In other words, I was able to draw from a broader base of empirical data to answer a certain set of questions, while unable to do so for a different set of questions. For example, it was easier to see patterns across all the interview data of what youth participants perceive and observe about labor migration as discussed in Chapter FiveŠfor instance how prevalent it is among the individuals within their social circles of family and friends who choose labor migration. However, I was only able to gain insight on how exactly labor migration becomes a narrative of success from fewer interviewees who provided more comments and context. Some youths simply put more into words in their engagement with my questions. This also means that a few youths are less written about. Among the youth participants, Cahaya and Gus, for example, were among the interviewees whose interview data were not as frequently cited in what became the dissertation.  While reading all interview data, I utilized a poststructuralist and critical lens to read success discourses and the articulation of subjects through discourses. In discussing the poststructuralist subject, Davies and colleagues (2013) description of fidifference,fl is helpful here. According to the authors, while a structuralist reading of difference is a matter of fiotheringfl through categories and categorization, a poststructuralist difference in the subject is a  43preoccupation with fiemergent possibilities within the multiplicities of being and knowingfl (p. 6). And so, in my analysis and listening to the voices of any one participant, I applied the following questions: Considering that social categories of class, gender, and religion are in play and yet are not static, what are ways that ideologies and the subject are articulated through success discourses, in the subject™s multiplicities of social locations? When and how do young people™s social locations matter (for example, their faith orientation, gender, social status, etc.)?  In the end, I was able to more readily notice the way gender in particular plays a role in shaping youths™ construction of narrative of success. With a relatively small number of study participants of sixteen youths, I was not able to systematically investigate patterns across different ethnicity and religious background. However, I was able to include an almost equal number of male and female participantsŠseven females and nine males and some patterns did emerge. Discussions on gendered success identities are included throughout Chapter Three. Further, socioeconomic differences and how that shapes youths™ narratives of success did not come up prominently through the interview data with teachers and youth. However, my field observation and the experience of staying with my third and fourth host and their families gave me more leverage. I eventually was able to observe how a young person™s narrative of success and trajectories in life are significantly shaped by their family™s socioeconomic background. This is included in Chapter Four. Finally, an artist who had crafted a piece of art capturing a historic moment made the following statement, fiit was a particular moment in time, and someone™s viewpoint has to take us through the story.fl Simulating the spirit behind this recognition of positionality and responsibility, what follows in the next few chapters is the fipartial knowledgefl (Britzman, 2000, p. 38) that resulted from my organization of fiinterpretive research momentsfl (Burke, 2010, p.  4485). Here, my histories, commitments, experiences, and concerns become relevant.  The next few chapters are a display of my attempt at sharing and treating with respect the voices of this study™s youth participants as they provide me access to understandings of their own definitions of success and imagination of paths that lead toward it. In various national and global discourses on adolescents, the youths in this study may be framed using terminologies borne out of deficit-perspectives, such as fiout-of-school,fl fiunemployed,fl or even fiat-risk youths.fl I will also delineate the ways that the teachers and community members, with whom I conversed, shared meals and rides, and in whose house I stayed as a visitor, project their hopes and dreams for the future of the younger generation.  I am humbled at the ways that some of the youths display commitment, courage, and agency in carving for themselves their journey ahead towards working out their successful selves, in the face of various socioeconomic and emotional/psychological challenges. I also hold on to an awareness of the ways that through this study™s writing I represent and, in a way, speak for them. Through the process of listening to and making sense of this study™s data, as well as of writing this study, I have been challenged to re-examine my own conception of the purposes and potency ofŠand faith inŠschooling in ensuring the growth, capacity building, and future well-being of youths. This study has opened up for me an opportunity to meaningfully engage with differing interpretations of the good life and success, and the significant role that schooling may or may not play within a specific narrative of success. Such is also my hope for the readers: to find themselves questioning their assumptions regarding the ways schoolingŠas different conception of schooling plays out in different local contextsŠboth fails and succeeds in enabling diverse groups of children and youth to realize their conceptions of a good life and successful adulthood.  45CHAPTER THREE   Youths™ Success Identities and Definitions of Success   When asked how they envision success for themselves, rarely did youths speak in terms of abstract decontextualized values and principles. They offer instead images of actors in a fifigured worldfl (Holland et al., 1998) in discourses of fibecoming somebodyfl (Wexler, 1992). The ideal successful future selves are projected onto ready molds of recognized roles and positions in a social world, or what in this chapter will be termed fisuccess identities.fl fiFigured worldsfl is a concept that describes socially organized and reproduced realities, or worlds, where individuals are firecruitedfl or enter as participants (Holland et al., 1998, p. 41). As participants, we perpetuate the figured worlds in and through our interaction, our intersubjectivities, and the roles we take up and play (p. 41). In light of Holland et al.™s notion of figured worlds, we can understand the notion of identity as: a concept that figuratively combines the intimate or personal world with the collective space of cultural forms and social relations–the imaginings of self in world of action, as social products–[I]dentities are lived in and through activity and so must be conceptualized as they develop in social practice. P. 5 Here, the authors point out that particular conceptual ordering of reality, meanings, and values we subscribe to then become the base for an understanding of one™s identity. This means that our understanding of self is a process that unfolds in cultural space and in light of social relations. In the context of this study, this definition of identity within a figured world provides a conceptual framework and departing point. When youth and teacher participants, even myself as the researcher, imagine ourselves and others as good or successful, we are engaging in a fluid  46construction of self (and others) situated in historical, social, cultural, and material contexts (p. 5). This means that how the current cohort of youth from Pesanggaran district imagine their successful adulthood may differ from the ways previous and future cohorts of youth from the same community imagine it. And how these youth construct their ideal future selves may differ from how youth from other regions construct their versions of successful selves.  In this chapter, I use the term success identities to explore youths™ projection of their idealized sense of self, which articulates both personalized and social or shared definitions of success. On this notion of identity production, Chicana/o studies scholar Luis Urrieta (2007) posits that individuals construct ficognitive understanding or mental self-making process of identity productionfl (p. 119), which is a conceptual task. Eventually they engage in the procedural, or the fiphysical engagement or practice of a new identityfl (p. 119). Success identities are outcomes of how youths consider, negotiate, resist, and adapt cultural messages regarding success. The first section of this chapter lays out the success identities that strongly emerge within youth participants™ success discourse, as indicated through repetition throughout my conversations with different youths. The three main success identities are: the entrepreneur, the professional/occupationalized person, and the good family member. I then offer a discussion of the sociocultural contexts surrounding these identities in the attempt of considering the ways they are emplaced within their figured world within this particular rural context. Moreover, as Urrieta (2007) argues, fiall identities have a set of ideas attached, explicitly or implicitly stated, that constitute what that identity is aboutfl (p. 122). The section that follows then offers an exploration of the underlying definitions of success that can be abstracted from these success identities.   47Using the metaphor of a journey, I liken the success identities and definitions of success that underlie them as a destination or end goal of a successification project, into which youths subject themselves. The analysis is drawn from all nine interviews and one focus group discussion with youth participants. However, before proceeding further, I now include a brief discussion of two words on which this study hinges, sukses and berhasil. Success in Bahasa Indonesia In bahasa Indonesia or the Indonesian language, there are two common words used to refer to success: sukses and berhasil. The word berhasil comes from the root word hasil (noun), which in itself means result, outcome, produce, or yield. Sukses, a loanword from the English words success, and berhasil are similarly used to refer to the accomplishment of a purpose, or the experience of yielding, gaining, or producing favorable or intended outcomes. In most cases, they are used interchangeably.  In some contexts, however, the word berhasil is more versatile. It can be used to denote one™s ability to manage a challenging or difficult taskŠfor example, berhasil meredam emosi penonton, or managing to control the crowd™s temper, or the phrase berhasil menurunkan tekanan darah or being able to lower one™s blood pressure. The use of the word sukses in these phrases would not be appropriate. In other contexts, the use of the word sukses means not only accomplishing a goal, but also doing so due to one™s relative advantage or competitive edge. Sukses seem to be more widely used in publication or book titles perhaps for marketing purposes, as in the follow examples: Sukses dalam Menulis Ilmiah, or Scientific Writing Success, and Rahasia Sukses Kepala Sekolah, or Secret to Success for School Principals. Replacing the word sukses with berhasil in these titles would take away a sense of its guarantee or confidence, and therefore selling point. The use of sukses instead of berhasil in these contexts would give a  48slightly altered impression from being able to do something or being good enough, to achieving great results. When used as a characteristic, the variation in meaning is slight. For example, orang sukses and orang berhasil both mean a successful person, or kehidupan yang sukses and kehidupan yang berhasil both refer to a successful life. Both orang sukses and berhasil can be associated with the person™s professional achievements and capabilities. However, orang berhasil may be a more inclusive term, associated with successes in other domains in life. One of my study participants™ use of berhasil in the following excerpt is an example of this:  For me, Bapak [or father], I would say he is berhasil. In the past, Bapak in fact has always wantedŠonce he retires [from teaching]Što go back into the field, not to be an entrepreneur. He wanted to go into farming, have gardens, take care of the vegetable plants. I think he is berhasil.  Here, the participant talks about his pensiunan guru father, a then recent teacher retiree. The use of berhasil above points to this general state of having reached retirement and completed a lifetime career as a teacher. As discussed later in this chapter, teaching is perceived as both an extremely common profession for individuals within this community, as it is associated with a position as a civil servant with good pension and, therefore, provision for old age. This interviewee associates success as having reached the point in life where his father can pursue his passions without having to work for an income: caring and tending a vegetable garden. While berhasil may also be a result of the completion of a professional career, the reference this participant made about berhasil is more encompassing. It includes an attitude of contentment and the ability to go into something one would be happy doing everyday, without having to worry about earning a living.   49In this study, youths in fact predominantly used berhasil in their speech. This means during the analysis of interview data, I was not able to see any particular patterns of usages and references. There were no instances where youth participants would repeatedly or exclusively use one word over the other. I reached similar conclusion when looking at data on the basis of interviews with teachers. Both words sukses and berhasil were used equally in frequency, and they were used interchangeably to each other. Having briefly discussed the terminologies of sukses and berhasil, and the context of their usage, I now begin with the success identities that strongly emerge from the data. Success Identity of the Entrepreneur  The converging theme of entrepreneurship as a success identity is salient within my conversations with youths. When youths talk about entrepreneurship, it is often about starting, opening up and running a business, and refers to activities involving trading, selling, or retailing. Note the following excerpts: Me:  What would you like to ideally be doing by the time you™re 30 years old? Citra: Have enough money to open a business, busy with the business/trading. Since the beginning, my grandmother taught me how to run the store, so I like it. In a different conversation: Elya: I want to have my own business at home, to make/create a business, while waiting on/caring for my parents. When I stayed with the teachers at the beginning of my fieldwork, Citra was my next door neighbor. She graduated from a nearby high school and worked helping run the home-based warung sembakoŠa small store selling basic groceries, which is the family™s entrepreneurial activity. At the time we had our conversation over the phone, Elya was working as a security  50guard for a private business in Jakarta. He grew up in the Bakulan village, and had been working and living in Jakarta for a year. Here, both expressed aspiration to become an entrepreneur. The terms Citra and Elya used in this context, buka usaha, punya usaha or bikin usaha, which means owning and creating a business, point to a sense of efficacy and ability to generate income through one™s own efforts. Usaha literally means efforts. Two young men who participated in the focus-group interview, Febri and Apri, talked about their own entrepreneurial aspiration and expressed this trait of a sense of efficacy in the excerpt below: Me:  What would you like to ideally be doing by the time you™re 30 years old? Febri: I want to be an entrepreneur, open up a small business. Everybody has his or her own fortunes. I™ll just be diligent with what I do now, if it doesn™t suit [or work out], then I™ll try something else.  Apri: Entrepreneur and run a business too. I want to have a business located in a strategic place, and to see what is appropriate [to sell], and see what people need [or what there is a demand for]. Here, Apri is referring to a knack for finding unmet needs from the point of view of someone ready to fiidentify unexploited specialities– [and] occupy those business nichesfl (Steyaert and Katz, 2004, p. 187). The entrepreneur-based brand of success is in being opportunity-driven. There are two dimensions of the entrepreneurial identity: the economic and the psychological (Vesala et al., 2007). The economic dimension of an entrepreneurial identity includes three factors: risk taking, growth orientation, and creativity/innovativeness (p. 52). Febri™s remark in particular speaks to this risk-taking attitude, overlaying a sense of being able to adapt or fitry something elsefl should the outcomes be found fiunsuitablefl or things just fidoesn™t work out.fl From a psychological perspective, the entrepreneurial identity is marked by a sense of  51self-efficacy, a belief that one is able to control, change, or affect one™s conditions and outcomes of one™s entrepreneurial pursuits (p. 52). This is also expressed above. Rinata, a young woman who works in the Artumorro department store also pointed to this while talking about his entrepreneur father. She remarked, fimy Father is the kind of person who, if something is lacking [or he sense that there is still a need for more], he will try to find other things, things that he could sell.fl Her expression of his father™s continual pursuit to improve, add into and expand the business depicts a growth-seeking mentality, which characterizes an entrepreneur.  Below, I turn to a discussion of how or why entrepreneurship becomes perceived as desirable and a success identity.  Entrepreneurship as alternative to labor-intensive work. A few youths talked about becoming an entrepreneur or running a business as an alternative to engaging in farm work. They constructed entrepreneurial activities as particularly distinct from the physically taxing and labor-intensive work of farming. Elya talked about being an entrepreneur or opening up a business in this way. In the following excerpt, his entrepreneurial aspiration is linked to helping a parent: Me: Among the older people and adult figures in your life, who do you see as living out a successful life? Elya: For me, Bapak [or father]. I would say he is successful. In the past, Bapak in fact has always wanted toŠonce he retires [from teaching]Što go back into the field, and not to be an entrepreneur. He wanted to go into farming, have gardens, take care of the vegetable plants. I think he is successful. But I pity Father, in his old age as a retired person. He isn™t as strong anymore. I want him to not have to go out into the field every day. He can have the field, but maybe he can just run the business at home, or we let  52other people work the farm, and we split the harvest/income. Here, going back into the field is constructed in opposition to entrepreneur-ing. Running a business can spare one from having to engage in manual work. In this context, wirausaha or running a business from home is something Elya prefers for his aging parent. The image of entrepreneurship he is projecting here is the absence of physical activity and manual work, perhaps of just waiting around for customers behind a counter in a store or stall, or handling finances behind a desk. In communicating their aspirations to me, youths spoke from their lived experiences that are intimately shaped by place, including the socioeconomic and labor structure of East Lampung, where 50 per cent of the working population work in agriculture sector (BPS Lampung Timur, 2015, p. 63). Citra brought up a similar point she expressed her interest in going into a different type of trading in the future: Citra: [By the time I™m 30, I want to] have enough money to open a business, busy with the business/trading. Since the beginning, my grandmother taught me how to run the store, so I like it–I want to trade small items that are high in value, like cell phone pulsa [or minute cards], or small electronics.  Me:  Why those things particularly? Citra: [Pointing to the sack of rice]. Sembako is physically heavy, makes you tired. Citra™s petite framing made her about half my size. The sack of rice she was pointing to would have probably been too heavy even for me to carry. This little episode disturbed my own conception of fihard work,fl as I pictured her carrying a sack or two purchased from the market on the back of her little motorbike once or more times a week. This points to the realities of the challenges of physical and manual work that most youth within the district and even regency are  53very familiar with. Work that is far less physically demanding becomes much more desirable. While running certain types of business may still involve physical labor, such as heavy lifting, there is a dimension of wirausaha that is to open, create, and run a business that may afford individuals to be exempted from it. Citra™s solution was to go into business where she can trade items that are small in size, weigh little, but have high economic trading value. Entrepreneurship, knowledge, and commodities. Indonesian youth studies researchers Lyn Parker and Pam Nilan (2012) observe that youths in their study ascribe a range of meanings to the term wirausaha or entrepreneurship. They report that, fiyoung people use the word ‚entrepreneur™ to cover everything from a rag-and-bone man or itinerant peddler to an exporter or contractorfl (p. 167). To this, the variety of knowledge that youths have acquired through their home life, their family™s economic activities, and their education becomes the basis of their entrepreneurial aspiration. This knowledge both delimits and opens up the type of entrepreneurial activities they may engage in. The more exposed youths are to different types of business and commodities, the more knowledge they would have as a base for their entrepreneurial pursuits.  The commodities most of the youths mention are mostly tangible perishable or non-perishable consumer goods, such as farm produce, farmed fish and livestock, groceries, foods, accessories, pulsa or calling cards, and clothes. Many youths within this study have much knowledge of agriculture and animal farming. Note Rinata™s expertise on, among other things, farming catfish and tilapia in the following: I was unemployed for about three to six months. But I was helping my parents™ farm, and I helped them out in the fields too. We sell the produce. We have rice field, vegetable gardens, with bananas, cassavas, tilapia and catfish. Catfishes grow fast, tilapias are more  54challenging–You cannot mix catfish [with other kinds], but they are resilient, they don™t die easily. Here, Rinata™s knowledge of agricultural processes serves as a base for a potential entrepreneurial venture. Other youths talked about opening up other type of service-based businesses: opening up a bike repair shop, a car wash and a garage, and providing copying and printing services. Speaking of her multiple entrepreneurial plans, Rinata expresses that she would like to open a different kind of business, stating: I want to open up a computer learning-center for children, so that children there [in West Lampung, where she™s from] can have this knowledge too. Nowadays, you need to have computer skills to do pretty much anything– Now I already have an online clothing business. Because in the past I had a friend who had gone into online business–Now I do online selling through Facebook and Blackberry Messenger. Rinata™s other entrepreneurial plan of opening a computer-learning center is what distinguishes her from my other youth participants™ regarding their entrepreneurial aspirations. She was the only youth among all the participants who expressed plans of entering the fibusiness of knowledgefl (Basu, 2013), where knowledge becomes the commodity. A specific type of knowledge she could offer to consumers is knowledge about computers, toward helping them acquire computer skills and technological competencies.  Economists have used the terms agriculture-intensive economies, labor-intensive economics, and knowledge economies to illustrate the types of economic basis in different societies. The knowledge-economy features markets where both capitals and commodities become increasingly intangible, and actors™ rely less and less on physical inputs or natural  55resources, and more on capabilities (Powell & Snellman, 2004, p. 201). An understanding of a new type of economy, and therefore society, underlies Rinata™s anticipation of demands for this particular type of knowledge. In the imaginary of the knowledge economy, computer proficiency becomes a highly valued currency and is needed to, in her words, fido pretty much anything.fl Through educationŠan independent computer course she took after graduating from high schoolŠRinata is positioned to have such awareness and be able to fienterfl the knowledge-based market.  Furthermore, through her knowledge of the internet, she is also able to participate in a wider the national, even global, economy. Her current entrepreneurial engagement, an online clothing business, is a testament of the ways communication technology hold vast potentials of transforming many aspects of rural living. In this instance, her technological skills and knowledge of computers allowed her access into virtual market-places, a space enabled and constructed by the knowledge-economy. These skills and knowledge shaped her unique entrepreneurial aspirations, which would otherwise have not been possible. Entrepreneurship and the economy. Here, I lay out the larger socioeconomic contexts behind youths™ entrepreneurial aspirations that emerged from the data. In Indonesia, entrepreneurship has and still continues to play an extremely significant role in the economy in terms of source of employment and contribution to regional and household income (Tambunan, 2007). A majority of entrepreneurial ventures in small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are situated in rural areas (p. 99). As a corollary, a majority of Indonesian SMEs is based on agriculture (p. 100).  In terms of proportions of the labor force, in the year 2008 SMEs absorbed up to 99.4 percent of the country™s labor force, amounting to slightly more than 97 million individuals total.  56The World Bank (2010) reports that while only 25 percent of individuals between the ages of 15-29 in urban areas are self-employed (in comparison to 70 percent of those who hold salaried employment), as many as 40 percent of youth are self-employed (in comparison to 20 percent who hold salaried employments). The rest hold finon-salaried employmentsfl (p. 16). In rural areas, 60 percent of individuals between 15 to 59 years old are self-employed, while only 20 percent among them hold salaried employments. This means not only are small enterprises extremely common within rural communities, but youths are also bound to be surrounded by family members, relatives, or neighbors who are entrepreneurs and run various kinds of businesses, be it selling and processing farm produces, selling sembako, farming tools and supplies, clothing stores, copy centers, and various other things. Lyn Parker and Pam Nilan (2012) in their research on adolescents in Indonesia report that entrepreneurship is a fikey word for youthfl (p. 167). The authors noted that youth in the study framed entrepreneurship as a way of managing the firisk of unemploymentfl (p. 167). As discussed in Chapter One, unemployment is a factor that significantly shapes the construction of narratives of success for youths in this, and other, rural communities in Indonesia. This suggests that the national and local economic structures and contexts fundamentally shape youths™ conception of successful adulthood. The success identity of an entrepreneur articulates conceptions of what is perceived as preferable and possible sources of livelihood.  Success Identity of the Professional/Occupationalized Self While for some success is projected onto an identity of an entrepreneur, others project a success identity associated to being in certain occupation or profession. They project the image of a professional. The difference between the two success identities is with regard to the source of income, as well as different social status attached to certain professions. As discussed in the  57previous section, youths conceptualize entrepreneurship as the act of starting, opening up, and running a business, where income is generated on the basis of the combination of resources through providing services or producing, creating, or trading various commodities. The entrepreneur is characterized by traits such as risk-taking, opportunity seeking, growth orientation, creativity and innovation. Non-entrepreneurs, on the other hand, are individuals who either join or remain in existing businesses or organization (Lee & Venkataraman, 2006), or whose employmentŠincluding self-employmentŠcan be categorized as part of a profession or occupational group. Professional or occupational aspirations are constructed within figured worlds. This identity of the professional or occupationalized self expresses the valuing of various signifiers of a profession. Research reports that youth and adolescents do have the knowledge about jobs and the social context in which they are embedded (Cook et al., 1996, p. 3369). This knowledge become a resource when they consider a range of different occupations as desirable, which reflects how they see themselves within the value systems and the socioeconomic contexts of the community and larger society (Gottfredson, 1981).  Among the most commonly mentioned occupations among the youths in this study are teaching, nursing, and law enforcementŠeither as a military personnel or police. While talking about becoming a professional, youths also repeatedly mention about holding white-collar jobs, characterized by either working in an office, in fimanagement,fl or related to computer and technology. In the next section, I focus on exploring the meanings behind one profession-based success identity, the teacher, to illustrate how and potentially why certain professions and not others are more prevalent within the imaginations of success among youth.    58Teacher success identity. Many youths expressed that one of the most common jobs in the community is teaching. Among the youths, Reyhan and Elya are among those who aspired to become a teacher. What marks the process of taking up profession-based success identities is further education, commonly but not necessarily in the form of post-secondary education. At the time of the interview, Reyhan had been enrolled at an institution nearby and was studying Religious Education as a part time student. He runs a copying and printing service from a store in front of the house he lives in with his wife, their one-year old child, and his in-laws. I was a customer and needed something copied in large amount. I recruited him into the study as he asked about where I was from and my general activities as a visitor in the community. The interview occurred the next day as I came back to pick up the copies. Elya, our aspiring entrepreneur who currently works in Jakarta, expressed his past interest in going into teaching, which was supported by a sibling, stating, fisince I was in junior high school, I have always really wanted to be a teacher. As I started senior high school, my older sister encouraged me to eventually go into Education.fl Elya had also at one point enrolled in a teacher training program, but decided to quit. I explore now what components or affects of becoming a teacher that makes it a profession-based success identity. One youth during our focus-group discussion mentioned that a teacher is a role model who is able to fihelp us control our ego, and provide us with guidance.fl Here, taking up the role of guiding others enacts the teacher identity. It is considered desirable and the profession™s intrinsic value. Others who have aspirations of becoming a teacher, however, predominantly framed the success identity of a teacher from the perspective of the profession™s instrumental value. Teaching is associated with the ability to gain a Pegawai Negeri Sipil (PNS) or a civil servant status. Reyhan™s statement explained this rationale, saying, fiYou  59can first become a contract teacher, and then you can then ask around to be a PNS. There is pride [or prestige] in becoming a PNS, because there are provisions for your old age.fl This means what makes being a teacher a success identity seems to be directly linked to what makes being a civil servant, or a PNS, a desirable and success identity. Becoming a PNS provides not only financial stability in the present, but also financial security for one™s future in the form government pension.  