Cancelled Futures

How race, class, gender, and place shape the ways working-class young people in Britain envision their transition from education to work

How do the effects of deindustrialisation and neoliberalism influence young people’s perceptions of work and education? In Cancelled Futures, Amit Singh examines how experiences of class-based inequality work through race, place, and gender in different ways. Moving beyond the usual framing of race versus class and the populist fixation with the white working class, Singh shows the intractable challenges that Black, Asian, and white young people share when they envision their futures in changing labour market conditions. Drawing on extensive interviews with sixty-two young working-class Britons, he describes the range of strategies they employ in the absence of viable economic opportunities—and the uneven results that follow.

Singh offers a vivid nationwide portrait, bringing together seemingly divergent locations and their youth—those living in proximity to the extraordinary wealth and perceived opportunity of the City of London, in the former northern mill town of Rochdale, and in the forgotten seaside town of Morecambe Bay—and captures the empathetic sense of struggle that many cultivate. Singh reveals that although the unique features of place raise distinctive racial and gendered reckonings with their circumstances and hopes, these young people have in common an increasingly fading sense of the future. Singh shows that they do not cling to the illusion that hard work pays off or the myth of meritocracy, but seek only to realise some sense of dignity and meaning amid a future that feels not just confusing but altogether absent.