Diffractive Wanderings and Illuminations on University Students’ Career Learning

Abstract

In pursuit of new ideas, questions and insights, this article explores undergraduate students’ career learning. It is based on the assumption that there is a need for new ideas and innovation in career development theory and practice, especially in times of rapid changes in the world and constant challenges. Performing diffractive analysis – in the sense of reading the ‘data’ (non-representational conversations with two undergraduate students) and poststructuralist as well as new materialist philosophical texts, career theories into and through one another, allow free movement of thought to explore beyond the normalized discourses of the field. It is wandering as well as wondering while being ‘of the world’ instead of observing from the outside, going further than universalisms. Philosophy of immanence and agential realism enacted here encourage to ask: what can be thought of students’ career learning? How does undergraduate students’ career learning emerge through entanglements with the human and non-human? The article is rhizomatic in its structure, it is also an attempt to break the rules and escape the enclosure of traditional empiricism in the field of educational research. Theory and practice are considered inseparable in Karen Barad’s agential realist framework; therefore, the theoretical and practical parts are intertwined. The results, or illuminations bring forward the ideas and concepts, that intensify and glow while diffractively reading the ‘data’, philosophical materials and career theories: thinking about career learning as life; attending to desire as the productive force in career learning; thinking about encounters and chance events as well as the non-human in career learning; drawing attention to how big narratives are created and disseminated. The article contains emergent thoughts, that appear in the process of thinking, they are noted in a different font, and I re-turn to them at the end of the work. I use ‘re-turn’ with reference to Barad’s idea of transformative process, the past that is with us.