For Reyhan, the contract-to-PNS teacher progression is perceived to be natural and inevitable. His statement expresses this: My plan for the next three to five years is to open an outlet store selling cellphone minute cards and electronics. Now I™m just running the business selling snack drinks, printing and copying, and selling pulsa. There is also an offer, since I have an older sibling who works in the Ma™Arif junior secondary school, perhaps I will start as a religion teacher, first as a contract teacher. Then later I will ask regarding joining as a PNS. Becoming a religion teacher, since now I™m studying religious education in college. Perhaps in the future, I could be work in the Ministry of Religious Affairs. The knowledge that he drew upon regarding the progression of entering the profession came from a family member. Reyhan™s articulation of a career plan also illustrates how occupational aspirations and success identities are constructed within a figured world, involving tasks and steps like transactions to be completed: contract-teach for a few years, then request to be recommended for civil servant status, then teach a few more years, then apply for position in the Ministry. Zai, a young woman whom I interviewed at her home and a daughter of a contract teacher, had a different sentiment and framing regarding teaching. Teaching is an occupation she  60did not aspire to enter, not because the profession and the possible career progression are not desirable, but because for her the path toward achieving the teacher-success-identity is considered more treacherous and risky. Observe her statement below: [E]verything needs money nowadays. And I don™t have meaningful connections. The colleague or connection I have is to help me become a teacher, but if I become a contract teacherŠit™s hard to become a PNS, you are given a hard time even to just get certification. In order to be a PNS, you have to pay [a bribe], up to 80 million, like my Father, [who didn™t want to pay], and someone else took his number–I asked my Uncle [who is a contract teacher], ‚how much do you make?™ ‚600 thousand Rupiah.™ Ah, I™d rather work at Alfarmart, Indomaret, and make 1.6 million Rupiah. Zai™s statement makes clear that the assumption that by becoming a teacher you can be successful is flawed. Being a teacher is only framed as successful if one becomes a PNS teacher, while working in a public school or higher education institution. The dilemma is in the difficult situation when on the one hand a prolonged status as a contract teacher is extremely undesirable, and on the other hand, the pursuit of gaining a PNS status involves having sufficient social and financial capital, a condition that may not hold for everyone. This also corroborates with Sziraczki and Reerink™s (2004) report in a study on how young people in Indonesia predominantly look for jobs, where they rely mainly on ‚informal networks™ rather than formal application and selection (p. 25).  Going into education and training to become a teacher is so common that Febri, one of the youths in the focus group interview, specifically uses this to explain his rationale in going into a different field. He states, fiI do want to go to college eventually someday, and major in Engineering or Law, because people here, so many of them become teachers, so there is much  61competition.fl His perception of the competition that may be involved from having so many desiring to enter teaching shapes his own aversion to doing the same. Pak Karuno, host number two, also provides this interesting context that confirms Febri™s concerns: The supply of teachers, and also midwives/nurses is overwhelming [or there is a major excess.] I read in the newspaper, the openings for PNS is 600, the prospective PNS who applied was about 60,000! All wanted to be teachers–There are many institutions here that train teachers–Not to mention the ones in Karang [or Bandar Lampung] His statement further support the insight of how powerful of the image of a PNS teacher is as a success identity within this community.  Gendered occupation-based success identity. While reading my data, gender emerges as a significant factor shaping youths™ construction of narratives of success and imagination of an occupation-based success identity. This is due to common gender associations of certain occupations prevalent within this community. This again exemplifies the idea that youths do have knowledge of the social context in which occupations and professions are embedded (Cook et al., 1996, p. 3369). In particular, they understand norms surrounding what types of work are considered appropriate only for female and male respectively. In terms of the profession of teaching, despite historically being a predominantly female occupation, it seems to be leaning more and more toward gender neutrality. As of 2012, while 60 percent teachers in primary education in Indonesia are females (Trading Economics, 2016a), the proportion in secondary education is about 50 percent (Trading Economics, 2016b). The gendered world of work and occupations also influences both youths™ educational aspirations and decisions on what to study in school. For example, since midwifery is associated largely with female, many female youths within this community, as observed by Rinata, enter  62vocational midwifery school. Zai also mentioned that she never followed through with her initial interest in automotive mechanics in vocational school. Mechanics or mechanical engineering is still considered the domain of male, and it would be considered inappropriate for females to handle machines. fiIt wouldn™t be feminine,fl Zai even stated. This is how work and professional aspirations articulates gendered norms and expectations surrounding particular types of work. A Family-Relationship Based Success Identity The third success identity emergent from interview data with youth is an identity that is based on one™s belonging to and position within one™s family. While as a part of their ideal futures youths may take up an entrepreneurship or enter a certain profession, they are always first and foremost someone™s child, someone™s sibling, or in the cases of Reyhan and Upit, parents. These family relationship based identities serve as a constant within the equation of youths™ imagination of successful adulthood. A family relationship based success identity then is in being a good member of the familyŠa good son, sister, and parent. Notions of being a good parent, son, daughter, or sibling are articulated through the ways family members ficome upfl in the stories youths share in response to my interview prompts. Characteristics of these family relationships are drawn amidst talks of plans, futures, and aspirations, youths™ recounting of past experiences, and rationales behind current decisions and actions. Youths invoke multiple meanings of good, including providing care and performing their duties, roles, and expectations as a member of a family. The following section explains these definitions of a family relationship success identity. Care. Youths expressed in various ways the importance of providing care for their family members, including most commonly mentioned, of aging parents as well as younger siblings. Further, youths made references to care-giving that take the form of both providing financial and  63emotional support such as through their presence and companionship. At least five youths expressed helping their parents financially and supporting their younger siblings as something they had either done in the past or would continue to prioritize in the future. Family is a part of the rationales behind decisions made, for instance, regarding schooling and jobs. For example, Rinata, the young woman with multiple entrepreneurial aspirations who was working at the department store while running a side online business, responded to my question about her immediate future plans. She said, fiI do want to go to college, Mbak. So I can add to my parents [financially, or so that my parents have enough money]. I™ll major in Computers. To earn more.fl Rinata™s decision to go to college is linked directly to the way, in her perception, it will lead toward increased earning, enabling her to achieve the goal of being able to fiaddfl to his parents™ finances and ensure that they live sufficiently. Earning more is about more capacity to provide care for his parents. In Rinata™s case, caring for her parents™ financial needs is at the forefront of her mind and her imagination of not only the distant, but near future. Similarly, Elya™s underlying entrepreneurial aspirations and plans of opening up a home-based business was so that he could fiwait onfl and be with his parents, and help ensure financial sustenance for his parents. He mentioned, fiI want to have my own business at home, to make/create a business, while waiting on/caring for my parents. Where I am no longer leaving my parents. Ultimately, that™s what I want.fl For Elya, engaging in entrepreneurial activities is addressing both the financial and emotional aspects of providing care. Being close and fiwaiting onfl his parents is the emotional and psychological form of care. Elya™s remark on no longer having to be away from the parents also suggests a temporal dimension of the enactment of a component of this family relationship based success identity, speaking to a period of time where he will in fact be fileavingfl and be away from his parents.  64This notion of fileaving to come back homefl repeatedly came up during my conversations with youth. It will be further explored in Chapter Five, in the discussion on mobility and labor migration as youths™ conception of an alternative success path.  The eventual reunion and being in proximity to the parents as enacting a family-based success identity also highlights the notion of a successful future that is emplaced. Living out an identity of a good, responsible, and caring son involves being in a specific geographical space, in this case, the parents™ home or a place close to it. Performing the identity of being a good son or daughter and caring for parents in this case is associated with not only what one does, but also where one ends up living. In sum, parents were brought into the discourse of youths™ future goals in a very direct way. For these youths, both college-going and entrepreneurial pursuits work toward achieving the same goal of ensuring parents physical health and financial sufficiency. While some youths were more explicit than others about this, this mindset was shared by many youths I conversed with. Further, adding to the nuances of understanding youths™ imagined future with respect to their relationships with their family, youths express also the way gender norms shapes their care aspirations.  Forms of care: Gendered articulation of a family-relationship based success identity. While reading my interview data on what forms and acts of care youths perform, I noticed both a gendered pattern and a pattern associated to one™s birth order in the family. These patterns inform what responsibilities and role youths take up associated with providing care. Using Zai™s case, I illustrate how both gender and birth-order influences the ways youths imagine their futures and adulthood within the context of caring for members of one™s family. Zai expressed her thought on the difference in expectations that his brothers face  65regarding family responsibilities, in comparison to what she and her sister would face. She made the following remark: I am concerned about my younger brothers, because they are males, in the future they will have to provide for a family. At least we are females, and we will follow our husbands–It™s better to work [than going to college], rather than throw away money, the money would be better for opening up a business. Going to college is just wasting money–What™s important is now to work, to meet personal needs and the needs of my younger siblings.  Here, she responded to my question of her decision to opt out of college. Her explanation points to constrain of resources as the cause of having to choose between going to college and working. In contrast to Rinata™s perception and decision discussed aboveŠthat going to college is linked to increasing her income-generation capacitiesŠZai perceives college her as a waste of resources. However, the main rationale here is hinged upon the desire to prioritize the well-being of her younger brothers. As both the eldest sibling in the family and a female, Zai™s explanation that younger brothers need to be prioritized displays a deep understanding of social expectations faced by especially male youths in this community. In Zai™s words, females simply fifollowfl their husbands. Males would have to be financially independent sooner in order to be able to marry and provide for the new family they build through marriage. Zai™s concern and later decisions were acts of ensuring that her younger brothers have the chance of succeeding in life with respect to family-building. She is persuaded that their well-being in this regard may be otherwise compromised. In this case, providing care is a social act taken up by adolescents to create a condition most favorable in order that they and others in the family may enact and uphold  66respective gendered expectations surrounding marriage and family-building. Caring for aging parents are also linked to gendered norms. Youths agree that males are predominantly expected to be the breadwinner. While exceptions exist, they are commonly the ones considered most able to assume the responsibility of caring for their parents financially who may not, by the time they age, have achieved their own financial security through securing a pension plan. Recall that in Elya™s remark above, an imagined positive future and successful adulthood involving waiting on and caring for his parents. It is in fino longerfl leaving their parents, as a young person would do while away at school or for work. That male children are predominantly the ones expected to provide financial support or care for their parents is also an implication of gendered experiences and expectations surrounding marriage discussed later in this chapter. Children and youths™ work: Care as extending home-life roles and expectations. In households where parents produce enough income to meet all the family needs, children are exempted from expectations to contribute economically. Some may be expected to help with domestic chores. However, when families have limited income or engage in labor-intensive income generating activities such as farm work, children and youth often fill these labor needs. In various global contexts, out of necessity, children have taken up either domestic or economic responsibilities. In rural contexts in particular, it is often the case that youths are expected to help and parents are not the only ones assuming financial responsibilities.  Children and adolescents everywhere throughout time have engaged in work. Regardless of participation in schooling, when work is available, many children and youth will work. In a 2005 study on child labor patterns using UNICEF survey data on children from 36 developing countries, economists Eric Edmonds and Nina Pavcnik (2004) reported that an estimation of 68%  67of children aged five to fourteen in these countries engage in work, where a vast majority held finon-economic household maintenance tasksfl (in Bourdillon et al., 2010, p. 25). A minority among them engages in economic activity with 20.8% working within the familyŠin farm work and other family enterprises, and 2.4% doing paid work outside the family (p. 25). Contributing to the family income is but one among many reasons children™s work (p. 67). Other reasons include social recognition, independence, and especially among adolescents, having one™s own financial capability to enjoy certain lifestyles and goods (p. 67).  Bourdillon and colleagues found that among the most common patterns worldwide is that rural children are much more likely to be engaged in the labor force than are urban children. Rural families are more likely to own or work on farms, with crops and livestock needing tending. Further, the authors highlight the fact that in rural contexts where infrastructure or modern technologies are still limited, much work remains in need of labor (p. 77), which means families require more help in and outside the familyŠfor seeding or planting fresh crops, keeping birds and various other pests off rice paddies, finding grass for goat feed, and so on. This observation certainly holds for many of my study™s participants. As I looked into the ways youth participants described their home lives, it became clear that youths™ unique sense of responsibility and care for their family is rooted in their involvement, even as children, in the general economic and domestic activities of the family. They have and will continue to hold responsibilities in maintaining the home or contributing to the household™s income-generation activities. Through the different interviews, I asked youths about their current daily activities. Here are their responses during the focus-group interview: Yanuar: Helping parents, with the mushroom farm at home. Febri: Operating my own business, farm fishing.  68Meiliana: Helping my parents, cleaning around the house. Adi: Helping parents, looking for grass [for goat feed]. Apri: Helping parents. Waiting for the [high school] diploma from the [vocational] school  With the exception of Febri, the focus group participants™ comments display a running theme of bantu orang tua, or helping their parents. This is an all-inclusive term expressing a range of activities illustrating parts of their daily activities that are both domestic and income-generating in nature.  Providing more description of what a typical day looks like, Citra describes her daily routine:  In the morning, I sell sembako at the market. In the afternoon, I sometimes do cleaning, and I cook for the entire family, food that™s for the entire day. Sometimes I buy supplies for the sembako, oil, sugar, most frequently flour. In the evening, I™ll take care of the baby. Citra was a 20-year old single parent when I met her. She lived in a multigenerational and multiple-family house with her mother, an uncle and an aunt, a cousin, and her grandparentsŠBapak and Ibu SutiyoŠthe owner of the sembako store she helps run. They lived next door to the teacher house. Food preparation for a family this size is a not be taken lightly. fiWhen somebody cooks, they cook a lot and everything all at once,fl she added. Without the luxury of hired help, which is common in many middle- and upper-class families with more means in Indonesia, she describes here her domestic responsibilities of preparing food for the entire family, cleaning, on top of taking care of her then one-year old infant. As discussed above, Citra also contributes to the family™s income by helping out with the family™s home-front sembako  69store. She does the supply runs to the market on the motorbike.  Similar to other youths in the study, Citra holds and performs multiple roles and responsibilities within the family. Whether it is being involved in home- and farm-based entrepreneurial activity such as fish- and mushroom farming, tending the animals, or doing domestic chores, these young people are certainly not idle, despite the fact that at the time of the interview many of them were not in school. Further, by maintaining the importance of providing care for parents in their imaginations of future and successful adulthood, youths are not projecting a new success identity. A family-relationship based success identity articulates adult versions of current perceptions of what it means to be a good son or daughter. The difference is the set of capabilities they would acquire, as they become mature adults.  In Elya™s case, his goal of providing financially or ensuring that his parents have financial security is consistent with what he had done in the past. He states, In the past my parents at one point owned a warung [or a stall] at home, but they ran out of things to sell. So I started, helping acquire things for the stall again. The stall ran again. That™s what I want by the time I™m ready to go home, so that I have reserves [or provisions] from a business that™s operational. My thought is that, my parents are aging, if he [referring to the Father] has to farm, he also doesn™t have much strength left. I could make him a fishpond at home, so he can work less hoursŠponds for catfish and giant gouramis.  Elya explained that helping his parents™ store financially has two functions. To have the store run again will benefit him personally in the future as an income-generating asset. It also works to provide means to care for his parents both financiallyŠas the store is hoped to produce enough profit to enable the start of another entrepreneurial project of fish farmingŠand  70physically in their old ageŠwhere the fish farming can help the parents stay at home and be released from the obligation of doing farm work. Further, unlike the success identity of an entrepreneur or a professional, being a good daughter or son is not something reserved only for the future. Even without schooling, youths™ lives and daily routines are still filled with work. The past and present reality of the economic role of children and youth in the family contextualizes youths™ sense of connectedness to and responsibility for the family™s well being as a part of their futures.  Filial piety: Making parent happy and obedience over personal preference. Scholars in youth studies and rural studies have contributed to the understanding of the extent to which across different cultures family is included in youths™ discourse of future success and the good life. Contributing to the knowledge of the experiences and perceptions of adolescents in Indonesia, a four-year study by a team of Australian researchers found that Indonesian youths hold as highly important connectedness to family and especially parents (Nilan et al., 2011). The authors, Pam Nilan and colleagues (2011), found that youths™ ficita-citafl or filife dreamsfl included things related not only to career and education, and social and financial standing, but also family (p. 720). To look after parents and make them proud consistently emerged from the data. The finding was based on a large-scale survey involving 3,565 youths in secondary schools and universities conducted in 9 different locations across the different Indonesian contexts.  In a later work, Parker and Nilan (2013) posit that Indonesian youths see themselves as embedded within the family (p. 5). Many youths in their study express their hope that they would be able to help their parents as well as fimembahagiakan orang tua,fl or make their parents happy (p. 103). The goal of being able to help their parents and make them happy is important  71for youths in my study as well. The phrase fibahagiakan orang tuafl or fimake your parents happyfl is an important goal for youths. So ubiquitous is this notion and phrase that public messages and advertisements have co-opted the term and used it to not only valorize certain experiences and actions, but also sell services. fiBahagiakan orang tua dengan Anda menjadi seorang staff penerbangan/pramugarifl or fimake your parents happy by becoming a flight attendantfl says an online poster. They sought to recruit students into their educational program by appealing to youth™s moral duties and expectations (see Figure 2).               Figure 2. Recruitment poster for a flight attendant training program in Indonesia.   72Rooted in teachings of Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Confucianism that have shaped the moral and religious consciousness of the Indonesian population, filial piety has become an important value. At its core, it calls for individuals enact their love and respect to parents, by ways of submitting into their authority. Youths predominantly portray adult figures, especially grandparents and parents, as having the role of providing guidance and a sense of direction.  Consistent with the idea of filial piety, parents are portrayed not only as the source of wisdom and practical life advice, but also as the voice of authority. Respect requires choosing obedience over personal preference, and making parents happy is in following their advice and directions. Obedience and subservience is not about lack of agency or capacities, but it speaks to a larger value and importance of choosing to preserve relationships and maintain positive emotions.  Youths did offer generative examples of moments of tension between them and their parents. Rinata relayed the following episode while explaining her recent trajectories from when she graduated from high school to the point she started working in Artumorro where I met her: I once got accepted to a flight attendant school and a midwifery school, but then Father did not approve. I was in the natural science track while in high school, alhamdullilah [an Arabic phrase for fipraise be to Godfl]; three people [from our high school] got accepted in the flight attendance school. Two people from the natural science track, and one from the social science track. Father said, what about the long run, you better go to a program that offers a Bachelor™s degree instead, because if not, then it will cost even more. Mother actually approved, and Father also originally had said yes, but then the day I was supposed to leave, fino, you can™t go.fl I felt so down. At one point I was angry. It is such  73an opportunity, Mbak.  In the excerpt above, Rinata recounts the time when she almost went to vocational training center. For her, an admission into a flight attendant school and a midwifery school were considered good opportunities, as they will allow her direct entry into specific vocations. The father™s change of mind and later insistence of the importance of going all the way with college led to the father not permitting Rinata to attend any of these non-degree granting programs. She explained earlier in the interview that her Father was the one that encouraged her to take independent computer courses. Rinata frames her father™s decision and action here as looking out for her and trying to steer her toward a path that will yield more beneficial long-term outcomes. Performing what it means to be a good daughter, she mentioned choosing obedience, which resulted in a lack of confrontation despite later mentioning how disappointed she was. In addition, she followed his suggestions to take up computer courses, a decision that has significantly shaped her work and entrepreneurial plans. In her case, the parent eventually comes across in her mind as having been her source of wisdom. Youths in general express a genuine consideration and belief that these voices of authority have their best interest at heart. In some cases, despite their personal preference, they actively work toward aligning their desires and actions to their parents™ wishes and guidance. Following this voice of authority in choosing to pursue or give up certain endeavors is an active agentic engagement in self-discipline and alignment of desires and behaviors. The end goal is to maintain a good relationship with other members of the family, especially parents. Filial piety therefore is expressed not only through providing care for parents, but also giving respect to elders through alignment of their desires and actions.  74Marriage: Gendered spousal experiences and expectations. Youth participants seem to agree in their observation that marriage is a common next-step for many of their peers. While many enter marriage after competing high school, a handful do so prior to completing their secondary education. It is rare for youths who have married to return and complete their education.  Marrying is an important life arrangement to enter as it is among the markers of adulthood (Parker et al., 2011, p. 710). Marriage articulates youths™ predominant framing of their identity and understanding of their place in society in light of their membership in a social unit that is the family (p. 715). However, among the 16 youth participants in this study, there are variations in their observations of gendered patterns of youths who enter marriage prior or right after completing high school. A few mentioned that it is as likely for males as it is for females to marry prior or immediately after graduating high school. Other participants, however, stated that it is more common for their female peers to have gotten married. For example, both Zai and Elya mentioned that on the basis of their observation, most of their friends who are married are female. In a different interview, Gisi suggested that it is more likely for female adolescents to enter marriage at a relatively younger age than males.  Adding to this perception, Gisi highlighted the role of parents in not only communicating the gendered expectation to their female adolescent to get married while in or right after finishing secondary school, but also facilitating the marriage arrangements. Note the following excerpt from our conversation: Many parents would tell especially girls, ‚Just get married.™ They would tell her to look for a partner, or they themselves would look for the girl and arrange the marriage. There is this one girl who lives close to my house. Right after finishing lower secondary she got  75married, that means she would only be around 15 years old. These youths™ observations reflect one study™s findings conducted by Gavin Jones and Bina Ghubaju (2008) using 2005 census data. The study found that throughout the Indonesian provinces, the percentage of females within the age group of 15-19 years old who live in rural areas who have entered marriage are consistently higher than the percentage of those who live in urban areas. On average, about 9 percent of all Indonesian females within that age groupŠalmost 1 out of 10 females ages 15-19 yearsŠare married (p. 4). Considering that Lampung™s rural population is also higher than its urban population (BPS, 2010), this suggests that in Lampung more rural females than their urban counterparts marry relatively early. Some are critical about youths marrying at such an early age. Another male participant, Stephen had this perception, stating, fiWhat can you do at such a young age? You haven™t even experienced being able to have money. What will you feed the family?fl The fact that Gisi and Stephen were college-bound may have influenced their perceptions on entering marriage at an age framed as relatively young.  Stephen™s statement also points to what many participants expressed regarding gendered expectations associated with marriage. Within this predominantly Javanese and Muslim community, males are considered the head of the household once they enter marriage. This leads to two direct consequences. Firstly, as mentioned above, it shapes understandings of males and females respective expectations of future responsibilities related to financially providing for the family. Stephen™s rhetorical question of what the young person who was getting married would feed the family may allude to the fact that, being relatively young; a young person™s financial capacities would still have been limited. This creates a tension. According to Stephen, males would be expected to provide or fifeedfl the family. His statement highlights his own  76positionality, as a male person in this community, while at the same time articulating gendered norms surrounding family-building and marriage.  