Abstract

This article is based on research about the relations and tensions between secondary students' subjectivities and dominant discourses as well as education policies in rural contexts in Chile (a well-known case of neoliberal policies in recent decades). Using a poststructural theoretical perspective, the qualitative study is focused on rural students' subjectivities, through the analysis of their narratives about their lives, their perceptions on secondary schooling, and their educational/labour perspectives about the future. The findings reveal the tensions between the certainty and uncertainty of a future. Specifically, of an educational and work path by which students seek to continue or diverge from the paths taken by previous generations. Here, education policies fail to offer a real upgrade in their future educational and lived conditions or aspirations. Moreover, rural students respond to the neoliberal discourse in an active attempt to de-subjectivise themselves from historical trajectories of precariousness.