Learning (not) to labour: How middle class young adults look for creative jobs in precarious time in Italy

The chapter presents the case of a collective of students in Italy as an alternative small-scale form of political and cultural action, and explores its dynamics and limits. The research dataset rely on a recent qualitative research (ethnography and in-depth interviews in from March 2017 to April 2018), among 26 activists aged between 19 and 26 composed by high cultural capital young adults who squatted in an empty building in the center of Milan in order to create a brand new space of both political and artistic action, sharing each other skills and information. Drawing on the seminal work by Paul Willis on working class subculture the chapter shows that middle class young adults oppose the aesthetics and the neo-liberal discourse of the hard work – that they find in the mechanisms of the educational paradigm – a discourse of creativity and talent built collectively outside the scholastic institution. This change of perspective is possible thanks to the spaces of reflexivity opened by the same fragmentation of the habitus generated by the precariousness produced by the incongruences between school system and the labour market.