Recall that Zai pointed to the same understanding of gendered expectation surrounding marriage. Within the context of explaining why she sternly had decided to not further her education, she stated that she would rather support her male siblings who need to achieve financial independence sooner. She added that as females, she and her sister would eventually follow their husbands. An understanding of her future as a female spouse exempts her from having to work toward assuming the responsibility of supporting a spouse or children. Understanding that her younger brothers as males within this community face a different set of pressure and expectations, her main goal was to be able to help her younger brothers one day be able to fulfill their familial obligations. Here Zai shares Stephen™s perception that males are expected to hold the primary responsibility of providing for the family. This reveals that gender norms surrounding marriage significantly shape youths™ construction of their aspirations and definition of success, and influence their decisions for immediate and long-term goals. Further, gendered expectations related to marriage also shape female youths™ imagination of their future with regard to mobility. Reflecting a patriarchal society, according to youths, female spouses commonly follow their husbands after marriage and reside with or close to the husband™s family. In sum, youths project an image of a positive future that includes enacting a family-relationship based success identity. This identity is characterized by care, where care is enacted in the form of providing both financial, emotional, and psychological support to family members. Acts of care both are shaped by gendered norms and expectations associated with marriage and family-building. A family-relationship based success identity articulates adult versions of current  77perceptions of what it means to be a good son or daughter. They are informed by youths having been involved in the domestic and economic activities of the family from a young age. Furthermore, a family-relationship based identity is also linked to the notion of filial piety. Youths value the importance of making parents happy and displaying respect, through obedience and the alignment of their desires and behaviors with their parents™ wishes and directions. And finally, marriage and family-building is a common goal among youths. This is another component of a family-relationship based success identity and is also influenced by gender norms. This in turn has implications on youths™ decisions and actions with both immediate and long-term effects. Success Defined As mentioned, in their speech youth do not talk about their conception of success in the form of abstract principles and traits. They point instead to figures, roles, specific individuals, and activities to illustrate what they mean. I have represented this using the notion of success identities and explored the contexts surrounding the identities within the figured world they have painted for me. Having done so, I now do want to step back and engage in a bit of abstraction. The three success identities discussed above are expressions of underlying definitions and conceptions of success. On the basis of these identities that emerge from youths™ discourse, I propose the following underlying definitions of success or components of successful adulthood that the success identities point to. Firstly, success has an economic component and is signaled by one™s ability to reach financial sufficiency, security, and stability. Success and the good life is not one that is necessarily defined by wealth, but these three are crucial, if not ideal. Secondly, a part of success is also in achieving self-reliance, independence, and a sense of efficaciousness. Thirdly, success is defined as maintaining respect and a good social standing in life. Lastly,  78success is also large defined not just on the basis of the individual™s present and future well-being, but also the well-being of one™s family. Youths™ aspiration is fundamentally linked to the well-being of one™s family members. So the ability to care for family is an important definition of success.  Particular definitions of success are more explicitly associated with certain success identities. As such, the discussion of success as having the ability to care for one™s family will be particularly brief, given that it is most directly and explicitly expressed in a family-relationship based success identity. Success and the economics of aspirations: Sufficiency, stability, and security. Across the lives of my youth study participants, their experiences of growing up and transitioning into adulthood continue to be shaped by realities of economic constrain and their perceptions of this limitation. Within our conversations youths made references to financial obstacles they and their families have faced in the past. These statements display their deep understanding of the risks posed by financial constrains. Youths repeatedly also pointed to financial limitations as justifications or rationales behind concrete actions they had taken or decisions they had made. This suggests the realities of financial vulnerabilities their families may live in. While financial success is a goal shared by youths and adults in many contexts, this particular context of these rural youths™ lived experiences explain why according to them an important component of a good life include financial sufficiency, stability, and security.  Both the figure of a successful entrepreneur and a professional holding salaried employment are identities characterized foremost by their income-generation capabilities that address this specific success goal. However, while the entrepreneur and the professional are figures imagined as having the capacity to achieve financial sufficiency, they differ in whether  79youths perceive of them as leading toward financial stability and security. Financial sufficiency as a minimum threshold underlies remarks on being able to make ends meet. For example, this is illustrated by Rinata™s statement regarding living a life where one is content and not lacking. On her definition of a successful life, she stated, fiit does not need to be fancy, but enough.fl  Financial stability is prominently linked to the image of an employee, whether those imagined as holding specific profession or a more generic white-collar jobs. A youth mentioned above, a steady monthly income, even if meager in size, is a preferred safety net especially when one seeks to engage in entrepreneurial ventures. So while fimany people here are entrepreneurs,fl the interviewee mentioned, fithey would also like to, if possible, be employed, while opening/running the business.fl As mentioned youths in this study have had their share of being financially vulnerable. For example, in Rehyan™s case, there was an incident where his family was found lacking financially and this led him to the decision of finding employment right after high school. In Elya™s case, at one point he needed to fistep upfl to help his parents™ store financially, as they had run out of merchandise to sell. When financial vulnerabilities are a part of youth™s experiences growing up, some a steady flow of income may naturally becomes part of one™s ideal imagined future. Entrepreneurship may, upon specific conditions, offer economic stability. However, a salaried employment or taking up an occupation guarantees it. Moreover, while becoming an entrepreneur also may conditionally lead toward financial securityŠdefined as having provisions during the phase of non-productive age, only certain types of employment will lead to financial social security. Financial security is a salient theme within youths™ discourse on civil servant jobs and the PNS status, and therefore, particular occupation-based success identities. Reyhan framed this as follows, fithere is pride [in prestige] in becoming a PNS, because there are provisions for your  80old age.fl As Indonesia has no universal pension scheme (Arifin, 2012, p. 224), financial security can become a status symbol. Considering that a majority of rural economies in Indonesia are based on agriculture, individuals entering non-productive age are predominantly not plugged into formal support or security systems. As such, reliance on children remains the most common firetirement planfl within the imaginations of many Indonesians in general. In sum, financial security is an important definition of success for individuals living in a country that fiwill become old before becoming rich, where financial schemes are not sufficiently available, and where job opportunities for older persons are limitedfl (Arifin et al., 2012, p. 207). Success as achieving self-reliance, building a sense of efficaciousness, and independence. Self-reliance and sense of efficaciousness both point to the ability to overcome obstacles and change one™s circumstances in light of limitations and constrains. This is enabled through one™s reliance on one™s own efforts, resources, and intellect, toward bringing about ideal outcomes. The success identity of the entrepreneur embodies and expresses this definition of success most prominently. It is characterized by a sense of confidence in one™s ability to change undesirable situations and resourcefulness to bring about ideal results, while generating income in the process. The risk-taking nature inherent in entrepreneurship realizes this success quality. We saw many instances of this in youths™ engagement in entrepreneurial activities and future entrepreneurial aspirations. For example, recall the instance when Febri started going into fish farming to resolve the family™s urgent financial need. Another example is with Rinata™ online clothing business and wish to open a boutique. As mentioned above, financial self-reliance is an important definition of success for her, including not depending on parents or future husband.  The success identity of the professional or an employee denotes the ability to secure a  81stable income, which reflects an underlying goal of economic self-reliance and self-efficacy. For Zai, the identity of someone who is able to hold a jobŠdespite making minimum wage and taking up low skill jobsŠis sufficient. It means having achieved the ability to generate stable income. And in her case, it serves the needs of providing for her younger siblings. Independence as a quality of successful adulthood is framed most clearly by Citra in terms of the freedom and ability to self-organize and self-manage. Speaking about her plans to continue trading and becoming an entrepreneur, she stated: [By the time I™m 30 years old, I ideally want to] have enough money to open a business, busy with the business/trading. Since the beginning, my grandmother taught me how to run the store, so I like it. If you work for yourself then you are not bound to another person in terms of your time, you are not governed [or managed] by other people. Juxtaposing her perception of a life of an entrepreneur against the figure of an employee, Citra pointed out that freedom, in her terms finot being bound to another person,fl is related to time- and task-management. She valued the ability to decide for herself how to organize her work and day. While both identities of an entrepreneur and an employee or professional address may lead toward self-reliance in terms of financial independence, Citra emphasized that entrepreneurship affords one the chance to be the one to call the shots. Good social standing and earning respect as successful. Youths are aware of certain prestige and reputation attached to particular lifestyles and livelihoods. A respectable life and what brings status is socially constructed, and youths appropriate them into their imaginations of success adulthood. Take the example of the media artifact included above of a recruitment poster for a flight attendant school. The media works with pre-existing popular conceptions and public opinion regarding certain professions. They reconstruct the image of a certain line of work as  82desirable; in this case a professional flight attendant. Being respected and maintaining a good social status as a definition of success is a pattern that emerges throughout youths™ projection of success identities.  A profession-based success identity in particular has become becomes a dominant vehicle to achieving social status. Two occupations in particular were repeated by different youths: working as a flight attendance and in law enforcement. They are referenced within the following exchange I had with Zai: Me:  What is your cita-cita [or life dream]? Zai: At one point I wanted to be a policewoman. I just wanted to be one. Since they have a reputation of being beautiful, teeth with no cavities, you have to be slim, and look neat. I also wanted to be a flight attendance.fl In another conversation I had with Reyhan about his cita-cita, he remarked: To be a cop, since my father is in the Karang Police Department. I did dare to take the entrance exam into the police academy, but, let™s just say there are still many others who are better [or more qualified] than me. Cahaya, yet another youth I interviewed, also revealed her dream to see her future children to be in law enforcement as a police. Among the youths I spoke to, including here Cahaya, Zai, and Reyhan, many name these two professions as being appealing specifically on the basis of their reputation of signaling physical attractiveness. The prestige and pride that comes with these two professions make them desirable. They are also occupations that are arguably within youths™ reach.  According to Reyhan, high social status or prestige is also attached directly to the civil servant status, or the PNS, as it signals both present status of working with the government and a  83stable income, as well as affordance of pension funds or future financial security. In a different interview, as referenced above, Zai most directly highlighted the notion that financial sufficiency or being able to at least earn a decent living is one of the most important steps to earning one™s right place in the society. fiWe just want to be respected,fl Zai uttered in responding to my question regarding why some youths become migrant workers. In Chapter Five I later explore a common aspiration and powerful narrative of success through temporary labor migration. I display that despite the perceived low-status work that labor migration is associated withŠas most work taken up by migrant workers are low-skill and manual workŠit nevertheless enables them to enjoy a relatively high income. This is what Zai is alluding to. Youths just want to be respected and including in that is the ability to accumulate wealth and capital. This shows both how difficult it is for some youths to even start at the base line of being able to earn a decent living, and that a version of success is defined by youths™ ability to gain and maintain a good social standing. Success as the ability to care for and be close to family. As mentioned, the success identity of a good family person or family member projects most explicitly a trait or definition of success of the ability to care for and be close to family. And within the context of one™s relationship with one™s parents, success is in the ability of making one™s parents happy and proud of one™s achievements and decisions. While a family-based success identity is a direct embodiment of this underlying life goal and definition of success, both the figures of entrepreneur and an identity linked to a certain profession or occupation instrumentally afford youths the ability to take up a family-based success identity in the future.  The most salient success identities from youths™ discourse discussed above are manifestations or expressions of underlying conceptions of success. Within the analogy of a  84journey, they serve as an end goal or destination. They are productive in that they construct aspirations, and inspire actions and frame rationales for particular decisions. These success identities are also products of youths™ engagement with culturally, socially, and historically constructed images of the good and ideal life. It interacts with their understanding of life constrains or limitations, and what then falls within the bounds of what is preferable, possible, and improbable for them and their families. In the chapters that follow, I explore the study participants™ narratives of success. I investigate what gets fiput into discoursefl as laying out paths that lead to success. I will discuss complementary and competing narratives about success at play within the community as projected by both youths and adults.   85CHAPTER FOUR   Narratives of Success through Schooling  I have so far described youths™ conceptions of future success. In this chapter, I will focus on what I will term narratives of success. My use of the term narrative denotes meta-narrative and departs from its use within its fields of origin related of literature and its association with fiction. Narrative here refers to abstract beliefs or explanatory myths about societies, collective entities of institutions or individuals. As such, in my discussion of narratives, I do not point to stories about concrete persons and daily life in literary texts (Herman, Jahn, & Ryan, 2007, p. 344). Instead, I consider narratives in the way they discursively construct and frame reality. By examining a narrative, I investigate a discourse to understand its assumptions and claims of truth (p. 344). A narrative of success is not a mere rehashing of definitions of success. Instead, it is an orienting story that employs a filogic of narrativefl (p. 279) surrounding what success means and how they can be achieved. A logic of narrative describes how certain things can and do lead to another, without necessarily implying causation (p. 279). In a narrative of success, some actions, events, or conditions precede other, where the progression leads to a version of what is defined as success. For example, one narrative of career success for Ph.D. students in higher education institutions in North America constructs the ideal end goal of employment in an R-1 institution and a tenure-track position. The ability to display one™s success in developing scholarship and getting published in respectable journals, securing funding, or teaching effectively, can and often do lead one toward said successful employment.  In this chapter, I focus on whether and how schooling is, in Foucault™s (1990), fiput into  86[success] discoursefl (p. 11). As discussed in Chapter One, schooling is predominantly imagined as a path that will lead young individuals toward success. There is, then, a narrative of success through schooling. However, my conversations with youth participants and teachers makes clear that there is in fact not a single dominant narrative, but multiple narratives about success through schooling. The two frame how schooling leads to success in very different ways. I will first lay out the two narratives drawing mainly from interview with adult and teacher study participants. In the final section, I then discuss the notion of limitations of a narrative and explore cases drawn from youths™ experiences that illustrate the narratives™ gaps.  Success through Schooling: Dominant and Minor Narratives Sometimes I ask a young person, fiThat diploma of yours, what is it for?fl  They say, fiWell, to get a job.fl That™s because if they want to work abroad they need a high school diploma. To work in a factory, they would also need a high school diploma. So, I guess what™s important is to be able to get a job (Mita, personal communication, June 2014)  But we want to push them, at least they would have it in their mind that they need to go to college–When they graduate from high school, they don™t really have very special skills. It™s different from vocational schools. If you go to vocational school, you™d have very specific skills, like in electricity or other things. But high school is really general still, so you have to continue on to college, get a degree, and then you can get a better job. That™s what we try to encourage them to see (Ms. Ana, personal communication, June 2014)  A dominant narrative. Within the community in which this study is conducted there is a dominant narrative about success involving schooling. The dominant narrative posits that many life and work opportunities require a high school diploma, making it a very important documentation one would need in order to secure a better future. A high school diploma allows individuals to gain types of employment common within this community, including working in a factory and overseas as a migrant worker. These types of jobs predominantly do not require a college education. A high school education and diploma are also needed should individuals want to take administrative or leadership positions within the local government, such as the kepala  87desa or the head of the village, or run for political offices. Moreover, as discussed in the previous chapter, in this dominant narrative of success, a very important goal for youths is to be able to quickly provide for their family members, such as aging parents or younger sibling, and prepare oneself financially to build one™s own family through marriage. A diploma is key to enabling youths to find work and start developing financial capabilities right after high school. According to the dominant narrative, schooling is a path toward success through the diploma one gains at the end. Within this dominant narrative, schooling is positioned as providing support and not interfering with the economic activities of families, considering that in this community, children and adolescents are involved in both economic and domestic activities at home. In other words, within this narrative, schooling should not take youths away from these responsibilities. This has implications in terms of the appropriate amount of time that should be devoted to schooling, the flexibility of schooling hours, and whether or not educational activities should happen outside of the allotted time.  Since gaining a diploma in a timely manner and getting employment as soon as possible is of great importance, schooling has an important end result in being expedient in granting individuals certificate. As discussed in subsequent sections, this has implications on whether or not schools find grade retention policies useful. Schooling instrumentally serves the purpose of providing individuals needed credentials for other opportunities. As such, schooling does not necessarily require sustained engagement, authenticity, or even certain types of learning to happen. Also, in the dominant narrative of success through schooling, post-secondary schooling is neither necessary nor inevitable in the ways that a high graduation and diploma are. Drawing from an interview I conducted with a teacher, I provide an illustration of the  88ways in which a dominant narrative of success through schooling manifest in individuals™ understanding of the purposes of schooling and in specific practices and policies. In this narrative, it is imperative that schooling works to ensure youths are able to succeed via gaining a high school diploma. This has been framed as a reason why some adults have allowed and participated in assisting students to cheat during the national examination.  Exam-related educational malpractice is nationally widespread, and within this community cheating is reported as a very common occurrence. In an interview I conducted with 2012, Mr. Yohan, a former religious studies teacher who eventually left the school in 2013, shared his insights into this widespread phenomenon of cheating. He accounted the following encounter: One time, I went to a public high school to collect the UN results. I ran into the principal there, or maybe the head of the region. He said to me, fiPak, in our school, to be honest if we implement the LCS policy, honesty and no cheating, we won™t even reach 20% graduation rate. But we don™t want to be ridiculous. We take pity on our students, because they want to have a future, so we help them.fl So that term fihelpfl is what they use, what they do so the students graduate. Now, they consider us as people who do not understand the difficulties students face. They gave us this analogy, it™s as if the children are forced to swim. They are forced to jump into the swimming pool, when clearly they are unable to swim, how can we just stand there and do nothing? Of course we need to help them, because they are not able to swim yet. That™s what they say to us.  Presenting a dominant narrative of schooling, the principal whom Mr. Yohan encountered suggests here that graduating from high school is considered as extremely crucial for youths™ future. However, students are portrayed as gravely underprepared or lacking the ability to pass  89the national examination, which at the time meant that they would not be able to graduate. This is considered a major impediment to their ability to succeed. The analogy of students drowning and being forced to jump suggests that teachers see their actions from the perspective of empathy and as an ethical decision responding to a moral dilemma. Helping students, which in this case means helping them cheat, becomes preferable to the alternative outcomesŠstudents not being able to fihave a futurefl or gain future opportunities. The school also benefits from this and is spared from having to produce an annual statistics characterized by low graduation rate.  In sum, helping students graduate and gain a diploma is of great importance, even if it involves cheating and examination malpractice. Within a dominant narrative of success through schooling, cheating becomes an acceptable action as it leads to what™s considered as schooling success. What otherwise may seem common or appropriateŠprincipals encouraging teachers and students display honest work during the national examinationŠis found to lead instead to undesirable outcomes. This narrative of success through schooling is a powerful dominant narrative shared by many youths, parents, and teachers in the community where I conducted this study. However, within this community, there exists a clear yet minor narrative that is shared by a small group of individuals. They comprise a minority group of teachers at the Lampung Christian School (LCS). These teachers challenge the dominant narrative™s definitions of success and offer a different definition of schooling. They also differently conceptualize the role schooling plays in helping young people achieve success in life.  A minor narrative. A minor narrative of success through schooling lays out that schooling matters not just because of its diploma granting mechanism, but more importantly because the acquisition of knowledge and increase in capabilities prepare young people for  90further employment and educational opportunities. A schooled individual will therefore have the necessary competencies, mindsets, and credentials that qualify them for specific educational, professional, and economic endeavors. This minor narrative suggests that since secondary education no longer suffices in ensuring a young person™s competitive advantage in a changing society, higher education is key to helping students succeeds in life, making secondary schooling all the more important.  Successful employments are imagined as professional white-collar jobs that require a college education and very specific skills and capabilities. In this narrative, the individuals who settle into manual, low skilled, and minimum wage labor that does not require post-secondary education are interpreted as less than successful. They are framed as individuals who have not reached their fullest potentials. Education is imagined as giving individuals a way out of low-skilled and manual work. Schooling success significantly increases one™s likelihood to succeed in life. This is because competencies and skills built through schooling, and the shaping of one™s habits and character has practical implications on one™s ability to get into and thrive in college, as well as secure and maintain professional employment.  Within this narrative, family and home-life is imagined as ideally working to support the educational goals of schools. At the same time, the narrative assumes being able to immediately make a significant financial contribution or provide care for the family is secondary to developing professional and educational aspirations and competencies. This is under the assumption that youths™ capacity to provide for their family is enhanced through professional employment or acquiring white-collar work.  Challenging the dominant narrative, the small group of teacher participants in my study posited that while high school graduation and gaining a diploma is important, the appropriate  91imagination of schooling is what LCS teachers frame as a process. Education is a process. The term process points to a broad range of outcomes, including changes in capabilities, mindsets, and behaviors that happen throughout the academic year.  According to this narrative, acquisition of knowledge and development of competencies as a process occur daily through schooling. Learning requires students to actively engage in activities that happen during the school hours, through classroom activities, lectures, and tests, as well as through extracurricular activities and assignments. This is the process that constitutes education. Within this narrative, schooling success is defined as the display of individuals™ daily and authentic engagement with the many learning opportunities, which lead to the above-mentioned personal, academic, and professional growth. Learning as developing what are considered positive habits and mindsets also occurs as individuals encounter and learn to submit to the particular set of expectations and norms that exist in the school. Conventional measures of learning such as grades and scores in examinations are considered unable to effectively represent these kinds of growth.  I offer the following example of the ways in which a minor narrative is articulated in teachers™ understanding of why specific school policies are in place at LCS. From a minor narrative, submitting into the schooling process prepares students for environments and arrangements they may encounter in future work and in higher education. Here, Ms. Teppy, who teaches secondary biology, offers her framing of learning goals that exist behind homework policies and their enforcement among students. In doing so, she links schooling to preparation for the workplace. She stated the following: [We start at] seven o™clock sharp. If you still got inside [the classroom] past seven, then you™re still late. Discipline, like that. And also, here, we have a pile for books with  92students™ names. That™s where they submit their assignment book every morning. So there won™t be opportunities to cheat and copy their friends™ work. So when they arrive, they have to submit their workbook there right away. That™s so that they can learn to be prepared when they come to school. That™s what we try to instill in them. In the workplaceŠif they™re not punctualŠfiIf you™re not honest and don™t have integrity, you cannot be trustedŠfi We tell them this explicitly, so that they can know.  For Ms. Teppy, schooling practices and policies yield lessons that prepare students for their future. Here, she points out that the school™s stern policy on students coming to school on time simulates expectations at a workplace that many adults encounter and working arrangements that teachers imagine their students will encounter in the future. Similarly, the morning homework submission routine and policy is linked to expectations of timely completion of tasks, engagement in honest work, and preparedness, which are common expectations that students should be able to fulfill. The learning process becomes an opportunity to prepare and develop habits such as being punctual, trustworthy, reliable, displaying professionalism and preparedness. Expressing a minor narrative, the learning outcomes of acquiring these new habits and mindsets are the direct benefit of schooling. They are all linked to students™ ability to succeed professionally future. In this minor narrative about schooling, success is also mediated by the pursuit of higher education and gaining a college diploma, since fibetter jobsfl would require a college education. In the example below, the minor narrative is articulated through a teacher™s statement of what it means for her students to succeed in the future:  Me: What type of life do you imagine your students living as they reach 30 years of age? What are your hopes?  93Ms. Ana: So high school give you general knowledge, which means you need to continue on to college, get a degree, and then you can get a better job–I want my students to have an open mind, and a full consciousness about what they want to do. So they can work withŠfiI want to be a lawyer!fl or fiI want to be a university lecturer, or a teacher.fl Or a police, and whatever else that is reachable for them. Within this minor narrative, gaining a college education and then pursuing different professions or gaining white-collar employment exemplifies success. As Ms. Ana suggests, fibetterfl jobs is a goal one can accomplish only through going to college. Here, she offers a list of types of work that she finds desirable for her students, all of which require professional and further academic training. This means she expresses a narrative of success through schooling that expands schooling to include tertiary education.  So far I have highlighted and described two narratives of success through schooling. Through the examples above, I illustrate how each articulation of the two narrative of success through schooling projects differing definitions of schooling. A pattern emerges from interview data with LCS teachers where the minor narrative is constructed in fundamental opposition and contrast to a dominant narrative. LCS teachers subscribe to and share this minor narrative. The section below discusses this construction of differentiations and the ways in which teachers elevate specific markers of schoolings that signal which definition of schooling and narrative about success through schooling is at play. Markers of schooling: Narratives of success operationalized. The distinctions between dominant and minor narratives about success through schooling fundamentally hinge upon the different way schooling is defined. These definitions are expressed through what I will term markers of schooling. These markers are sites where a particular definition of schooling  94corresponding to a particular narrative of success through schooling is enacted. They function to mark a set of cultural activities as fischoolingfl or educational. I will discuss three markers of schooling and the ways they became resources for LCS teachers to construct differences between the minor and the dominant narratives. Homework and teacher presence. Homework was among the most frequently mentioned markers of schooling, through which the distinction between different notions of schooling were constructed. According to a minor narrative of success involving schooling, learning occurs as students engage in educational tasks in a sustained way. Expectations and practices surrounding homework signify how much an institution or individuals value authentic engagement. As such, whether students are given homework and how often, whether there are consequences for not doing homework, and whether homework contributes to students™ grades became meaningful questions for administrators and teachers. Institutions are marked as enacting a particular narrative on the basis of these questions.  In the following example, Ms. Feby contrasted practices at LCS and other schools surrounding homework. Taken from our conversation on student attrition at LCS, here she made a reference to a particular student who, despite having access to financial support, eventually left LCS before finishing his 10th grade: Me: So, in fact, if the students want to continue schooling, they could still do it? Even though there is a small tuition, they would have access to financial aid? Ms. Feby: It is mostly because of the student™s internal [motivational] issue; perhaps he is tired with the schooling system we have here, with the daily assignments. I think this isn™t evenŠThat™s what schools are supposed to be! You™re suppose to have lots of assignment when you™re in school, if not, then what are we doing here? But perhaps in  95other schools out there [such is the case]. They sometimes have teachers who, might or might not even come to class, don™t give any assignments. If they want to study, then that™s good, it™s up to the students.  Here, by pointing out LCS™s version of fiwhat schools are suppose to befl as well as what it is like fiin other schools out there,fl this teacher established that there are in fact different narratives of schooling that are at play within the community. As illustrated above and reported by teachers in other interviews, infrequent homework and tests were common experiences of LCS students prior to their enrolment at LCS. Representing a minor narrative about success through schooling in this community, for Ms. Feby the two represented essential components of schooling that allow for engagements where the process of learning may happen.  Within a minor narrative, students™ learning requires teachers™ intervention and facilitation. Learning occurs through engagement with opportunities, including those called homework. The narrative lays out that assignments need to be assigned frequently, and teachers need to be present and teach in classrooms. While in a dominant narrative about schooling, it is possible for schools, teachers, and students to achieve the purpose of schooling without consistent homework-giving and presence of teachers in the classroom, in a minor narrative this is not the case. From the perspective of a minor narrative, without appropriate practices surrounding homework and teacher presence as markers of schooling, one can only frame what is happening in schools as bad or fisham-schooling.fl a term actually used by an LCS administrator in our conversation. fiOther schools out there,fl where students have their schooling experiences prior and occasionally after leaving LCS, are transposed from being geographically fiout therefl to discursively fiOther.fl They are fiotheredfl as places with schooling practices that do not match  96theirŠor mirrorŠnarrative of success through schooling. Grade promotion and retention. Grade retention practices in schools are viewed differently within this community. Grade retention is a marker of schooling that symbolizes assumptions behind the purposes of schooling, which in turn articulate either the dominant or a minor narrative of success.  Within a dominant narrative, a most predominant goal of schooling is to afford students a high school diploma that will open up work opportunities. When quickly gaining income-generating capabilities is a very important goal for families and youths, grade retention is therefore framed as having little to no benefit. Being retained one grade level becomes an unnecessary setback for not only the individual, but also his or her family. In contrast, in a minor narrative of success through schooling, schooling entails a learning process that leads to the development of students™ cognitive abilities and character formation. Mechanisms of assessment are then in place to monitor such notions of progress. Grade retention is purposed to ensure that students are allowed sufficient opportunities to engage in the educational process until they are able to display progress deemed appropriate in order to continue on to the next grade level.  LCS implements a grade retention policy. At the end of each academic year, LCS principal and teachers meet to discuss students™ progress and deliberate on whether or not specific fiat-riskfl students should be promoted or retained. The following excerpt illustrates LCS teachers™ view on grade retention. Ms. Bunga, the most senior or veteran teacher among the teacher participants in this study, stated: At times, we have students who may be cognitively weak, but display a good character and attitude, show good disciplineŠBut then we also see [those who] are not only cognitively lacking, but also have a bad character. What else can we do, we can™t help  97them. We therefore don™t promote them, that™s how [we help so that] they can repeat the learning–Our hope is that as students repeat [the grade], at LCS, they can change. They can still remain in our care and attention. They can be better. Here, Ms. Bunga framed retention as a form of teacher care and help, and as a support system built in for students to fibe better.fl By framing grade retention as helping students, this teacher suggested that grade retention is a positive compensation for students™ shortcomings. fiCognitively lackingfl and fibad characterfl are personal traits, which students have the ability to modify in due time and when given enough opportunities. These shortcomings as a form of underperformance are rectifiable through grade repetition. At the same time, grade-level progression must mirror actual progress regarding development of competencies and ability to display appropriate behaviors and mindsets. This articulates the minor narrative of success through schooling. In a minor narrative, the benefit of schooling lies not only in the diploma, but also much more directly from competencies developed through students™ engagement in the learning process. There is an assumption inherent in this perspective that repeating benefits students by allowing them more opportunities to learn, and that the benefits would outweigh costs involved in repeating a grade level incurred by students and families whether economically, socially, and emotionally.  To their disappointment, LCS teachers observed how the grade retention policy implemented at LCS has throughout the years contributed to student attrition. They reported that a majority of the parents criticized the grade retention policy implemented at their school. Additionally, they observed that a majority of other schools do not implement a strict grade retention policy, if at all. In the following excerpt, Ms. Bunga continued to explain the situation  98in other schools and the rationale behind parents™ decision to move their otherwise retained students elsewhere: In a different school, the student wouldn™t have to repeat, Miss. They could go on to the next grade, butŠBecause the community [has low] awareness and parents are not open to the idea [of grade retention]ŠSo they consider [being retained] as failing, which for them means failing at everything and not achieving the end goal. That™s why it is preferable to choose a different place [or school]–A different place also guarantees that the end results will be fine. So there you have it, for parents who lack educational awareness, what is the use in repeating? Since when you move to a different place, at the end they will be able to get the diploma anyway. Recognizing the dominant narrative of schooling, Ms. Bunga suspected that when the goal of schooling is to gain a diploma in a timely fashion, grade retention was therefore coded as failure and an impediment to reaching the end goal. Her reference of other schools that were able to guarantee fiend results [that] will be finefl pointed to schools that would grant students the ability to gain a diploma. These are places where notions of process and progress may be differently valued and interpreted, and grade retention is rarely practiced. In their ability to fihelpfl students by ways of promoting them, these schools became more desirable places, and pulling students out of LCS into these schools is framed as a rational choice.  In sum, grade promotion and retention serves as a marker of schooling that communicates differing definitions and assumptions on purposes of schooling. Teachers used this symbol to construct differences between real and sham schooling, and in doing so, they demarcated spaces where the dominant narrative about success through schooling is enacted, while setting LCS apart as an anomaly among other schools.   99The national examination. While a form of national assessment has been in place in Indonesia since the 1960s, the national examination as a nation-wide annual event has garnered much more attention and sparked debates in the past decade. In 2005, for the first time the ujian nasional (UN) or the national examination was used to determine graduation from an educational unit. This translated to examinations being held at the end of year six, nine, and twelve. Between 2005 and 2012, students™ performance in the UN became the sole determinant of their graduation. This meant that to be able to graduate, gain a diploma, and continue on to higher education, students had to score above the UN™s minimum passing grade. Throughout those years, the passing grade ranged from 3.0 to 5.5 out of 10 (Mendiknas, 2014). During this time, exam-related malpractice became rampant throughout the nation with students trafficking leaked answer keys, and teachers, principal, and exam proctors serving as accomplices.  Within a dominant narrative about success through schooling, graduating from high school and gaining a diploma is a necessary and inevitable outcome, without which youths™ future success will be hampered. In this dominant narrative, the UN is perceived as yet another hurdle to overcome or go around, in order for youths to achieve the end goal of schooling. Revisiting the analogy of rescuing drowning students, allowing or assisting students to cheat is explained as a form of student support to achieve this goal. In contrast, within a minor narrative the national examination is not only a mechanism of assessment that monitors process and progress, but it is also a pedagogical site for students to exercise important values and traits whose development is included among the many goals of schooling. These values include good work ethics, integrity, honesty, and confidence in one™s own work and abilities. The UN or the national examination is an annual activity that serves as another example of a marker of schooling. Activities that occur prior to and during the national examination in  100 schools signal a commitment to particular narratives of success through schooling. In other words, whether or not schools and teachers go through extra measures to prepare students for the UN by, for example, giving them extra tutorial after school hours may signal which definition of schooling is at play. It also means whether or not teacher allow or are involved in helping students cheat signals which narrative of success animates the individual™s action. As such, the UN becomes a symbol used to construct points of distinction between LCS and other schools performing real versus sham schooling, as well as between LCS students and students at other schools in the community.  LCS teachers recognized exam malpractice as a dominant practice. They recounted numerous instances when LCS students were offered answer keys at the exam venue, and mentioned students who in their prior school had formerly been involved within the network of exam answer key traffickers. For instance, Ms. Feby offered the following account:  It was shocking, how easy it was for the students to get answer keys, and how at ease they were accepting them. But I™m talking about students from other schools. For us, we teach our students, fiDon™t do it, what would you cheat? You have to be confident in yourself...fl I did hear from our students, fiMiss, earlier this morning [during the UN] they were distributed ‚candies.™ That™s what they said; they gave out ‚candies.™ The UN is definitely a den of sin. So everyone cheats. I also heard that, in some other area, they received exam packets that were already opened.  Here, she clarified to me that when she talked about students who were getting easy access to answer keys and would made use of them, she was fitalking about students from other schools.fl This was a distinct positioning of LCS as outside of the dominant practice surrounding the UN, and LCS students as an anomaly.  101 LCS students, while rarely involved, are not immune to the temptations to cheat. In the following excerpt, Ms. Vero illustrated the tension experienced by a group of students as they weighed their commitments and negotiated their circumstances: [The year] 2011 was different in terms of our UN results. So, our students would make halal all strategies in order to be able to graduate. Because they were so scared soŠafter the UN many students came to me. They said, fiMiss, I want to apologize cause I took the leak [answer keys].fl That™s the sad part, becauseŠokay, on the one hand I accept them for who they are, on the other hand, I am disappointed at what they did–We [the teachers] got to a point, to a commitment, where we would say to them, fiNot graduating is okay, that you are still precious, and there is still the GED, and life goes on.fl...That™s so that they can face the UN with integrity, so that they would be prepared. It™s okay to not graduate. So that™s the underlying character they need to develop, but that™s what™s very difficult, the it™s-okay-to-not-graduate mentality, because the UN is everything for them.   The statement that passing the UN is fieverythingfl for the students refers to the line of argument within the dominant narrative that codes failure in the UN as a larger failure in life and a loss that can and should be avoided at all cost. Instead of framing exam cheaters as disengaged youths who cop out, the teachers seemed to suggest a more critical and empathetic reading of youths who make halal all means toward an end goal of passing the UN. They framed them instead as individuals minimizing the risk of a life challenge presented by schooling, when their perceived immediate future is at stake.  The scene of the confession and apology of remorseful cheaters provides a glimpse of subjects caught between two narratives about success through schooling. On the one hand, in  102 light of ongoing responsibilities, personal aspirations, and social expectations, much importance is placed in graduating from high school and gaining a diploma in a timely manner. On the other hand, there is recognition that cheating violates an honor code with consequences of a lost opportunity to measure one™s competencies and progress. The not-graduating-is-okay mindset epitomizes the minor narrative about success through schooling. This mindset deems as important the learning process that one has gone through schooling, and to honor that through one™s display of integrity during the UN. This is to be upheld despite the financial, emotional, and opportunity costs of failing the UN.  In sum, the national examination also becomes a symbol of schooling that projects specific versions of conception of schooling. Practices prior to and surrounding the UN articulates different assumptions of how schooling becomes a part of and path toward success. Having described the two narratives and discussed the ways they are constructed, in the following section I focus on what study participants have identified as the narratives™ limitations.  Critical Voices and Gaps within a Narrative of Success I return to the definition that a narrative of success offers an orienting story about versions of success and what conditions or events may lead to their realization. In this section, I explore the ways study participants and individuals within the community represent ficritical voicesfl against a certain practice or outcome that articulates particular definition of schooling and narrative of success through schooling. I use the notion of critical voices to represent the ways individuals utilize their own narrative of success to question or invalidate a set of beliefs, practices, or policies as a part of a narrative of success. Underlying critical comments and perceptions are specific imaginations of individual obligations and institutional arrangements that support fisuccessificationfl project of youths.  Critical voices represent a discursive over- 103 reach, which makes visible discordant and competing narratives of success.  Both the dominant and minor narratives about success through schooling have facilitated youths™ school-to-work transition. Individuals have reached versions of fimaking itfl within the community. A majority of youths in fact continue to remain in or prefer to be in schools where authentic engagement is not necessarily what is required of them. Similarly, schools and students continue to use all means to guarantee youths™ success in securing a high school diploma. These schools have teachers who may not be consistently present in the classroom, who may not give frequent homework, and may either help students cheat on national exams or look the other way. Cohorts of young people still graduate from schools characterized as such and go on into blue-collar work to start generating income. A small group among them may also still move on to local colleges. The dominant narrative of success through schooling explains many youths™ lives and institutional practices in various schools within the community. LCS teachers clearly established this. In other words, the dominant narrative about success through school has worked and it continues to have its appeal. And yet, LCS teachers point out clearly the limitation of the dominant narrative. I expand on this below. They don™t have skills: The limitations of the dominant narrative. From the perspective of a minor narrative, a significant limitation of the dominant narrative is in the exclusion of post-secondary schooling as an important success path, and therefore, a limited emphasis on developing professional or white-collar aspirations. As reported by this study™s youth participants, many high school graduates in the community do not continue on to college. Many, including their friends, work as buruh PT or factory workers, as a staff in retail stores, or as a Tenaga Kerja Indonesia (TKI) or a migrant worker. Getting a high school degree and gaining blue-collar work achieves the goal of enabling youths to generate income and provide  104 help for the family. While this is framed within a dominant narrative as success, it is coded as failure within the minor narrative. LCS teachers repeatedly expressed this sentiment.  In the following example, Ms. Ana expressed her concern with the dominant framing of success, which excludes higher education. She framed going to college as an experience that will expose youths to future and work possibilities beyond what they had known in the past. Lacking this experience becomes a great loss. She stated: In terms of my hopes and dreams is for them to have their minds opened. For them to really see the outside world, and for them to see–that they are not limited to just eventually becoming a farmer in this village–If they go out, they™d know more, oh, there are so many kind of jobs, those that they™ve never thought of. That™s really why, I hope that they can go to college, so they will know for themselves what the outside world is like. For this teacher, college became a window into the outside the world. The outside world is a term that pointed to both geographically what lies outside the communityŠas the nearest higher education institution is in a town about one-hour on a motorbike from the communityŠas well as the different types of living and working arrangements, particularly employment and professions that students may not regularly encountered.  This idea of seeing more than what the community has to offer particularly with regard to work possibilities is echoed by Ms. Vero in the following statement: I see a big difference between people who, may similarly hold a job, and similarly can generate income. But the difference is when some of them understand that fithere is something more that I™m suppose to be able to do, not just to become a coolie, do hard labor, and such. But there is indeed something more that I am capable of doing.fl That™s  105 the difference. So for those who have the eyes to see, their future aspirations are expanded. Both teachers similarly suggested that higher education has a potential of expanding one™s imagination of success and altering one™s future aspirations. Ms. Vero also suggested that additionally, it alters self-perception with regard to one™s capabilities. Related to this, underlying her comment regarding similarities and differences between individuals who have entered work is that manual labor, whether farming or construction, limits a person with regard to their capacities, which include but goes much beyond income generation. Within a minor narrative of success through schooling, dodging higher education to immediately enter the working force is not coded as successful outcomes, and therefore, a limitation of the dominant narrative. A narrative about success is also limited when unintended outcomes are framed negatively. Members of the community that I have interacted have shared their frustration with high school graduates who lack skills. I share the following two comments I heard during an interview with Gus, the 19 year old who recently graduated from a vocational school and is employed at a copier store. This is taken from my fieldwork notes:  His friends are either unemployed, working, or married. The friends, who work, some work in factories, or employed in small businesses. When I asked him what his unemployed friends do everyday, or whether they™re waiting for something. He said, nothing. Just hanging out at home. And then his boss chimed in, abruptly, fiKids these days, those who go to school just to fool around and follow their friends, they don™t have skills and can™t do anything. In response to my question regarding his friends, Gus™s description of what a majority of his friends do on a daily basis depicts much of what is outlined by the dominant narrative of success.  106 No one is in college, and the majority works in factories or in small businesses perhaps in low-skill minimum-wage job. The supervisor who interrupted our conversation and made comments about fikids these days,fl describing again a reality that is represented by the dominant narrative. He was clear in critically framing the outcome related to the dominant narrative about schooling as young people are found lacking important skills and competencies. These young people who fican™t do anythingfl are diploma holders. And yet, the dominant narrative is silent with regard to the future and success of diploma holders who lack skills and competencies. It becomes extremely problematic when skills youth lack include basic and essential literacy skills. This is a condition that some members of the community have observed both among elementary school and high school graduates. Employers who have hired high school graduates reports some who still struggle to read and write.  As mentioned, teachers were forward in their critique of the dominant narrative of success. In response, they offer a counter narrative as a positive alternative, which lays out a different definition of schooling as a path to success and a different set of alternative values to construct new mindsets, habits, and work and life aspirations. However, this minor narrative about success also has its limitation. Members of the community outside of the LCS circle recognize them, and some teachers are also somewhat reflective of them.  Those who succeed are those who get an opportunity: The limitations of the minor narrative. Very early on during my fieldwork, I met two teachers from a public elementary school close to where LCS was located. They represented critical voices against the minor narrative of success and helped me realize how some members of the community were also critical of what they term LCS™ fiapproach to schooling.fl It was another hot early afternoon and my host Pak Kar and I were sitting in a small food stall outside LCS. I was waiting for my order  107 of mix Indonesian salad dish called gado-gado, when a conversation about LCS ensued. The following is what I recorded about the exchange as included in my fieldwork notes: fiLCS is implementing an approach [to schooling] from the ‚center.™ But this community here is not ready for that kind of schooling.fl She meant that LCS™ educational practices and principles are considered not suitable, fitting, or appropriate for this place. She proceeded to say, fiAnd what about the students, since they went to elementary schools that are so different?fl Another person asked if I were the principal, and at one point mentioned, fiLCS is sadis [heartless].fl On my way back from the school, Pak Kar mentioned to me that not everyone in the community shares those sentiments. This teacher clearly disapproved of the way LCS is run as a school. My host later explained to me that what is implied in her comments on LCS™ fiapproachfl to schooling include, among other things LCS™ homework policies. The heavy workload that is given to students has implication for the considerable amount of time that students need to devote to school-related activities outside of school. As discussed above, a dominant narrative of schooling lays out that schooling should work to support the everyday rhythm of a local and rural lifeworld, minding the multiple roles and obligations of children and youths in the family. What is framed as excessive homework interrupts this dynamic. At the same time, the minor narrative is silent with regard to how families may directly benefit from schooling.  The tension is exacerbated by the grade retention policy that positions homework-doing as providing important evidence for students™ engagement and progress. Added to this is the policy of zero-tolerance on cheating implemented during the national exam. These are considered to overburden students and families. Here, when the framing that constructs the dominant narrative of success is used to assess LCS™ practices and policies, the minor narrative  108 appears flawed in the way that it is fails to help students succeed. LCS is constructed as, in the words of the teacher I encountered that day, fiheartless.fl Teachers were also reflective about the ways that the minor narrative about success through schooling that they subscribe to has its limitations. One teacher made this explicit. She suggested that despite students™ authentic engagement, hard work, and persistence, there was no guarantee that students would come out on top. Success may be delayed and is contingent upon external factors that are beyond teachers and students™ control. Ms. Teppy named this factor as fiopportunity.fl Note her comments in the following: I think the pattern of who succeeds in fact lies in [whether or not there are] opportunities. Those who get an opportunity to go to college, go to college. Most of them go because of scholarship– Those who succeed are those who get an opportunity, and those who want to fight and put in the effort. In my imagination, students whoŠThere is this one kid, oh I feel so sorry for him. He tries one thing. Dead end. He tries another path. He fails. But he is willing to find different ways. I just hope that eventually, what I can imagine for him, that he could break through and be a successful person out there. The minor narrative frames post-secondary schooling as a necessity for success. However, it is silent with regard to the reality that many youths in this community find it extremely difficult to get into and stay in college due to financial constrain and competition. Illustrated here, a chance to succeed through college-going depends heavily on opportunity in the form of a scholarship. While scholarships are available, they may not be able to successfully compete for them. Ms. Teppy pointed out how tough this step is for some, as it required unrelenting patience and persistence.  This student™s story very closely simulated the experience of Hery, an LCS student I met  109 during this fieldwork experience. Four out of six teachers I interviewed mentioned Hery in the interviews. He may very well have been the person Ms. Teppy was referring to here. Hery had left school at the end of junior secondary due to financial difficulties, and went to work for a couple of years holding mostly low-skill manual jobs. He came to realize that education was what could save him from his predicament. He found a way to continue on to high school and became a student who proactively sought help from teachers to make sure that he had all the resources he could get his hands on for assignments and exams. He wanted a better future. Teachers recognized him as someone who embodied their ideal of a good hardworking student, despite his average academic achievements. He graduated from LCS in 2014, the summer I conducted fieldwork, and was in the process of applying to different universities. Over the months that passed, we kept somewhat in touch. It was disheartening to learn about the series of rejections and failed attempts he experienced, including failing the National College Entrance Exam in 2014 and receiving rejection letters from various colleges. At the time of this writing, his fiopportunityfl has yet to come. By early September of 2014, he was kerja serabutan or doing odd jobs at his home community, while waiting for his diploma to be issued from the high school to then apply for jobs. By February of 2015, he had found work at an apothecary and was taking courses. In July, he had moved to Java and was working in shoe factory outside of Jakarta. He took courses in Korean language on Sundays. Going to college and eventually holding white-collar jobs were goals that had remained out of reach.  I have encountered other LCS alumni who have earned a college degree from a local college who struggle to find employment, in light of a general trend of increasing length of unemployment among college graduates in Indonesia. The minor narrative about success through schooling considers honest hard work and authentic engagement as benefits that will lead to  110 success. Its blind spot is the reality that hard work, engagement, and efforts are necessary but insufficient to ensuring the realization of the end goals that include post-secondary schooling and gaining professional employment. Success may be chronically delayed and hinges on external factors that are at times beyond anyone™s control.  Recall that at the beginning of the study, I had intended on further exploring the ways fipoststructuralist differencefl (Davies et al., 2013) or the ways one™s multiple social locations matter when looking at construction of aspiration and experiences of narrative of success. Here, using the case of two youths from the community, I explore the ways socioeconomic background shapes particular manifestations of the minor narrative of success in youths™ life trajectories and experiences of schooling and work-to-school transition. By doing so, I will extend the discussion of underlying assumptions or gaps of the minor narrative. The case of these two young women provides insights into the ways in which social difference become key elements in the enactment of success discourse. One narrative, two stories: The case of class difference. The stark contrast of the lives of two young females, Putri and Ira, with whom I stayed at different times during my fieldwork, is a good illustrative case of how youth™s construction of aspiration and experience of transition articulates their families™ social locations. Both were among the few young women from the community who did attain a college education. At the time of my stay with their families during fieldwork, both were new college graduates who had just completed their programs within the past year.  Putri went to LCS, which is a five-minute walk from her house. She was used to living with LCS teachers who would rent a room at the house and stayed with her and her family during the academic year. Upon graduating high school from LCS, she had managed to find a sponsor  111 that had set up a scholarship arrangement for a group of LCS students to attend one specific Sekolah Tinggi Ilmu Ekonomi, or School of Economics (SOE). The SOE is located in Bandar Lampung, the provincial capital. While she and her peers within this group were granted admission and had begun their enrollment, the funding from the sponsor quickly ran dry. The SOE received but a fraction of the tuition from the donor. The SOE leadership eventually decided that these students were victims of fraud and they were allowed to complete their program. Putri graduated after completing 8 semesters, but after a whole year of job-searching not only locally in Lampung, but also in Jakarta, she had not been able to secure employment. She married and came back to live with her mother, Ibu Nia. At the time of my stay with her, Putri was expecting a child. She communicated daily with her husband who lived away due to his work at a sugar cane processing plant. Ira is the niece of my fourth host, a married couple who are both successful entrepreneurs and also civil servants or PNS-es. Ira™s father is the eldest brother and the patriarch of the extended family. The families of the two brothers live in a large multiple-family housing compound with spacious cemented grounds, a garden of avocado and guava trees, fish ponds, all enclosed by tall brick walls. The family owns and runs the Artumorro, a growing retail store that currently employs nine staff membersŠincluding Rinata and Cahaya, my youth intervieweesŠand one factory that processed coconut. They also own plots of farmland. They are a family of meansŠthe 1% of the district. The community recognizes them as such as they participate in the family™s open houses and feasts held during different celebratory occasions, the most recent to my visit being the Eid al Fitr and Ira™s brother circumcision ceremony. Despite her Muslim background, Ira attended a Catholic high school in the nearby town. I™ve heard several teachers refer to this school during my last visit as well as earlier visits. The school is recognized as  112 having a good academic reputation. After graduating from high school, she then attended the top public university in South Sumatra and majored in Communication Technology. After college, she secured a job at Nokia Technologies in Jakarta, a multinational company and big player in the global communication technology industry. Ira™s job included the task of monitoring the technical performance of a fibase transceiver stationfl tower, a tower that receives and sends signals of data for cell phone users. Among the company™s biggest clients are cell phone providers like Telkomsel and Indosat, the equivalent of North America™s ATT and Verizon. This highly technical job allows her interaction with both local staff and expatriates, and a wholesome fresh-grad salary that affords her rent in expensive Jakarta. In this case, both Putri and Ira™s similarly subscribed to the minor narrative of success through schooling. Their aspirations included finishing secondary school, gaining a college education, and securing professional employment or a desk-job, preferably in Jakarta. And yet, their transitional experiences, whether from high school-to-college, and college-to-work, differed greatly. Even though Putri came from relative wealth, as I will discuss in Chapter Five, Ira™s family had much more means. This may be explained by the family™s going beyond relying on farming-based income into white-collar employment as PNS, as well as building successful businesses.  Privilege that comes with financial means affords one more options. Putri had far more limited options than Ira with regard to which high school and university she would be able to attend. As found in various other contexts globally, schooling unequally benefits different children and youths. With regard to constructing one™s life and work aspirations, having a choice matters. For example, while Ira was able to imagine and consider many more professional trajectories, including careers in the communication technology industry, Putri™s options were  113 more limited to fields of study and work available in the institution where the scholarship program would take her. In this case, the SOE was a vocational or single-discipline higher education institution offering programs in Economics. Their college experiences further led to the degree of difficulty or relative ease they encountered while searching for employment. Ira™s degree, conferred by one of the most prominent universities in South Sumatra province, may have afforded her a much better competitive edge than Putri™s lesser-known school.  At a glance, while one continued to struggle to secure employment and found instead one closed door after another, the other continued to see her horizon expanded. Putri™s experience seems to reflect the statistics of the higher degree of college graduate unemployment across the nation among specifically among the poor and those who live in rural areas (Suryadarma et al., 2007, p. 12). It also validates the conclusion Dhanani drew (2009) of the relatively lengthy average timeŠup to eight monthsŠit takes for college graduates to secure employment (Dhanani et al. 2009, p. 54).  In sum, family™s socioeconomic background may determine one™s ability to have different options and exposure to a range of imaginations of successful adulthood. While Ira was able to dodge becoming a part of the statistics regarding graduate unemployment, Putri was more vulnerable. Family™s SES background shapes, then, not only one™s construction of the definition of success including those related to life and professional trajectories and goals, but also one™s experiences of success and obstacles along the ways. They eventually construct one™s understanding of what becomes not only preferable, but more importantly, possible to achieve. The case above also illustrates the hidden assumptions that construct the minor narrative of success through schooling, which in this case is rooted in differing socioeconomic background and privileged positions.  114  I have described two narratives that outline very different versions of success, where both narratives include schooling as a path that will lead one toward success end goals. There is a dominant narrative about success through schooling that exists in this community, and a counter minor narrative that is adopted by a small group of educators. Using the concept of markers of schooling, I explore the ways these narratives of success about schooling shape and are articulated in schooling practices and policies.  The dominant narrative and its focus on helping students succeed by gaining a high school diploma is criticized for the way it (mis)guides students away from seeing the importance of post-secondary schooling. The dominant narratives™ limitation also is manifest in the under-preparation of young people for the real world with appropriate skills and competencies. To counter this, the minor narrative is positioned as a positive alternative. However, it too has limitations. Members in the community find specific schooling practices and policies that articulate the minor narrative are misaligned with community™s expectations. They criticize the way students are overburdened with school-related activities beyond school hours and how school policies do not favor students toward helping them quickly proceed through the grade levels and gain a high school diploma. The limitation of the minor narrative also is manifest in cases where individuals™ hard work and authentic engagement do not lead them to a path toward success, and lack of opportunities due to external factors that stand in the way. From my conversation with both youth and adults in the community where this study was conducted, it became clear that there is a powerful narrative about success that does not involve schooling. Whether they favor or criticize this alternative narrative, various members of the community acknowledge the way that this narrative is growing in prevalence. This narrative lays  115 out a path toward success that involves youth migrating abroad to specifically become a Indonesian Labor, or a TKI. Within this narrative, becoming a TKI is a success path. The chapter that follows describes and explains this narrative and considers the ways in which this narrative about success involving transnational migration both compliment and compete with the two narratives of success through schooling.   116 CHAPTER FIVE   Narrative of Success through Labor Migration  As discussed in the previous chapters, schooling has been predominantly imagined as a path that will lead young individuals toward successful transition to adulthood and future success. In Chapter Three, I have explored youths™ conceptions and differing definitions of success. I have also discussed in Chapter Four that there are differing perceptions on why and how schooling is important in helping students achieve versions of success. Drawing on interview data with youth and adults, this chapter explores a powerful alternative narrative, which is a narrative of success through labor migration.  In this narrative of success, success is facilitated through temporary transnational migration. Migration here is narrowly defined as becoming an overseas contract worker through government-facilitated programs on the basis of bilateral or government-to-government agreements on export and import of Indonesian labor. Tenaga Kerja Indonesia or TKI is the official and popular term used to refer to migrant workers who go through these programs. TKIs apply for programs to specific country destinations. The Indonesian government and private agents are involved in facilitating recruitment, employment matching, and migration abroad. This chapter is divided into four main sections. The first section briefly outlines historical and policy contexts surrounding state-sponsored international labor migration in Indonesia. It describes the recent migration and employment patterns of TKIs. I expand on the terms and policies that govern the TKI work and discuss the type of work TKIs engage in. These discussions provide the backdrop for understanding youths™ construction of narrative of success through labor migration. I examine youths™ perception of the benefit of TKI work and what labor  117 migration makes possible toward realizing their definitions of success. The third section explores differing sentiments regarding TKI as a success route. All youth and adult participants recognized temporary labor migration as path that is taken by many youths in this community. While some recognized TKI as a success path, others recognized it as a success path for other people and not for themselves. There are still others who completely reject labor migration as a good path to helping youths succeed. Representing a minority group, LCS teachers code becoming a TKI as a non-success path. Eligibilities to apply to become a migrant worker often include high school completion. As such, while a narrative of success through transnational migration assumes a role of schooling, be it small, it is built on the foundation of the dominant narrative of success through schooling. This is not the case for the minor narrative. The narrative of success through TKI in fact competes with what I described in Chapter Four as the minor narrative of success through schooling. Lastly, I examine the differing ways that labor migration impacts TKIs from different sub-groups of youths within this community, especially along gender and socioeconomic lines. Labor Migration in a Changing Regional, National, and Local Economy Throughout the colonial times indigenous groups from the Indonesian archipelago have been involved in labor migration within Southeast Asia (for example, Boomgaard, Kooiman, & Nordholt, 2008). Within the post-independence era, it was not until the mid 1980™s that the Indonesian government began officially promoting and regulating the export of labor (Hugo, 1995). During this time, the Middle East region became a main destination for migrant workers from Southeast Asian countries. From a macro-economic perspective, state regulated Indonesian labor migration directly links to in-country changes occurring in the Middle East and East Asia, specifically Saudi Arabia and Malaysia. Migration and gender studies scholar Rachel Silvey  118 (2004) notes that the partial inclusion of women in both higher education and work in public sectors gave rise to increasing demands for domestic servants in Saudi Arabia (p. 254). In Malaysia, a major fiexodusfl of Malaysians from domestic service into factory work due to higher wages and status in the mid-80™s is turned the government to import labor with Indonesian prepared to respond with supplies of workers (Chin, 1997). Toward the late 1980™s and into the 90™s, with the decline of the oil boom in the Middle East and growth of the East Asian economy, countries within East Asia began to absorb an increasing number of migrant labors. This is reflected in the historical pattern and government policies regulating predominantly low-skilled labor export in Indonesia. Inspired by a gendered labor export model implemented in the Philippines in the 1970s, in the mid 80-s the Indonesian government began officializing women™s labor migration particularly into Saudi Arabia (Rosewarne, 2012; Silvey, 2004). In the 90-s, the government began sending TKIs to Malaysia, and in 2004 the two governments signed a Memorandum of Understanding for Indonesia™s export of labor to Malaysia. While the Middle East and Malaysia were the first to become predominant labor-receiving countries for Indonesians, Taiwan, Singapore, Japan, and Hong Kong subsequently began to receive more TKIs (Hoang, Yeoh, & Wattie, 2012). By the end of 2006, the Ministry of Manpower and Transmigration (MMT) had made official agreements through MOU signings with South Korea and Malaysia, Taiwan, Kuwait, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, and Japan (Hernandez-Coss et al., 2008) (see Table 2). In terms of the size of the migrant labor population, in 1983, 47,000 documented TKIs left Indonesia during that first year. The number rose to more than 223,000 for the period between 1984-1989, and more than 384,000 between 1990-1994 (p. 250). The World Bank  119 reports that in the year 2006 680,000 Indonesian went overseas to become migrant workers under contracts with labor-receiving countries (Hernandez-Coss et al., 2008), and in 2007, there were a cumulative total of 2,7 million TKIs abroad (Hugo, 2009), p. 5. However, when taking into consideration overseas contract migrant workers who are undocumented, the number is estimated at 4.3 million TKIs (Hernandez-Coss et al., 2008, p. xiii). Table 2  Number of TKIs by Gender per-5 year Period Between 1996 Œ 2007  Gender 1996 2000 2004 2007   Total % Total % Total % Total %          Male 228,337 44 137,949 32 84,075 22 152,887 31 Female 288,832 56 297,273 68 296,615 78 543,859 69 Total 517,169 100 435,222 100 380,690 100 696,746 100                    Note. From International Organization for Migration, 2010, Labor migration from Indonesia: An overview of Indonesian migration to selected destinations in Asia and the Middle East, p. 9.  While prior to the 1980™s, transnational migrant workers from Indonesia were predominantly males who went to Malaysia and engaged in agriculture-based work, beginning in the 1980™s, TKIs have been predominantly female (Hernandez-Coss et al., 2008), who entered domestic service in Saudi Arabia and Malaysia. Between 1989-1994, up to two-thirds of all transnational migrants were women, 80% working as domestic servants (Silvey, 2004, p. 250). The trend during the decade spanning from 1996-2004 has been an increase in the proportion of females TKIs (Table 5.1). However, within the past decade, there has been a gender shift in the trend of Indonesian migrants going abroad as temporary overseas contract workers. The shift can be observed between the years 2004 and 2007. This period saw an increasing trend of proportion of male TKIs. The proportion of males reached its highest in the year 2013, with 46%Šclose to  120 halfŠof all TKIs (Figure 3 and Table 3). The gender gap widened again in the subsequent year in 2014 along with a slight decrease in the overall number of TKIs compared to the year prior.      Female       Male    Figure 3. Number of TKIs by Gender 2010-2013. Reprinted from 2013 Placement and Protection of Indonesian Overseas Workers, by BNP2TKI, 2014.   Table 3       Number of TKIs by Gender 2010-2013   Year Total Number of TKI Female TKI  Male TKI Female TKI (%) Male TKI (%) 2010 575,804 451,120 124,684 78 22 2011 586,802 376,686 210,116 64 36 2012 494,609 279,784 214,825 57 43 2013 512,168 276,998 235,170 54 46 2014 429,872 243,629 186,243 57 43  Notes. From BNP2TKI, 2014, 2013 Placement and Protection of Indonesian Overseas Workers, p. 5.             121 TKIs in East Lampung regency and labor migration aspirations among youths. As of 2013, Lampung is the eighth largest province in terms of population, and the fifth largest labor-exporting province in Indonesia. The National Agency of Placement and Protection of Indonesian Workers reports that out of 34 provinces in Indonesia, the top five provinces send 83% out of the total of 429, 872 documented TKIs who travelled overseas that year (BNP2TKI, 2015, p. 4). Further, it notes that among the 18,500 TKIs from Lampung that were placed overseas, 7,582 of themŠabout 41%Šwere from East Lampung regency. East Lampung has for years now remained the largest exporter of TKIs among other regencies in the province (BNP2TKI, 2013). The statistics are reflected in what strongly emerges from my data. Labor migration and becoming a TKI is among the most prevalent imaginations of a path toward success among both adults as well as youths. Out of the 16 youths who were interviewed, three of themŠtwo males and one femaleŠwere considering becoming a TKI in the near future. The two males were Febri, a 20-year old high who was a part of the focus-group interview, and Elya, the 21-year old who at the time of the interview were working in Jakarta as a security guard for a private school. They strongly expressed their TKI aspiration and planned on beginning the application process in the next year or two. Citra, the only female among the three, was the least enthusiastic about the thought of becoming a TKI, and merely stated that she had thought of it. Reflecting a national trend in the shift in gender mentioned above, the proportion of female TKIs relative to male TKIs from Lampung has also gone through a steady decline over the years (Table 4). Reflecting a known characteristic about transnational migration as predominantly facilitated by family, youths™ statements regarding the origins of their TKI aspirations suggest that social and family networks have a significant role in the development of migratory aspirations. Family  122 members and relatives may proactively encourage those to consider becoming a TKI, or may model, display, and point others to the visibility of its success through their accumulation of wealth. Additionally, TKI friends, acquaintances, or family members are ubiquitous within the social networks of youths in this study. There is a strong narrative about success through labor migration in this community. In interviews, multiple youths readily mentioned TKI friends and relatives who either have just left, or were about to leave. Table 4  Number of TKIs from Lampung by Gender 2010-2013   Gender 2011 2012 2013   Total % Total % Total % Male 3,043 18 3,573 22 5,518 22 Female 14,042 82 12,686 78 12,457 78 Total 17,085 100 16,259 100 17,975 100 Notes. From BNP2TKI, 2014, 2013 Placement and Protection of Indonesian Overseas Workers, p. 111.   Citra expressed that family members, specifically her mother and grandmother, are the ones who have repeatedly urged her to consider the TKI path. Pointing out how the relative success others have achieved makes TKI success route attractive, Citra noted, fiI got to thinking about working abroad also because of Mbah, and mother. Mbah has seen her granddaughter in Taiwan able to succeed.fl The granddaughter referred to in her remark is the cousin who owns the house that the four LCS teachers were renting. This house was built with TKI money. This house is where I stayed for the first portion of my fieldwork. Elya similarly formed his TKI aspirations by observing an older sibling who had about 4 years prior become a TKI in Malaysia, as well as his cousin who recently left for Taiwan. His cousin periodically notified him of vacancies. The cousin had also attended university for one year, but decided to leave to be a TKI. Elya has mentioned that he plans to do the same.   123 TKI work, placement, and application. Within both policy and popular discourses, there is a tendency to cluster together the large demography of labor migrants who travel overseas through government-to-government work arrangements. This constructs the imagination of a homogenous group of TKIs and hides the realities of the varying nature of TKI work, the work environments, and the ranging set of benefits, risks, and challenges. TKI experiences differ among migrants and are dependent on destination country, employment arrangements, and gender.  Male TKIs predominantly hold factory jobs in either large-scale manufacturing companies or small-scale privately owned businesses, while females are predominantly in domestic work or health care servicesŠcommonly child- or elderly-care (International Organization for Migration, 2010) p. 15. This corroborates youth participants™ observations of gendered work placements of TKIs, including among their friends and relatives who predominantly work in Taiwan and South Korea. Elya™s male cousin in Taiwan works in a small private furniture manufacturing company. Gus mentions that four of his friends who are currently TKIs work in factories, including a female friend. He adds that while females may also work in factories or manufacturing, very few males go into care-giving services and domestic work.  Official data on TKIs from Lampung record that between 2011-2013 the most common employment is in domestic work, which defines the work of 40% of Lampung TKIs (BNP2TKI, 2013, p. 314). The second most common employment is caretaking, which entail providing elderly care and baby-sitting services. About 25%, or one out of four, TKIs from Lampung hold this type of employment (p. 314). The proportion of Lampung TKIs who hold these two type of jobs that are historically associated with females may be explained by the large proportion of  124 females that still make up the majority of Lampung TKI demographyŠ69% by the end of 2013 (BNP2TKI, 2014, p. 111).  Table 5  Number of TKIs from Lampung Province by Destination Country between 2011-2013  Country Year Total   2011 2012 2013   Taiwan 5,801 5,817 7,622 19,240 Malaysia 2,953 3,646 4,716 11,315 Singapore 2,790 2,227 2,042 7,059 Hong Kong 1,717 1,854 1,748 5,319 Saudi Arabia 2,101 452 553 3,106 United Arab Emirates 487 598 307 1,392 South Korea 287 259 251 797 Brunei Darussalam 189 253 231 673 Qatar 163 365 57 585 Oman 200 313 67 580 Bahrain 123 192 50 365 Kuwait 50 37 52 139 Zambia 0 27 58 85 United States 14 34 32 80 Macau 29 21 12 62 Japan 12 18 26 56 Syria 52 0 0 52 China 2 10 23 35 Fiji Islands 9 14 6 29 Spain 1 6 19 26 Other 105 116 103 324 TOTAL 17,085 16,259 17,975 51,319 Notes. From BNP2TKI, 2014, 2013 Placement and Protection of Indonesian Overseas Workers, p. 280  Regarding labor migration destination, youths in my study agreed in their observation that Taiwan and Malaysia are the most common countries of placement for TKIs from the Lampung province. This reflects the trends of TKI placements recorded by the National Agency  125 for the province of Lampung displayed in Table 5. Youths also perceived that South Korea and Japan are the more popular labor migration destination. While the table shows that there are more Lampung TKIs who work respectively in Singapore, Hong Kong, Saudi Arabia, and United Arab Emirates than South Korea and Japan, the former four countries never received any mentioning within my conversations with youth participants regarding Lampung TKIs. The number of Indonesian labor migrants who travel to South Korea did drastically increase between 2010-2013, before declining in 2014.  The application procedure and where to apply to become a TKI is a part of youth™s knowledge base, considering the prevalence of labor migration in this regency and their immediate surrounding. Elya pointed out that the application procedure could be quite straightforward. Aspiring TKIs can connect with their TKI relatives or friends who are already in the migration destination country and able to assist with fireferencesfl and knowledge on job availabilities. They need to then get a fisponsorfl whose role would be to assist with paperwork and documentations, and to fitagfl the TKI job for the applicant. Afterward, after all pre-clearance has been completed, they just need get the plane ticket and go. In the following excerpt, he shares this knowledge with me during our phone conversation and lays out what commonly happens: My cousin told me which sponsor is good. For us, going through a sponsor will expedite the process of getting a job. Nowadays, most of the placements are still in Taiwan. Taiwan has been the main TKI destination for Lampung–[He] told me about which sponsor. A friend of mine also just left yesterday, through a sponsor. Flew out just about three days ago. He put a certain amount for a down payment, and then sponsor would take care about the medical stuff and passport. The down payment is to ficlosefl the job. If  126 a job becomes available, then they™ll contact us. If we want the job, then deal, then the job is ficlosedfl for us; they won™t give it to anybody else. The sponsor is in Indonesia, and they work with people over there. Most of these agents in Indonesia work directly with Taiwan. They™re private. It takes about 2-3 months, 3 months to process. If we go through the government, the fee is lighter, but it takes longer.  Here, Elya highlighted one particular feature of the labor recruitment and migration business: the crucial role of the middleman or the sponsor. Sponsors are individuals who reside in a labor-sending community. The power of the sponsor comes from his or her knowledge of bureaucracy, and access to information on TKI jobs through a networking with multiple private labor recruitment agencies called the Pelaksana Penempatan Tenaga Kerja Indonesia (PPTKIS) (Lindquist, 2012, p. 72). Many also have knowledge of the TKI life and employment, as they are themselves formerly TKIs. And most importantly as the sponsor is a member of the labor-sending rural community, they have the trust of the people in the community and aspiring TKIs. PPTKIS are agenciesŠmay be government-owned but most commonly private due to their sheer number across IndonesiaŠthat receive job orders directly from employers in the labor-receiving country. They need to be registered and hold a license issued by the National Agency or the BNP2TKI, however unregistered or illegal agents are ubiquitous across labor-sending communities throughout Indonesia. The sponsor mediates the dealing between TKI candidates and PPTKIs, and may, as Elya suggested, have direct access to information on job availabilities from employers or TKIs who are already abroad.  Youths were also aware of the range in initial costs of the TKI application procedure. Some reported a range Rp. 20Œ25 million deposited prior to departing, with a 6-month break-even plan, while others mentioned a number closer to Rp. 50-60 million, and even Rp. 90  127 million. As a comparison, the Lampung minimum wage is set at Rp 1.6 million. This suggests that expenses incurred from the process of applying to become a TKI post a significant burden for parents of young aspiring TKIs; however, they are framed as an investment in light of the potential of future financial yields from working abroad. Many TKI candidates are then hard-pressed to utilize the loan system enabled by the sponsors and recruitment agencies, where costs are covered upfront by the loan and TKIs are then held under a contract to deposit a large portion of their monthly income to make the loan payments with interest to either the sponsor or the agency.  Lastly, youths also noted that TKIs work under a three-year term contract, renewable as many times as they would like to work. However, in some cases, there are age restrictions to contract renewal. Reyhan mentioned that his mother had then reached the maximum age restriction for renewal eligibilities. She had been a TKI in Taiwan for the past two terms, which was a total of 6 years, and may have had to return home. Youths repeatedly mentioned that TKIs from the Pesanggaran district commonly work for the length of two contract terms. This is parallel to the requirements laid out by the Taiwanese government, under the amendment to the Employment Services of Act of 1992 that allows foreign contract workers to stay up to six years at the time, and requiring them to return home before applying for a contract renewal (Pitkänen & Carrera, 2015).  While in many contexts migration has the end goal of permanent relocation, TKI migration is largely temporary. Youths insisted that many leave in order to come back. In the section that follows, I explore the ways in which becoming a TKI is constructed as enabling youths to achieve success. While for some the act of leaving to become a TKI is one among multiple paths to choose from, for some it is constructed as the only feasible way to achieve  128 success or overcome financial obstacles in their lives. I begin the section with a vignette illustrating the strength and prevalence of a narrative about success involving labor migration. fiWorking as a TKI Can Really Help Us Become Anything:fl Narrative of Success through Labor Migration It was a hot mid-afternoon on the 23rd of June. Putri and I found ourselves in the kitchen. Putri was very pregnant and had been having more frequent hunger pangs, while I had missed taking lunch. She is the eldest daughter of Ibu Nia, my third host during my fieldwork in the community. She was an LCS alumna and had graduated from college just a few months prior. At the time of my stay with her family, she was looking for work in the attempt of putting her college education and major in Accounting to good use. She had been on the job market for more than six months. Seeking employment proved to be a challenge.  Ibu rents out the rooms in her house to both teachers and students at LCS who are not from the Pesanggaran district. The land on which the large house is built and the plots of farmland the family owns has been with them for decades, as a part of the compensation for relocation and participation in the government transmigration programs from Java to Lampung. Over the years Ibu and Bapak acquired even more plots of farmland. Ibu™s family was in fact among the earlier settlers who migrated during the early 40s during the colonial era. As discussed in Chapter Two, this was the colonization period of the resettlement programs. Ibu, a woman now in her late 40s, talks about her grandmother who still remembers the tunes of Japanese songs she had learned as a child during Japanese occupation of Indonesia between 1942-1945. As among the earlier settlers, this family is considered well-known. The late Bapak was also one of the village™s bayan, a respected elder and leader in the community and the spacious house had been a communal space, used for meetings and gatherings. This goes to show  129 that Putri comes from relative wealth.  The evening prior, the three womenŠIbu Nia, Putri, and Vitri, the youngest daughterŠand I had sat around in the kitchen talking and motek jagung, massaging the dried corncobs with our thumb and palm to get the seeds to fall off. In the background was the crisp sound of dry seeds crackling and mixing with each other, as clusters of them fall from our hands into the big rattan weaved basket half-filled with orange-brown colored corn seeds. The seeds would be ready for planting the next day. After Bapak passed away a year and half prior, the three women were left to do the bulk of the physical work. During harvest, as normally the custom nowadays, they would hire farm workers.  Sitting around the dining table, Putri and I helped ourselves to pumpkin vegetable curry and white rice, and talked. We eventually talked about farming. She mentioned repeatedly how farming does not provide individuals and families with much financial leverages nor help young people gain social mobility. Despite Putri™s family™s relative wealthŠboth inherited and accumulated over the decadesŠfarming has not been able to provide this family with much liquid assets. For example, they in fact still had to rely on scholarships in order to be able to send Putri to college. Recall how in Chapter Five I recounted how eventually her sponsor failed to follow through with the commitment. She acknowledged that it is far more challenging for hired farm workers who do not own their own farmland to be able to make ends meet. Putri mentioned that a farm worker makes about Rp. 40,000 per day, which is about $2.8 a day. This amount is below the minimum wage for Lampung province. Through our conversation, she shared a memory of a young man from her past, with whom she was romantically involved. The following excerpt is taken from my fieldwork notes of our conversation that afternoon: They were together since the time she graduated from middle school. He lived in the  130 same village, but his parents weren™t around. As it turns out, he was also an indigenous Lampungese–When they found out about the relationship, the neighbors started talking negatively. So they went on with the relationship in secret–He stopped his education after middle school and went to work. He worked on the farms owned by IndoLampung Perkasa–At one point, she told the young man to just go abroadŠbecome a migrant workerŠfiif you stay, how can you make it?fl So he did apply to go, and had paid Rp. 28 million–He eventually left, and is still in Malaysia now as a TKI [Tenaga Kerja Indonesia, or Indonesian migrant worker]. They eventually broke up. The story got interrupted, because Ibu came in. Putri is someone whose adolescent life has been largely animated by the minor narrative of schooling. This is displayed in the alignment of her past trajectories, as she completed secondary schooling, followed through with her aspirations to pursue higher education, and her current plan to enter the professional world and seek an office job. Yet, through this glimpse into a fragment of her life story, it is clear that Putri recognized TKI as a path toward success for other youths in this community. While she was immersed within a narrative of success through schooling and has not chosen to become a TKI, here she recounted herself recommending labor migration to her boyfriend at the time as a way for him to escape his predicament: limited opportunities to gain upward mobility. She contextualized her rationale in a deep understanding of how difficult it is for a young person to gain economic capabilities while working as a hired farm-worker, seeing her own family struggled financially despite their inherited and procured assets in the family farm and the house. Putri constructed temporary labor migration as a solution to the young man™s need to radically reposition his economic status. Her remark that he would not be able to fimake itfl if he stayed in the community framed TKI as not only among the most  131 efficacious path toward success, but as seemingly the only option for this young man and individuals like him.  In this excerpt, Putri also brought back to my attention tensions that exist in the community between migrants and indigenous Lampungese. This was something I repeatedly heard mentioned in conversations with various members of the community. As briefly summarized in Chapter Two, differing access to resources between predominantly Javanese migrants who participated in transmigration programs and indigenous Lampungese have given rise to ethnic-based conflict within the region. The young man Putri alluded to was Lampungese, while Putri came from a Javanese migrant family. Most youths and adults I met during my fieldwork were in fact ethnically Javanese, including individuals who were not originally from the community, such as the LCS teachers. Many either expressed or pointed to common negative stereotypes the community holds against indigenous Lampungese. I heard the same repeated characterization: orang asli Lampung, or indigenous Lampungese, are filazyfl and fispends more than what they earn,fl have fibadfl customs, are backward and begal, or robbers and muggers usually of motorcycles who commit their crime in public roads, sometimes in broad daylight. The challenges to Putri™s relationship were set against the backdrop of this tension rooted in politics of identity. That the young man did not come from means reified the negative stereotype against him: that he was idle and would not have been a good provider and suitor for Putri. Here, labor migration is then again constructed as a resolution that may resolve this issue. In the case of this young man, as a Lampungese who bore the negative prejudices and stereotypes of Putri™s Javanese transmigrant family, becoming a TKI would not only yield the success of accumulation of wealth and economic empowerment, but may also lead to a repositioning of his social status in the eyes of the Javanese migrant public.   132 A narrative about success through labor migration lays out a belief in the encompassing potential of temporary transnational labor migration. Becoming a migrant worker opens up a wide range of possibilities and has the ability of helping young people fibecome anything.fl One of the focus group youth participants in fact used this phrase to make this point. As mentioned, Putri suggests that for some individuals, there is simply no better option, and staying will not help them succeed in life. Upon their return and as a direct results of the wealth they are able to accumulate, individuals who have become an overseas contract worker may experience a shift in the way they are both economically and socially positioned in the community. As such, the promise of economic empowerment that may be experienced by individuals and families through labor migration construct working as a TKI as a strong narrative about success especially for the least advantaged youths in this community.  Success as economic empowerment and accumulation of capital. Youth participants expressed that being a TKI set them up for achieving many other important life goals and definitions of success. This included the ability to provide care for family members, gaining further income generating capabilities, and gaining respect. Within a narrative about success through TKI, labor migration enables accumulation of wealth in a relatively short period of time. The sacrifice of being away from one™s family and home community over a period of three to five, or even ten years, pays off upon one™s return, with both the young person and their family™s increased purchasing power and consumption capacities. For some TKIs, working abroad enables them to ensure their familyŠchildren, parents, or younger siblingsŠare cared for and have their needs met, including having access to education and health care. For others, the accumulation of wealth enables returnees to have capital to further their income generating capabilities. TKI money enables individuals to purchase farmland or establish small businesses.  133 Within a narrative of success through TKI, labor migration is largely temporary and enables youths to eventually return to their home communities, to be close to family while making a more decent living. This would otherwise have not been possible.  In my conversations with youth participants, a house, a plot of farmland, a business, and a car were the four most commonly mentioned things that TKI money can acquire. Citra™s comments below pointed to this, as she explained the rationale behind her consideration of becoming a TKI:  I thought of working abroad, because I will be able to succeed. I can buy farmland, and have money to open a business. I can have a car and work. Staying and working here, won™t get you anywhere. I thought of working abroad because my mbah, my grandma, and my mother already told me to. My grandma has seen that one of her granddaughter in Taiwan is successful. She built the house, the one that you are staying in, that™s where the money is from.  Here, Citra reiterated the familiar pessimistic tone about staying in the community and the chances of, in her words, getting fianywhere in life.fl Success is evidenced in renovated and modern looking houses built on remittance money, labor-migrant owned businesses, and farmlands. Their visibility works to strengthen the power of the TKI narrative of success. In other words, TKI money makes success visible. According to Citra, this explained her grandmother and mother™s aspirations for her to follow her cousin, a TKI in Taiwan.  TKIs receive a wide range of income on the basis of types of employment. According to one of the village leaders, Pak Jupri, female domestic workers earn between Rp. 6 Œ 7 million per month, about 4 times the Lampung minimum wage, while males who are predominantly factory workers may earn up to Rp. 10 Œ 20 million a month. He added that a large portion of this  134 monthly income is then sent home as remittance through both formal channelsŠwire and bank transfers directly to familyŠand informal meansŠtransfer through sponsors or rolled up cash in bags carried through the entire plane ride back to Indonesia when TKIs fly home. The economic yield of a TKI largely rises out of the difference in currency exchange. Migrant workers benefit from currency differences as they multiply the buying power of wages earned, as they are remitted and used in Indonesia. Youths expressed how crucial yet difficult it can be for some to acquire enough capital to open a business. Labor migration is, therefore, positioned as a solution to this problem.  From a macroeconomic perspective, the aggregate amount of remittance sent by TKIs abroad makes a significant contribution to the local and national economy. For example, remittance from labor migration in Indonesia exceeds the amount received from foreign investment and development assistance (Rosewarne, 2012, p. 68). In the year 2013 alone, TKI remittance amounted to US $ 7.3 billion (BNP2TKI, 2014, p. 41), while the amount of development assistance Indonesia received that year amounted to US $ 53 million (World Bank, 2015).  The changing economic landscape of the rural community due to labor migration significantly shaped my fieldwork experience. Two out of the four houses in which I stayed during my fieldwork were built by TKI money. My first host, a female LCS teacher, was leasing the house built by Citra™s cousin with three other teachers from her hard-earned money from Taiwan. My second host, the LCS principal and her husband, were also renting from a man whom I was told processes TKI applications. He may have been a sponsor, or someone who runs a private labor recruitment agency. Across the LCS campus stood a brick house painted bright yellow with large glass window, visibly standing out as new- and modern looking house. When I  135 inquired, teachers confirm that it was also built on TKI money. These houses have a few visibly recognizable traits: ceramic tiled bathrooms, electric water pump, and elevated water tanks in place of or in addition to ground water wells, finished and painted brick walls, garages and gates, multiple-stories, and satellite dishes. Scholars studying transnational labor migration in Southeast Asia have documented similar phenomenon of the changing landscapes of villages and of remittance-based development happening in labor migrant sending communities (see for example, Lindquist, 2012; Silvey, 2006). Migrants building a home, purchasing farmland, and opening up businesses that occur while being abroad reveal intentions of returning to one™s community of origin. Youths confirmed that TKIs leave in order to be able to succeed. Succeeding is then about thriving in their own communities of origin and being able to care for and be with family.  Gaining respect and increasing social status within the community. Being a TKI becomes a narrative of success in that the increase in one™s financial capacities leads to an increased self-worth and social status. Zai, the young woman who deliberately advised her younger female siblings against going to college identified this as what motivates youths to choose to become a TKI. In response to my question of the reasons why her own friends become a TKI, she noted, fiYes, well they want to succeed. They want to be successful. So that people won™t look down at them.fl Here, Zai not only reaffirmed the direct link between becoming a TKI and success, she also framed the success that labor migration would bring as leading to the ability to alter one™s self-perception as well as other™s perception about a person. There is an assumption that gaining the respect of others is a byproduct of one™s ability to display symbols of successŠincluding but not limited to the new house, the car, the new business, or the farmland. And this in turn is made possible in a relatively short period of time through temporary labor  136 migration. Returning to the vignette above of Putri and the young man she recommended to become a TKI, success through TKI is conceived as having an effect of adjusting one™s social position in the society. Putri seemed to suggest that financial advancement displayed by this young Lampungese may hold the potential of altering the community™s perception toward him, in light of negative stereotypes against indigenous Lampungese. Providing further context on the prejudice against Lampungese prevalent among Javanese migrants, in a report prepared for the World Bank on violent identity-based conflict in Jabung, a sub-district in the southern border of Pesanggaran, Yuhki Tajima (2004) delineates the socioeconomic conditions and cultural processes that construct fiopposing collectivitiesfl (p. 42) among the two groups. He notes the following: The Transmigration Dinas [Agency] supplied migrants with land, housing, food and agricultural support, while not providing the same support for the Lampungese. This struggle to establish new villages strengthened the bond among transmigrants. As the economic condition of the transmigrant communities overtook that of the Lampungese communities, Lampungese resentment of transmigrants began to surface. Thefts of motorcycles were seen by some as a justifiable redistribution of wealth. On the other hand, greater crime led to negative stereotypes of Lampungese communities, while reifying the sense of shared struggle among the transmigrants–This opinion that Lampungese are lazy and are criminals by nature and that transmigrants are diligent and disciplined was an opinion repeated throughout Lampung Province by transmigrants and even some Lampungese. This narrative of socioeconomic differences is a source of significant resentment for transmigrants, who believe their hard work is being stolen  137 away by Lampungese crime, and Lampungese, who resent the inequality between the two collectivities and the negative labels as lazy and undisciplined criminals (pp. 42 & 44). In order to combat the negative stereotypes that have shaped this young man™s reputation, the task of displaying financial efficacy and capabilities therefore became essential. Migrant work enables accumulation of wealth. For an indigenous male Lampungese, this may translate into a breaking out of stereotypes that are imposed upon him, and a repositioning of one™s status amidst a predominantly Javanese community, where the watchful eyes of the public expect very little from him.  Labor migration as a family matter. Accumulation of wealth and economic empowerment is seen as a direct result of working as a TKI. However, labor migration is also perceived as enabling youths to provide care for immediate family members, including one™s own children and also parents. TKI remittance has supported family left behind with their daily expenses and basic needs. Remittance has also paid for children™s education and health care, as well as provides startup funding to open and run a business.  Olyd, the female youth participant who worked teaching English at the asram, while herself not choosing to become a migrant workers, recognized the income-generating potentials of TKI in this regard. She highlighted how, in light of this, young TKIs go with their family in mind:  As of late, more and more TKIs are those who go straight after high school. They have seen those who are successful, who went to Korea, Japan, and Taiwan. Usually they want to help their family, so that they can have a business, acquire capital funding, and can succeed. As discussed in Chapter Three, an important version of success is providing care for one™s  138 family. Within youths™ conceptions, caring for family is framed largely as looking after their economic well-being. I heard repeatedly that individuals who become migrant workers abroad are largely motivated by this need and desire to provide for their family members. This is also exemplified by Elya™s aspiration of becoming a TKI to be able to open a business for his aging parents. In Reyhan™s mother™s case, by going away, she was able to support Reyhan™s college education.  Individuals leaving behind family members in order to better care for them is a phenomenon that is very close in my life. My own sister, an Indonesian nationality who lives in Singapore, has for a number of years employed a TKI from Indonesia as help to, among other things, care for the children while she and her husband are at work during the day. The TKI woman, who is in her mid 30-s, herself has a young child at home in her village in West Java. The child is left in the care of her mother, both of whom are benefiting from remittance sent home. There are hosts of female migrants with children like this woman who become workers abroad motivated by their desire to meet financial needs at home. In the process, they leave behind their household and children to take up jobs where their primary responsibilities ironically include taking care of other people™sŠtheir employersŠchildren and also home. However, according to feminist geographer Rachel Silvey (2006), these female migrants who have had to leave children behind while they work as a TKI abroad in fact tend to see maternal absence as a form of figood motheringfl and an expression of fistrong family valuesfl (p. 24). In sum, within a narrative of success through labor migration, becoming a TKI yields economic empowerment which holds an all-encompassing potential of success, as it gives youths the ability to provide and care for their families and gain respect or an increased social status. In the very particular case of young male Lampungese, success through TKI is a part of a larger  139 project of repositioning of self amidst a predominantly Javanese migrant community, through an altering of the community™s perception about his character and values. For female migrants, especially those with children, labor migration holds the promise of the ability to exercise good mothering in providing for their children as well as their parents, who commonly become the children™s primary care-giver. This in turn illustrates that success through TKI affects the lives of differing sub-groups of youths within the community in different ways.  Labor Migration (Not) for All: Complementary and Competing Narratives of Success A majority of the people I met during fieldwork recognized that becoming a TKI is a path to success for youths, despite whether or not the TKI narrative of success had animated their own lives. Yet, there were variations in their perceptions. Some have enacted and embodied the narrative by becoming a TKI, or planning to become one. As mentioned, Febri, Elya, and Citra would fall under in this category. There were also individuals in my study who, despite not having chosen TKI as their own path toward success, acknowledged that the narrative of success through labor migration is powerful. Some among them were empathetic and understood why others have chosen it, while others went further by actively promoting it to their family members and friends. We see this in Citra™s mother and grandmother™s encouragement for her to consider the TKI route. This is also expressed in Putri™s recommendation for her boyfriend at the time to go into labor migration, despite her own enactment of the minor narrative of success that involves schooling. There are then others who may have been empathetic to those who have chosen to become migrant workers, but saw labor migrations as having to great of a cost due to the physical and emotional separation from family members one would experience. As an example, Elya™s older sister disapproved his TKI aspirations and current employment in Jakarta, wanting instead for him to be physically close to their parents who remained in Lampung.   140 Comprising a small group, there were then a distinct group of individuals who were critical of the TKI route and considered TKI as altogether a non-success path. Within this group, a few individuals actively discouraged youths from developing TKI aspirations. As agents of the minor narrative of schooling, LCS teachers were among the individuals who fell under this category. The following excerpt taken from my interview with Ms. Feby clearly communicated this:  I was placed in this school the year I did my practicum. So prior to 2011, I was here for 4 months. That was in 2010. I saw then that almost all of the students I taught wanted to be TKIs. They were 12th graders. That™s what they aspired to be. I suppose it™s because they think that TKIs–would have lots of money. I didn™t understand, but I told them, fiWhy would you guys want to merely be a TKI? YouŠYour dignityŠIt is low! It is better for you to have work that can make you be much better, even though the pay is not great. So, there were so many of them. Even the 9th grader [aspired to be TKIs].  At the time of my interview with her, Ms. Feby was in her second year of teaching. The exchange she referred to occurred during her practicum or student teaching. As someone who was not from this rural community, she expressed the novelty of encountering a strong post-secondary aspiration to become TKIs among adolescents who were then in their mid-teens. While acknowledging that it was a phenomenon that she did not quite understand, she framed becoming a TKI as degrading and filow.fl Here, she recounted that early on she began the effort of steering youths away from the TKI path. By associating TKI work with low-status work, Ms. Feby overlooked the meaning behind the potential for economic empowerment for youths in this community.  As someone who taught economics and entrepreneurship, this teacher projected her own  141 version of success for students in her classroom. She made the following comment: fiI would prefer you all be entrepreneurs and start your own business, perhaps start small. But that is okay, if you keep on at it.fl In light of this statement, the notion of fiwork that can make them become much betterfl in the excerpt above refers to students engaging in entrepreneurship. While she acknowledged that youths were attracted to becoming a migrant worker due to the money they could make, she may have lacked the insight that TKI-aspiring youths in fact do, among other things, become migrant workers in order to realize their many goals. These goals include accumulating enough funds for capital in order to become entrepreneurs.  There is a ranging positioning of subjects in relation to the TKI narrative of success: from adherence and enactment of it, empathetic acknowledgement, to critical recoding as non-success. As I focused in my data on those who were critical about becoming a TKI and labor migration as a path towards success, I noticed the following. The narrative of success through labor migration complements the dominant narrative of schooling, while competing with the minor narrative about success through schooling.  Labor migration may be a logical progression of high school completion. Revisiting the dominant narrative of schooling, schooling mediates success for adolescents as it enables them to gain a high school diploma in a timely fashion to quickly find employment. Labor migration is an opportunity that provides young people sure access to employment and offers a great way to accumulate wealth in a short period of time. Engagement in schooling, therefore, becomes irrelevant, while valuing getting credentials continues to be acceptable. A narrative of success through labor migration validates the dominant narrative about success through schooling and gives it further traction. However, the opposite is true for the minor narrative of schooling.  Within a minor narrative about success through schooling, authentic engagement is  142 important as it qualifies young individuals for further educational and professional opportunities, specifically college and mid- to high-skilled or white collar employments. Becoming a TKI and going into manual and low-skilled labor is seen as limiting individuals™ potentials for educational and professional opportunities and, therefore, a non-success path. According to LCS teachers, a narrative of success through labor migration works against developing students™ commitment to schooling as defined within the minor narrative of success. In the following excerpt, Ms. Bunga lamented her observation of why the TKI narrative of success worked to undermine LCS™ efforts to promote a narrative of success through schooling: We see in this community that most of those who succeed are in fact because of TKI, both males and females. As it turns out, this is also what™s causing the students to lack motivation to study. fiSchooling is not important, I could still be a TKI,fl even though who knows what type of work they do there. That™s not important for them–For those who aim to just graduate [high school], or those who don™t even graduate, they could still work abroad in domestic service–Because others do succeed, that™s what makes them think that it is not important to further their education, or take their studies seriously. Here, Ms. Bunga attributed the success of many individuals in the community to their migration as a TKI. Further, she identifies the visibility of the success of past and present TKIs as a non-neutral circumstance, and a part of the mechanism through which the TKI narrative of success became reiterated for adoption by youths. According to this teacher, the attractiveness of the TKI route works against inspiring students to value engagement in schooling and, particularly, the pursuit of higher education. The imagination that they can succeed by becoming a TKI is contributing to motivational issues among students. In other words, the visibility of the TKI-generated success displayed by TKIs weakens students™ already waning commitment to  143 adopting for themselves a minor narrative of success through schooling. Costs and hidden risks behind the potentials of labor migration. While within this narrative of success, labor migration is seen as a likely potential for rapid accumulation of wealth, youths recognized that there are necessary conditions under which this is achieved. In other words, not all TKIs come home having achieved their financial goals. And not all of them are able to materialize the dreams of owning own business, farmland, and building a house. In most cases, individuals acknowledged that in order for a TKI to be able to save and send money as remittance, they would need to work far exceeding normal working hours. In the case of Wahyu, a young man who was an LCS alumni and eventually went to Taiwan as a TKI, working overtime is in fact not only a daily occurrences, but mandatory. This was his experience: I work in a small home industry, small factory, and it stands beside a school. I handle metal plates, shape and weld them. There was another Indonesian TKI working there, but the rest are Taiwanese. I work overtime. If you don™t work overtime, you won™t break even. So you can work from, for example, 8 am till 5 pm, with an hour lunch break from noon to 1pm. They provide lunch boxes, with soups that you drink, Chinese style. And then the mandatory overtime is till 8:30 pm, even though if you want to continue on till 10 pm or 11 pm, you can do so.  Here, Wahyu pointed out that TKIs would be able to send back a portion of their income as remittance if they worked overtime in addition to the mandatory twelve-hour days. My host Pak Kar, the LCS principal™s husband, confirmed the commonness of this situation. He added that in order for TKIs to be able to make the Rp. 10-15 million monthly income, they would have to do fikerjaan yang tidak manusiawifl or fiwork that is inhumane.fl He used this term to refer to working 16-hour days. This means what enables TKI to be successful comes at a cost. The cost  144 is in the form of being away from their families and putting in long hours of hard labor. For female migrants with children, it comes in the form of being separated from their children. In addition, what makes TKI success possible comes with a set of risks.  Writing for the EU™s international research on transnational migration, Pitkänen and Carrera (2015) notes that in addition to discrimination in the labor-receiving countries, migrant workers may face other risks, including underpayment of salary, exposure to health hazards due to unsafe working conditions, and physical or mental abuse by employers (p. 284). Female TKIs face even more risks. The International Organization for Migration (2010) reports that domestic work is often not governed by labor laws in labor-receiving countries, as it is considered informal work within the domain of private residences. The TKI narrative of success redirects individuals™ gaze from the risks and potential harm that they may incur, to the promises of rapid accumulation of wealth and the ability to realize youths™ definitions of success.  In this chapter, I have shown how youths and adults in this community point to labor migration as a path that can provide youths the leverages to realize their definitions of success. Within this narrative of success, labor migration of youth as TKIs leads to their economic empowerment and ability to accumulate capital. This in turn enables youths to perform or develop various success identities, including becoming an entrepreneur and opening up a business, as well as providing care for their family members by sending monthly remittance. TKI success may also result in a shift in one™s social status in the community. In the case of Lampungese male youths, this is particularly important in light of negative stereotypes and prejudices held against them by the predominantly Javanese community at large. The material visibility of TKI successŠTKI houses, farmlands, cars, and businesses in the communityŠ 145 reiterates the narrative and adds to its legitimacy.  I have shown how this narrative of success is particularly prevalent within this locale and the regency of East Lampung. It has shaped many youths™ understanding of their own and their peers™ future possibilities. The TKI narrative of success is an example of the ways that national and global economic forces implicate youths™ lives and aspirations within a rural community. Here, youths™ narrative of success through becoming a temporary overseas migrant worker is constructed on the basis of bilateral agreements among nation-states on import and export of labor, and government-sanctioned employment programs that originally targeted female domestic workers. It is a local manifestation of the effects of a set of national policies, which sought to respond to and exploit the shifts in labor trends and economic structures occurring elsewhere in the world, including the Middle East and East Asia. 146 CHAPTER SIX  Success Discourse and Youths as Success Subjects In 2011, an interview I had with a religion teacher at LCS piqued my curiosity in the ways in which schooling becomes a leverage for some youth and an obstacle for others in their pursuit of successful adulthood. The account of the conversation this teacher had with a principal from a neighboring school still haunts me to this day. I am reminding the reader of this excerpt previously included in the discussion of school policies on the National Examination included in Chapter Four: We take pity on our students, because they want to have a future, so we help them–It™s as if the children are forced to swim–They are forced to jump into the swimming pool, when clearly they are unable to swim, how can we just stand there and do nothing?  The coding of allowing or facilitating students to cheat as helping students succeed was at first mind-boggling, but it become an opportunity for me to ask, fiwhat if?fl I return again to Dorothy Holland™s (1998) notion of the fifigured world,fl which refers to a web of social encounters, activities, and relations where individuals, form and [are] formed in collectively realized ‚as if™ realms–People have the propensity to be drawn to, recruited for, and formed in these worlds, and to become active in and passionate about them. People™s identities and agency are formed dialectically and dialogically in these ‚as if™ worlds–What if gender relations were defined so that women had to worry about whether they were attractive? What if there were a world called academia, where books were so significant that people would sit for hours on end, away from friends and family, writing them?  (p. 49)  147 Thinking in terms of fiwhat iffl allowed me then to ask: What if teachers and adults who facilitated students to cheat in National Examinations were helping young people succeed in life? What if graduating from senior secondary and getting a high school diploma were so important that youths needed to employ all means necessary? What if labor migration were a better option than going to college for some youths?  The focus on exploring narratives of success was an epistemological decision to understand encounters such as the one above. I wished to see the exchange between the LCS teacher and the neighboring principal, the act of helping students cheat, the different meanings attached to such act, and the principal™s disposition as if they were all a series of artifacts of their time and context. I adopted a Foucauldian question of geneology: fiGiven those artifacts and epistemes, how did people think of themselves in the worldfl (Fendler, 2010, p. 39)? Given what I saw and heardŠabout schooling, cheating, what is success, labor migration, and so onŠhow do people think of youths as successful in their world?  The driving question in this research was how does a rural community construct understandings of their youths as successful or otherwise. In Chapter Three, I delineate youths™ success discourse from the perspective of success identities. There are three dominant figures or success identities identified: the entrepreneur, the professional or an occupation-based success identity, and the good son/daughter/sibling/parent.  Many youths™ success discourses centered on being an entrepreneur. While some are attracted to the independence that comes from owning and running one™s own business, the affordance of working from home and being close to family, others are attracted to the risk-taking nature and honing their savviness to detect market demands, try new things, and adapt. Still, for some, being an entrepreneur means not engaging in manual work, such as direct hands- 148 on farm work. A few youths suggested that while being an entrepreneur is a primary future goal, pluriactivity is ideal; to not only be an entrepreneur but also hold permanent salaried employment is even more desirable. Other youths visualize success identities that are linked to professions or occupations. It is an identity that interacts with the various signifiers of a profession, including access to a body of knowledge, commonly the acquisition of higher or post-secondary education, the achievement of social status linked to particular occupations or professions upon entry into the profession, and the social and moral responsibilities and expectations attached to the profession. Among the most common professions mentioned are teaching, nursing, and either joining the military or becoming a police officer. Youths also talk about success identities as a professional in the sense of someone holding a white-collar job, characterized by either working in an office, in fimanagement,fl or in information technology. Lastly, the third predominant success identity is one that is based on one™s family relationships. Living close to parents, and more importantly, membahagiakan orang tua or making one™s parents happy and proud is a part of what many of this study™s youth see as a successful future self. The goal of being a good son, daughter, sibling, or parent also involves living out their responsibility of caring for family members. Caring often manifests in both providing for loved ones financially as well as being in close proximity to one™s parents, to provide emotional and psychological support. While in their speech regarding successful future selves, youths do not speak in abstractions and at the level of values and definitions, the following success definitions emerge within their success discourse: financial sufficiency, stability, and security, sense of efficaciousness and independence, gaining respect of others, and ability to care for family and  149 make their parents proud. These definitions are projected through the success identities, or figures in a figured world. They serve as end goals within successification projects that construct aspirations surrounding work, education, mobility, and family, and guides corresponding decisions each person make. Youths™ aspirations or desires articulate narratives about success that are within their purview in this community. I have discussed multiple narratives of success that in different ways and at different times animate youths™ lives. I purposefully drew a distinction between two discourses of success: one that centers around schooling and another that centers around labor migration.  In Chapter Four, drawing mainly from interview with teachers at LCS, I make explicit two ways schooling has been fiput into [success] discoursefl (p. 11). I highlight what I have termed a dominant narrative and a minor narrative of success through schooling. Individuals within the LCS circle, particularly teachers, administrators, and parents related to LCS, are the strongest proponents of the minor narrative of success. They are in fact a minority within this rural community. The two narratives of success through schooling are constructed through differing assumptions behind what schooling entails and what effects different components of schooling have on youths™ lives and futures.  A dominant narrative of success through schooling within the community is based on a belief that many life and work opportunities require a high school diploma, making it a very important document one would need in order to secure a better future. From this perspective, since gaining a diploma and getting employment in a timely manner are of great importance, schools need to support young individuals to reach this goal. In the dominant narrative of success through schooling, post-secondary schooling is neither necessary nor inevitable in the ways that  150 gaining a high school diploma is.  A minor narrative of success through schooling, constructed in contrast or opposition to the dominant narrative, argues that schooling matters not just because it helps youths eventually earn a degree and be able to find work. More importantly, schooling is crucial because it helps youths acquire necessary knowledge and build competencies that will prepare them for future educational and professional employment. According to this narrative, authentic learning requires students to actively engage in schooling, and since secondary education no longer suffices in ensuring a young person™s competitive advantage in a changing society, higher education is key to helping students succeed in life. Successful employment is imagined as professional white-collar jobs that require a college degree, or jobs that require medium- or high-level skills. In sum, this minor narrative of success through schooling assumes that authentic engagement in schooling, and developing higher education and professional aspiration, as well as eventually finding professional employment are keys to a successful future.  These narratives about success through schooling produce different mindsets and, as argued in Chapter Four, are expressed in classrooms and schools through various practices and policies. They also interact differently with another powerful narrative of success that centers on labor migration. In Chapter Five, I described a narrative of success through becoming a TKI. Becoming a contract-based migrant worker leads to economic empowerment and youths™ ability to accumulate wealth in a relatively short period of time. This allows them the ability to open up a business and be entrepreneurs, which is developing an important success identity. This also affords them the ability to buy farmland, build or renovate a house, and provide for their family members by sending monthly remittance. All these would otherwise be very hard to accomplish or would require much more time.  151 TKI success may also lead to an increased social status in the community. In case of young male Lampungese, success through TKI is a part of a larger project of repositioning of self amidst a predominantly Javanese migrant community. This is achieved through altering the community™s perception about one™s character and values, by signaling efficacy, responsibility, and commitment to hard work. For female migrants, especially those with children, labor migration holds the promise of the ability to exercise and display good mothering, as one™s ability to provide for one™s children and one™s parents are enhanced. Foucault (1990) would argue that the world of discourses is not divided between accepted or dominant discourses, and excluded or dominated ones, but as multiplicity of discursive elements that come into play in various strategies (p. 100). However, the distinction I am making, firstly between the dominant and minor narratives of success through schooling, and with the narrative of success through labor migration, helps in my analysis to tease out differing success discourses that youths are exposed to and to which they are vulnerable. Making the narratives distinct allows for an investigation of differing success subjects. In the following section, I will expand on this notion of the success subject. From Narratives to Success-Subjectification: Reframing Youths™ Narratives of Success  What were the games of truth by which human beings came to see themselves  as desiring individuals? (Foucault, 2012, p. 7)  To reiterate, when I started the dissertation my aim was to understand youths™ aspiration and their perceptions on what success and the good life entails. My interest was in understanding what drove adolescents™ decision during the period in their lives associated with transition from secondary schooling to work or further education, in light of local and shared definitions of success. I used the framework of narratives to describe and represent notions of success, and perceptions of what paths lead to success. As mentioned in Chapter Two, a narrative of success,  152 which implies a meta-narrative, organizes and connects understandings about the social world and one™s place in it with notions of success. A logic of narrative lays out how one action, event, or condition precedes or follows others. It states that a series of actions, events, and conditions when put in place will eventually lead towards success-related outcomes, without necessarily establishing causation. After discussing the success identities and narratives of success as included in the preceding chapters, I began to see another pattern emerging from the data that foregrounded the involvement and role of social actors in inviting, promoting, resisting, and iterating specific narratives of success. The framework of narratives of success is limited in its affordances to explore this. I then started to reread the narratives using a framework of Foucault™s theory of subject of discourse and subjectification. This positioned me to think not only in terms of narratives of success, but to really frame them as fisuccessificaton projectsfl in which institutional and individual actors play a significant role. I will use the term fisuccess-subjectificationfl to refer to the ways in which individuals come to recognize their subjectivities within and through a success discourse. An individual as subject: constitutes himself in an active fashion, by the practices of self, these practices are nevertheless not something that the individual invents by himself. They are patterns that he finds in culture and which are proposed, suggested and imposed on him by his culture, his society, and his social group (Foucault, 1987, p. 11; in Strozier, 2001, p. 141).  Youths™ narratives of success are examples of what Foucault refers to here as patterns found in culture, society, and social groups. The discussions in Chapters Three, Four, and Five point to this as youth identify success identities, or enact specific narratives of success involving schooling and labor migration. A reframing of narratives of success using Foucault™s theory of  153 subject of discourse extends the analysis to recognize the ways in which social actorsŠindividuals and institutionsŠbecome a part of the social transactions that constructs, validates, iterates, negate, or undermine specific narratives of success. It also pushes the analysis to consider what it means for individuals to engage with and be shaped by particular success discourses.  In the following, I discuss three major ways a reframing of narratives of success using the framework of subject of discourse extends the analysis. The framework allows me to see and investigate: 1) that there is a success Subject within a success discourse, 2) that individuals are invited into procedures of success-subjectification, and 3) that individuals establish their differing subject-position with regard to particular success discourses.  Success discourses, subject, and subjectification. According to Butler (1997), subjectification is the process of becoming subordinated by power by fidiscursive productivityfl (p. 2). Expanding on this Foucauldian notion of discursive productivity, Davies (2013) states:  It is through citational chains, or repeated acts of recognition, that we are subjected and subject ourselves to discourses that are, Butler argues, in some sense prior to us, and external to us. The citational chains enable the accomplishment of ourselves as recognizably human, autonomous beings with a viable sense of individual identity (p. 682). Narratives of success are these citational chainsŠitineraries of aspiration, orientations, commitments, and corresponding behaviors and actionsŠthrough which the success subject can be recognized. Success discourse produces ways to recognize self and others as working out or having realized particular definitions of success. This means subjectification is a process whereby one obtains a subjectivity, which is but fione of the give possibilities of organization of  154 a self-consciousnessfl (Foucault, 1988, p. 253; in Strozier, 2002, p. 141). Different narratives of success lay out different procedures of success-subjectifications and contruct differing Subjects of discourse. Here, I turn to Strozier™s (2001) distinction of the Subject/subject. Strozier uses Subject to denote what is prior and fiinstituting that culture in which the subject is nurtured and able to realize his own portion of originality (p. 45).fl Within the analogy of itineraries of aspirations within narratives of success, the Subject serves as the end-goal or is a projected image of ethical/successful being. The discourse that constructs the Subject serves then as the landscape that makes intelligible notion of firoutesfl or fipathwaysfl as a part of the successification project. While the Subject institutes fidiscourse and the subject formed within infl (p. 144), individuals come to occupy the site of the subjectfl (Butler, 1997, p. 10). The subject emerges through individual™s recognition of his or her own sense of self, which always takes place through and within discourseŠand Butler would emphasize, occurs through language (p. 5). Foucault™s theory of subjectification is genealogical investigation of the subject. I draw heavily from Lynn Fendler™s (2010) reiteration of Foucault™s four-part framework for analyzing the subject, which describes both the rationale and itinerary for what Foucault (2012) terms fipractices of the selffl (p. 28). The framework helps us understand subjectification as a procedure in a more systematic way. Foucault (2012) offers the idea of substance, regimen, mode, and telos of subjectification. The substance of subjectification points to the fitarget of changefl or which part of self is fito be worked on by ethicsfl (Fendler, 2010, p. 56) toward carving out in oneself the Subject of discourse. The ethical substance of a success-subjectification procedure would refer to what domain or target of change is expected in order that individuals may recognize self and others as  155 successful, or attempting success. While in one success discourse, the substance may target observable behaviors and actions that are perceived as exhibiting success, in another the change within the subject needs to occur at a cognitive level or related to one™s belief and mindset about success.  The regimen of subjectification is the fihowfl or the set of practices in order to work out the ethical subject (p. 60). Subjects take up a set of practices or fiforms of elaboration of ethical workfl (Foucault, 2012, p. 27) not only in response or compliance of external pressure or a given rule, but in order to transform oneself into the Subject of discourse (p. 27). The regimen or set of practices represents the workings of power in the fipeculiar turning of a subject against itself–in acts of self-reproach, conscience, and melancholia that work in tandem with processes of social regulationfl (Butler, 1997, pp. 18Œ19). The regimen of success-subjectification then delineates acts and practices that will help youths enact and realize various versions of success. The mode of subjectification refers to the rationale of subjectification. It points to ways in which fipeople are invited or incited to recognize their moral obligationsfl (Fendler, 2010, p. 58). The mode of subjectification delineates what criteria of ethical beingŠwhether fibrilliance, beauty, nobility, or perfectionfl (Foucault, 2010, p. 27)Što which one™s life becomes a form of an answer. The mode of success-subjectification refers then to what criteria of being successful the different narratives point to. It would allow me to ask questions such as what kinds of reasoning individuals appeal to in order to persuade themselves to enact a set of practices within a successification project, for instance, cheating or not cheating on the National Examination, going or not going to higher education, and becoming or not becoming a TKI. The telos of subjectification concerns the larger goal behind the rationale of the ethical project. Rationales behind any sets of practices of self are lodged within discourse or the network  156 of meanings and values that contextualize and construct reasoning. Investigating the telos of the subject means exploring the fikind of beingfl (Fendler, 2010, p. 63) of the resulting ethical subject. The telos of success-subjectification delineates what it means to be successful, or what kind of a person one aims to be to recognize oneself as successful. Telos refers to the kinds of being and living that is constructed as successful within particular narratives of success, be it through schooling, labor migration, and even other success paths. Using this new framework of the success subject, I offer a re-reading of two particular narratives of success: what I have called the minor narrative of success through schooling and the TKI narrative of success. Recall that in Chapter Five, I discussed how they become narratives that are pitted and constructed as competing against one another.  The substance dimension asks what part of the self should be worked on and changed to become a success Subject, while the regimen dimension asks how this change occurs, or what one is expected to do to change (p. 55). Within the minor narrative of success, the substance of change includes one™s values for authentic engagement with learning tasks, attitudes or aspirations toward schooling or further education and professional or white-collar work, and behaviors that display engagement. This narrative™s regimen, or one™s fipractice of the selffl (p. 55) includes compliance to school regulations and fulfillment of academic requirements through actual engagements in learning tasks. This means completing homework, studying for tests and upholding the honor code during exams, being punctual and disciplined, and developing and displaying higher education aspiration. Within the TKI narrative of success, the target of change of the success subject is instead one™s financial capacities and ability to accumulate as much wealth as quickly as possible. The regimen of this success subject requires signing up as a TKI, working abroad, and while abroad, meeting the conditions that increase the likelihood to succeed  157 as a TKIŠthrough working overtime and living frugally.  Both narratives of success lay out which part of selves need to be worked out toward recognition as a success subject. The substances of the success subjects of the two competing narratives differ and do not overlap. While the target of change in a minor success-through-schooling discourse is concerned with values, attitudes, and aspirations surrounding further education and professional employment, the target of change in a labor migration success discourse is the individual™s financial-enhancement capacities. While a change in the former may eventually support the latter, the reverse is not true. This is the underlying theory of change behind the minor narrative of success through schooling, that social mobility and increased financial capacity can be achieved through development of educational and professional aspirations. One™s labor migration aspiration, and even success as a TKI, does not lead to higher education and professional aspirations. Further, as lamented by LCS teacher-participants discussed in the previous chapter, one™s desire for a speedy increase in one™s income-generating capacities via the TKI route may lead to a decrease in valuing authentic engagement in schooling. It may also pull one away from developing further education and professional employment aspiration. Both success discourses lay out different regimens that clearly put individuals in different courses of actions. Being a migrant workerŠa regimen of one success discourse™s success subjectivityŠsimply takes one away from staying in or continuing with schoolŠa regimen of the other discourse.  I now turn to the other two dimensions of Foucault™s scheme of subjectification: mode and telos. The mode of subjectification asks what kind of reasoning an individual appeals to in order to persuade his or herself toward the act of constituting oneself as, in this study™s case, a success subject (p. 59). The telos dimension asks what the ultimate goal of this work on self is or  158 what kind of a person one aims to be (p. 59). The success subject of the minor narrative of success through schooling is fiinvited tofl (p. 58) comply with school regulations, engage in and fulfill academic and class requirements, in order to develop specific types of competencies and, related to this, prepare oneself for further educational and professional opportunities. This is the narrative™s mode of subjectification. The telos, or the larger goal, is to become an honest, hard-working, and educated individual, able to avoid what is considered manual or low-status work, and able to achieve social mobility through entrepreneurial and/or professional work. For the narrative of success through labor migration, the rationale behind the regimen of becoming a TKI, working overtime, and living frugally is in order to be economically efficacious. This is expressed in the ability to remit a portion of the income to family members at home, and eventually once one returns home, able own a business, procure land, build a house, and buy a car. The telos of this narrative is a kind of individual who is economically self-reliant, entrepreneurial, and also able to experience social mobility. And further, it is to become someone who, through one™s economic capacities, can be responsible for and able to provide care for one™s family. In both narratives, the practice of self is an exercise of self-actualization. However, the mode of subjectification for the minor narrative of success through schooling is predominantly intellectual and professional self-actualization, while for the narrative of success through labor migration, it is more directly economic self-actualization. Intellectual and professional self-actualization refers to a subjectification system in which the success subject realizes, develops, and benefits from their intellectual and professional potentials. The success subject acts rationally by desiring this (p. 60).  Similarly, economic or financial self-actualization is concerned about the individual™s development and the ability to benefit from their economic  159 efficacy, and to act rationally is to have one™s life be animated by this desire or orientation.  In both narratives, the telos of the success subject include a common image: an individual who is financially or economically self-reliant, and may be entrepreneurial. The difference lies in the following. Within the minor narrative about success through schooling, the telos includes an educated and white-collar professional, while the TKI narrative™s telos of the success subject is an individual or being that is a responsible and caring son or daughter, sibling, or parent. I am intentional in evoking the notion of success identities as discussed in Chapter Three through this discussion of the telos of a success subject. While in both narratives, the telos of the success subject includes the success identity of the entrepreneur, the telos of the minor narrative of success involving schooling points to a profession-based success identity, while the telos of the labor migration narrative heavily overlap with a family-based success identity. Invited into subjectification. I have offered the term success-subjectification to refer to the process whereby individuals adopt and enact fipractices of selffl towards emulating or becoming particular kinds of successful being. I have also laid out what Foucault describes as what institutes subjectification using the four-part framework above. After iterations of reading and analysis of the data, and write up of the narratives of successŠespecially Chapters Four and FiveŠI began re-reading the interviews with study participants and field observations in a different light. I started paying attention to the ways that youths were invited into specific success discourses or procedures of success subjectification.  I am using the concept of inviting and being invited into success-subjectification to include instances where, for example, images of specific success identities are put in display for adolescents and specific lines of reasoning or rationale behind a kind of successful being are foregrounded or promoted. Success-subjectification is expressed through sets of practices that  160 are put forth as ways for youths to discipline themselves towards realizing particular versions of success. The reframing work expands the analysis to consider not only that individuals are invited into procedures of success-subjectification, but also what mechanisms of inviting and being invited ensue; how, where, when does the inviting happens, and who is involved.  Inviting and being invited into subjectification is an expression of power relations, which according to Foucault (1997) is best understood as fistrategic games between libertiesŠin which some try to control the conduct of others, who in turn try to avoid allowing their conduct to be controlled or try to control the conduct of the othersfl (p. 299). Liberties here point to the emergence or constitution of subjectivity as fionly one of the given possibilities of organization of a self-consciousnessfl (Foucault, 1988, p. 253; in Strozier, 2002, p. 141). In other words, there are many ways of ethical becoming, as there are many ethical Subjects. Foucault would add that there is finothing wrong in the practice of a person who, knowing more than others in a specific game of truth, tells those others what to do, teaches them, and transmits knowledge and techniques to themfl (p. 299). However, when some try to control the conduct of others on the basis of and toward particular procedures of subjectification, this is nevertheless an expression of power relations. In the work of reframing this study as youths™ success-subjectification, I offer a re-framing of two particular examples discussed elsewhere in the dissertation that illustrate how youths are invited into success discourses and are implicated in different power relations. The first example is through the presence and missions of LCS within the community, where LCS teachers act as active recruiters of youths into the minor narrative of success through schooling.  Recall that in Chapter Four, I discussed the ways LCS teachers construct what I have termed a minor narrative of success through schooling. Teachers repeated reported ways they  161 encourage students toward constructing particular aspirations, adopting particular values associated with authentic engagement with daily tasks, and discipline student into a set of conduct through compliance with school policies that expresses the minor narrative. This is evident in the following excerpt taken from my interview with Ms. Ana and previously included in Chapter Four:  But we [LCS teachers] want to push them [students], so that at least they would have it in their mind that they need to go to college–When they graduate from high school, they don™t really have very special skills. It™s different from vocational schools. If you go to vocational school, you™d have very specific skills, like in electricity or other things. But high school is really general still, so you have to continue on to college, get a degree, and then you can get a better job. That™s what we try to encourage them to see (Ms. Ana, personal communication, June 2014) The fipushingfl and fiencouragingfl of students to behave and think a certain way, which in this case is related to constructing college and professional aspiration, is an example of teachers inviting students into a success-subjectification procedure. Encouraging students to fiseefl their future differently may point to a target of changeŠor ethical substanceŠof the mindset, value, and aspiration. Further, by providing students the checklist of ficontinuing on to college, get a degree, and then– get a better job,fl this teacher is offering a set of practicesŠa regimenŠof a subjectification into the minor narrative. By saying that fihigh school is really general still,fl and suggesting a certain imagination of a fibetter job,fl Ms. Ana is laying out part of the rationaleŠor modeŠfor subjectification. During other interviews, I heard more instances where teachers report having persuaded students to think differently about their future, about their level of engagement with schooling and what those engagements are for, and having taken disciplinary  162 measures into showing and instilling within them LCS™s definition of schooling, what learning is for, and the role of schooling in helping them realize specific imaginations of success.  In a second example, I use two graphics previously included in Chapter Three and Five to illustrate the other ways and spaces where youths are directly invited into particular success subjectification. Consider the posters below (Figures 4 and 5). In the first figure, an attractive young woman with a bob-cut hair style stands tall and smiles directly into the camera. She wears a button-down fitted black shirt and a matching black tight skirt with a bright red rim down the edges, some sort of an aviation pin on her right chest, and an equally bright red belt and neck scarf. Beside it the poster reads:  Make your parents happy by becoming an aviation staff/flight attendant.  Make your dreams come true by joining the Aviation PSPP School. This poster is a part of a recruitment campaign for the aviation school accessible online, and while I did not see this poster personally in the community during fieldwork, as mentioned in Chapter Two, flight attendant as a profession is among one of the most repeatedly mentioned jobs for many female participants in my study. PSPP School was one of the largest flight attendant training center in Lampung.  Compare this with the second figure. The text heavy poster prints: Job Vacancy To Korea Monthly Salary Indonesia Rp. 15 Million (US $1,100)/or More  Labor trainee fionly pay for trainingfl  Requirement: Male/Female-Minimum Lower Secondary Graduate-Age between 18 to 38 years Already proven not just–!! Promises–!!!  The large poster was affixed onto a tree trunk by the side of the main road alongside the irrigation canal that connected the villages in Pesanggaran where I conducted fieldwork. The poster was taped over the bottom half of what looked like another poster advertising deals on   163 .           Figure 4. Recruitment poster for a flight attendant training program in Indonesia.            Figure 5. Recruitment poster advertising opportunity to become a TKI in South Korea.  164 corn seed. As materials used for marketing campaigns, these posters were purposed for recruitment into programs and schools targeting youths and adolescents. However, they become a part of the network of discursive elements that reinforce specific success discourses. By using the term reinforcing, I mean to point out that institutions behind the posters have knowledge of the social context in which jobs and the construction of youths™ aspirations are embedded. As discussed in Chapter Three, the first poster appeals to youths in the promise of gaining the ability to make parents happy, enact the identity of a good son or daughter to one™s parents, and to hold a profession that is associated with being attractive and displaying professionalism. The second poster appeals to youths™ direct need for a quick and efficient boost in their economic capabilities, as well as the guarantee of securing a TKI job. This message of assurance of getting a well-paying job speaks in direct response to the difficulty of finding employment even for high school and college graduates in the community. The reinforcement of images associated with success serves also to invite and persuade youths into a process of success-subjectification. While absent of individual recruiters, the posters work to invite and attract youths to subject themselves into particular successful becoming.  Self-subjectification, choice, and agency. I have illustrated the re-reading of narratives of success to point not only to different success subjects, but also to the ways that youths are invited into different procedures of success-subjectification. As discussed above, there are multiple success-subjectification systems through which individuals are, in Fendler™s (2010) term, fiinvited or incited to recognize their moral obligationfl (Fendler, 2010, p. 58). Robert Strozier (2001) reminds us that the  individual chooses to or must fashion itself as a cultural subject–There is no code so explicit that it excludes choicefl (p. 143). Here, Strozier highlights  165 the notion and possibility of choice, even though aspiration and therefore the choosing subject never stands outside of discourse. Having discussed above how success Subject constructed through success discourse, and the ways individuals are invited into specific subjectification procedures, I now want to foreground individual™s self-subjectification or the emergence of subject-position. Holland (1998) describe this notion of individuals as subject positioned within discourse, stating that fisocially constructed selves–are subject to positioning by whatever powerful discourses they happen to encounter–Perhaps they are resistant to such social forces; they nonetheless remain provisionally at their mercyfl (p. 27). As discursive subject, they are positioned inside (success) discourse where through their lived experiences and social relations, they take on these discursive tools to fibuild the selffl in a successification project.  What this dissertation has addressed in the previous chaptersŠsuccess identities and underlying success definitions addressed in Chapter Three, narratives of success through schooling and labor migration discussed in Chapters Four and Five respectivelyŠare various available discursive elements and tools. Patterns of preferenceŠfor instance, aspiration to become a teacher, but not a professor based in higher education, and to become a nurse or a mid-wife, but less commonly a doctorŠare shaped by, among other things, the economic and labor contexts of the larger community in which youths and their families live, as well as cultural values associated with certain professions. This means aspirations then can only take form through available discourse, as mediated through language. Similarly, practices of (success) self, therefore, can only be recognized within success discourses.  We can see cases of self-subjectification through, for example, individuals whose lives and aspirations articulate the minor narrative of success through schooling, characterized by the  166 valuing of engagement in schooling, and higher education and professional aspirations. Olyd is a useful example. As a reminder, Olyd is the young woman who taught English at the asram. She was taking college courses on the weekends and aspired to become an entrepreneur in IT education. She eventually wishes to open and run her own learning center that offers various types of computer courses. Her clear expressions of why a college education is important, how developing computer literacies and technological competencies lead to this professional entrepreneurial work, and how she has chosen the path for herself, articulates the minor narrative of success through schooling. Olyd, an individual qua subject within discourse, participates in a successification project laid out by this success-through-schooling discourse.  Another example is Ms. Teppy™s account included in Chapter Four of new LCS students who struggled to transition into LCS. Students struggled with academic and behavioral expectations laid out by LCS teachers, to the point of entertaining the idea of quitting. However, they did persevere and disciplined themselves into LCS™s standards. This displays then a shifting of the students™ subject-position from the fiperipheryfl of the narrative of success through schooling as framed by LCS closer to its ficenter.fl Recall that according to Ms. Teppy, they were students who came from other schools, and held a different understanding of schooling and therefore had different expectations with regard to their own engagement and performance. As subjects who started, metaphorically, at the periphery of the minor narrative of success through schooling, these students were invited through and disciplined into this minor narrative. Some eventually successfully embraced or allowed the new discourse to define a new set of itineraries of aspirations.  Pointing to Butler™s work, Holland (1998) highlights the notion of identification as a fisuturing of subject of subject and discursive practicesfl (p. 33). In these two examples,  167 individuals display identification with a minor narrative of success through schooling: Olyd, through a self-identification vis-à-vis her educational and professional aspirations, and the new LCS students, through their identification and buy-in to LCS™ academic and behavioral expectations.  Self-subjectification refers to fithe possibility of thinking differently from a self-reflexive perspective–[where o]ne finds that one is looking down on oneself from abovefl (Stozier, 2001, p. 144), and able to transcend or counter the discourse that constructs the individual (p. 145). This suggests that individuals may consciously choose their successification, while always being inside available discourses that orders their experiences and knowledge of the world. Some youths in my study do show that they are able to consciously choose which narratives of success they enact in the face of competing narratives. Zai makes a unique example. To remind the reader, I introduced Zai in Chapter Three as the young woman who just returned to Pesanggaran having been away from home for two years while living in Jakarta. Recall her critical standpoint regarding going to college. According to Zai, for her and her female siblings, going to college is a misallocation of resources and effort when the goal is to be able to provide for one™s family and, especially, support a male sibling filaunchfl in lifeŠhave the ability to marry and start a family.  She stated that college is a fiwaste of money,fl and what is important for her now is to fiwork, meet personal needs, and the needs of my younger siblings.fl Her thoughts points to a set of assumptions: that success in professional workŠas exemplified by teaching Šis contingent upon one™s social network. She perceived her own social network as insufficient. fiI don™t have meaningful connections,fl she lamented. Despite access to higher education, in this case Zai chose to take a different path forward and decided to work in retail instead. Hers is a case of self- 168 subjectification into the dominant narrative of success through schooling. It is signaled through a conviction that the role of schooling is limited to helping one get employment right after finishing secondary school, so that the young person can build his or her income generation capacities as soon as possible to help the family. She did establish that she consciously did not follow in the footsteps of his father. I mentioned in Chapter Three that her father had remained a contract teacher for years making meager amounts. He had not gained a civil servant status, for which he would have had to, according to Zai, bribe government officials and have better connections. In her case, she found the minor narrative of success through schooling to be lacking. For her, developing professional aspirations and entering professional work is not a guarantee of success. Her father served as an example of this. This shows that while individuals in their aspirations, desires, and decision are bounded by their histories and knowledge (Nodelman, 2008, p. 102; in Burke, 2010, p. 26), there is possibility for choice and the emergence of agency. A focus on agency from the perspective of self-subjectification in successification projects means giving attention to the ways that youths resist powerful narratives of success available within the community as reiterated and endorsed by family members, friends, community and religious elders, the government, institutions, and the media. Summarizing one of Judith Butler™s central arguments regarding resistance and agency, Robert Storzier (2001) notes that the fisubject constructed by discourse has produced in it the capacity and/or positionality for resistance to the constituting discourse (p. 83).  Elya™s case of multiple shifts and transitions discussed in Chapters Three and Five is an example of resistance and emergence of agency. Through the transition, he went to college for one year, quit and took up a job as a security guard in Jakarta, and then planned to apply to a TKI  169 program. Recall the tension that occurred between Elya and his father. Elya™s father insisted that he furthered his education and went to college. This conflicted with his interest in becoming a TKI, an interest piqued by a cousin™s invitation to join him as a migrant worker in Taiwan. Having complied with his father™s decisions and enrolled in a teacher training program, he quit after the first year. The shift from college-going to quitting, and then making plans to apply to become a TKI, displays agency. It is expressed in a self-subjectification into a success discourse that narrates labor migration as a path toward success, against a narrative of success through schooling endorsed by his father.  According to sociologist Leslie Miller (2008), self-subjectification allows for:  –an expanded position of freedom for the subject of power: in terms of its relation to dominant discourses, the ethical subject has a certain freedomŠa freedom within limitsŠto reflect on ways it is positioned by such discourses–and to consider other styles of self, together with the principles that inform them. This is Foucault™s point about the moral self as a relation of power (p. 265-266). Agency emerges within this notion of an expanded position of freedom. Elya™s self-subjectification into the TKI narrative of success articulates his agency, borne out of what Miller summarizes as a ficonsideration of a [style of successful] selffl that differs from the success Subject of the narrative of success imposed by his father. In sum, a rereading of the narratives of success of youth within this rural community utilizing a framework rooted in Foucault™s theory of subject and subjectification allows one to see three main underlying discursive phenomena. Firstly, a success discourse and its corresponding narrative of success lay out a success-subjectification procedure as an itinerary of aspirations and a set of practices. Individuals™ emergence as success subjects within a success  170 discourse follows this subjectification procedure. Secondly, success discourses do not manifest in a vacuum, but within a context of power relations. This is expressed in individuals both inviting and being invited into specific successification projects. The reframing allows me to focus on the ways youths are both directly and indirectly invited into different success-subjectification procedures. Thirdly, youths establish their subject-position and are able to be self-reflexive. They choose narratives of success that will animate their own lives, and in their agency, are able to resist powerful success discourses. Final Story for Reflection: Subjectification and a Question of Moral Obligations I have described above the framework of subject and subjectification, as well as its affordances. I conclude by returning to the story of Hery, one of the LCS graduates whom I met during fieldwork. His personal experiences pose for me a new set of questions related to how youths are invited into specific success-subjectification procedures. For example, what happens when despite youths™ self-success-subjectification, they are still unable to realize success as defined by the narrative of success that constructed their aspirations? Further, what moral responsibilities do those who invite others into success-subjectification have to their invitees? Consider his story. Hery graduated from LCS the month I arrived at the school for my fieldwork. In my conversations with interviewees, I kept learning about the series of rejections and failures he was experiencing. He did not gain college admissions and was not able to secure financial aid or scholarship to attend one institution that would admit him. By early September of 2014, he was doing various odd jobs at his home village in a neighboring district. However, by February of 2015, he had found work at an apothecary and was taking courses. In July, he moved away from Lampung and worked in a shoe factory outside of Jakarta, while taking courses in Korean  171 language on Sundays. During our conversation through an online messenger in October of 2015, he was asking me for advice about improving his English. He was still working in a factory, making Rp. 1.8 million (about US $132 per-month), for which Rp. 500 thousand goes into paying rent, and another Rp. 300 thousand to food. Most recently in November 2015, he mentioned to me that he applied to become a TKI in Korea, a goal unbeknownst to me but may have explained his decision to take up Korean language study on the weekends. Recall that four out of the six teachers I interviewed mentioned him during our conversation. All of them agreed that he was among the most hardworking students they had known. Despite hard work and extraordinary amount of efforts while at LCS, there were still necessary leverages he did not have: financial support and qualifications for admission to most of the colleges he applied to. These external-factors are significant. However, LCS teachers rarely acknowledged them as an assumption underlying the minor narrative of success. As discussed in Chapter Four, Ms. Teppy™s statement regarding how students™ success does depend on whether or not there are opportunities is one exception. The minor narrative of success through schooling is silent about the cost or risk of long periods of uncertainty and waiting for opportunities to come, as well as rejections that youths like Hery may experience. Recall also the case of Putri. As recounted in Chapter Four, when I stayed with her family during fieldwork, she had been months out of college and was struggling to find employment. What she shared with me regarding difficulties to find a job agreed with Zai™s comments that in most cases people need good connections and some financial savings in order to secure professional employment or white-collar jobs. Putri lacked both.  Experiences of rejection, failure, and postponement of successful outcomes may bring psychological and, in some cases, financial blows. In inviting others into a subjectification  172 procedure, individuals shape and influence how others construct their aspiration. In Putri and Hery™s case, aspirations have been shaped and yet the fruit of their desires have been delayed or have remained out of reach. I return then to the question of whether those who invite others into specific success-subjectification have a form of moral responsibility toward their invitees, and what those should entail. Encouragements to persist and persevere, as LCS teachers mentioned they often gave to students, do not change experiences of temporary unemployment or underemployment or help youths avoid unsuccessful attempt at following through their higher education and professional aspirations. In the case of the narrative of success through labor migration, the risk involved in becoming a migrant worker may be even more dangerous and harmful, psychologically, financially, emotionally, and even physically. For as long as TKIs have gone abroad, there have been numerous cases of exploitation and abuses. TKIs working in various countries have reported overwork, non-payment of wages, even abuseŠincluding intimidation, torture, sexual assault, and rape (Silvey, 2006, p. 23). While male TKIs are not exempted from various risks of exploitation and abuse, females are particularly vulnerable as many more of them enter domestic work and live with their employers. As another house is built by a TKI, another business opened with TKI money, and more TKI neighbors come back to their home community, the narrative of success through labor migration is reiterated. One more youth will say to him- or herself, fiI™ve seen others who have gone abroad and are able to be successful. I, too, want to succeed.fl The legitimacy of the narrative hides the reality of the costs and risks of the path. While some TKIs who have experienced abuse and exploitation not only survived, but also eventually were able to return home and be successful, others lost too much in the process and return without having  173 accomplished their goals. Still some others trusted their hard-earned TKI money to spouses left behind at home, to find that while they were gone, everything was gambled away. Pak Kar, my host, recounted this story to me. None of the youths in my study talked about any downside, risks, or dangers that may be involved in labor migration. Most who rejected or were critical of the TKI narrative of success, associated it with the low-status of TKI work, or the emotional cost of being away from family. In their self-success-subjectification into the narrative of success through TKI, youths may put themselves in positions of vulnerabilityŠfor risks of abuse, exploitation, and constrainŠas they are bound by contracts and various dealings with either TKI recruitment agencies and the government. A similar question may be fruitful here: what moral responsibilities do those inviting youths into the TKI narrative of success have toward the invitees, especially in light of these risks? Conclusion and Implications for Further Research In this dissertation I have explored the ways in which youths and adults within a rural community understand success. I have discussed powerful narratives of success adopted by youth and promoted by adults within this community, and the ways these narratives significantly shape youths™ work, education, and life aspirations. LCS is constructed by teachers, both from LCS and from neighboring schools, as an anomaly within the community for the practices and policies they enact. I have utilized and explored this tension to investigate the different ways schooling is perceived with regard to its role in helping young people realize their definitions of success. I have also explored why labor migration has become a very common path for youths within this community. A shift in the analytical framework, from narratives of success through success- 174 subjectification, extends the analysis to recognize that different narratives of success not only delineate differing itineraries of aspiration. They construct differing success Subjects and lay out different successification procedure. They spell out different conceptions of being and becoming successful. An understanding of narratives of success as success-subjectification have also enabled a recognition that social actors, whether institutions or individuals, play a crucial role in iterating specific discourses and recruiting or inviting individuals into specific success-subjectification processes. Further, youths navigate and traverse through multiple success discourses. I have shown instances where in their agency youths are able to reflect on and choose their own self-subjectification, or the narrative of success that will animate their lives and describe their life trajectories. I conclude with some final reflections on implications for further research. The notion of being invited into success-subjectification allows for investigations of the mechanisms and discursive strategies employed by social actors in iterating and inviting youths into specific narratives of success. Studies may focus on different actors, whether figures of authority, peers, or various governmental or non-governmental institutions. Moreover, given the emergence of agency and individuals™ ability for self-reflection, studies can investigate which underlying narrative of success may eventually gain more traction than others within a specific locale. As mentioned in Chapter Four, the LCS policies regarding grade retention and against malpractice during the National Exam have affected the school™s reputation. LCS was known as a school that would not fihelpfl students succeed. And this has adversely affected the school™s recruitment of students.  A question extremely relevant among LCS teachers and administrator, as well as within the Foundation would be the following: how does one instill educational value, high educational  175 expectation, and higher education aspiration to students and families? I would argue that this is also a question relevant to many educators and education stakeholders globally who are working with predominantly marginalized populations. Through the framework of success discourse, I suggest a reframing of the question into the following: What does it take for a narrative about success through schooling to gain traction? For example, what factors contribute to the handful of LCS students™ buy-in to the minor narrative of success through schooling? What led them to display more engagement in schooling, comply with and submit to the schools™ policies, including the honor code during the National Exam when many of their peers in other schools mock their commitments and proceed with cheating as business as usual? What structures and relationships support the shifting of subject-position or self-subjectification into this minor narrative of success through schooling?  Research on the construction of aspirations for rural youths as shaped by sociocultural, economic, and institutional contexts of the rural in Indonesia bears fleshing out. I have posed that despite having access to higher education, youths in their agency may choose instead to become a migrant worker, where they commonly take up low-skilled or manual labor. As they do so, they enter environments that may be hazardous or may expose them to risks of exploitation and abuse. For educators and the general public that frames post-secondary education as a crucial component in helping youths is successful and lead a good life, this is a potentially disconcerting reality. However, this tension opens up the opportunity for further exploration by researchers, educators, and practitioners to consider the contexts in which youths and their families live and learn. Future studies can be pursued into understanding how youths in transitional ages of 16-24 years creatively engage with messages regarding success. Studies can contribute to further understanding rationales behind decisions made surrounding youths™ work, education, mobility,  176 and transitions.  The narrative of success through labor migration powerfully emerged through the data in this dissertation. More investigation is needed to build an understanding of the differing effects of broad macro-economic growth programs such as labor migration on youths™ education aspiration and participation, especially at the level of upper secondary and post-secondary. Moreover, considering the overrepresentation of youths from certain provinces and districts among all TKIs, further studies ought to be pursued to uncover the ways that structural factorsŠsuch as community poverty level, family socioeconomic background, and genderŠcontribute to the likelihood of certain groups of youth to neglect higher-educational pursuits and pursue labor migration.  Labor migration of youth as TKI in general deserves much more attention. From the perspective of youth workforce development, future studies may establish evidence of the relative efficacy of labor migration as a national youth employment programs. Further studies can expand our knowledge of youth labor migration™s comparative advantages and disadvantages as an employment program, and what other micro- or macro-economic policies and programs should be in place to maximize the benefits of youths™ labor migration before, during, and after they complete their time abroad, for instance, programs related to entrepreneurship development, and educational or vocational training.    177             APPENDICES   178 APPENDIX A   Sample Interview Protocol for Youth Single/Pair and Focus Group Interviews (4-6 students)  Thank you for your helping me with your insights so far and your engagement with the activity we did. I now want to focus on your personal story, including near-future plans and thoughts about what™s next in your life.  1. What decisions do you need to make about life beyond high school? What are your immediate plans? Where will you be? What are you going to do?   2. [If they do not indicate continuing their education] What kind of work will you be looking for?  3. Do you want to finish: 1) vocational school? 2) seminary? 3) college? 4) graduate school?   4. What do these people think you ought to do right after you leave high school: 1) Father; 2) Mother/Guardian; 3) Teacher; 4) Counselor; 5) Best/Good friend   5. Schooling is considered a pathway to a successful adult life. What is your reaction to this statement?  6. What are some of the things that you did that you think helped you be successful in school?   7. Is there a person that you can identify as being extremely crucial in helping you become who you are today?   8. What other things (people or actions or support system) helped you become who you are today?   9. What causes anyone to fail in school? Why do you think some youth do not finish school?   10. Why do you think some of them don't go to high-school at all?  11. In your family or this community, who would you consider to be good role models and are successful in life? Who do you get pointed to? Who is doing the pointing?  12. Where do you ideally want to live in at age 30? If you do not expect to stay in Sekampung, why not?     179 13. How do see yourself being connected to this place in the future, for instance, by the time you reach 30 years of age, despite where you actually live? Do you go back? Do you visit often? Do you try to do something here? What is this place for you in your life, then?  Closing  Thank the youth again for his/her time and participation. Ask to keep in contact by providing my contact information. Ask to maintain contact especially with youth who are in transition, to monitor their transition, decisions, and mobility, in the next 3-6 months. Ask if s/he has any more personal questions about me or about this study that can benefit him/her.   180 APPENDIX B    Sample Interview Protocol for Teachers Part I Opening  Thank you for your willingness to be interviewed for this project. I really appreciate it.  My dissertation looks at youth in a rural community and what shapes their decisions, identities, aspirations, and futures surrounding definitions of what it means to be successful.   Briefly review informed consent guidelines; ask permission to record the interview  Contextualization  1. The senior students in this school just sat for their National Examination one month ago, and during my visit two years ago, the topic of the Exam and how that impacted the school community, including students, teachers, and administrators came up quite prominently in my conversation with different teachers. Will you be able to tell me some of the changes in the past few years that you™ve seen in this school surrounding the National Examination, the experiences of students taking it and the school administering it? 2. How many students sat in the exam? And what were the results?  Success Identities 3. I want to talk about the student in more general terms. Can you give me an example of a student that you recognize as being successful in schooling? 4. What types of students do well or really well in school? What type of families do they come from? 5. What are the images associated especially with the following pairings of youth, those who: 1) graduate from high-school, and those who don't; 2) are in school, and those who are high-school aged but are not in school? 6. Do students leave school without completing? How big of a percentage of them do so?  7. Can you give me an example of a student that you recognize as having potential but did less well in schooling?  8. How would you characterize students who do less well in school or drop-out?  Components of Success Paths 9. Why do you think some students do better in school than others? Why do you think others are less successful in schooling? 10. What about the role of the child-sponsorship program in this school? Who does this help? How does this change, either, student motivation, outcomes, or values?   Success Enacted and Embodied 11. Are there habits and behaviors/actions that you and the school either explicitly encourage or discourage in students, for the sake of helping them do well in school? 12. What about specific habits and behaviors that you and the school encourage or discourage in order that they may succeed in life? Can you give me an example?  181 13. I am going to move on to the theme of aspirations and future orientations. For students who do well in school, what does the pursuit of a successful life beyond high school look like for them? What™s next for them? 14. What do you expect of them? What does the community expect of them?  15. How are these communicated?  16. And for youth who do less well in school or discontinued their schooling career, what are the community's hopes for them? What™s next for them? 17. What does the community expect of them to do and to be? And what do you expect of them? 18. How are these communicated? 19. How about youth who do not go to school? What does the pursuit of a successful life look like? 20. What does the community expect of them?   Temporal & Productive Dimension of Success 21. As their teacher, what kind of a life do you envision your students living by the age of 30 years? For instance, what do you communicate to students regarding what type of work you envision your students doing in the future? What does it mean to be successful in this regard?  22. Are the imaginations of positive futures different for students showing different schooling outcomes (or for those who are considered to do well in school, in comparison to those who do less well)?  23. What type of a person do you want your students to be in the future, in terms of their characteristic and traits? What does being successful mean in this regard?   Previous Cohorts 24. I am also interested in contacting and interviewing students who were once a student here, either those who have graduated or those who for different reasons left the school without completing. Will you be able to recommend me some students to contact? 25. Can you give me an example of alumni that you recognize as having succeeded so far in their life journey?  26. What do they do? Where are they now?  27. How does the community see youth like them?  Success Emplaced  28. What does high-school prepare students for? What's next for them, if they stay here in this village? 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