Being someone in life: a study on rural young people and their life projects

Abstract

This article discusses the categories youth and life projects. Its main goal is to question the category life projects, based on a qualitative study with a group of young people from a rural municipality of Minas Gerais state and reflecting about the importance of this category to the contemporary discussion on youth. The study was conducted with high school students, residents of a Brazilian region marked by the culture of migration and whose life projects evidenced from different points of view. The concept of life projects is used in this article in a broad perspective, not limited to professional choices, because life projects cannot be limited to career; after all, life is not work only. To define and characterize the life projects of the subjects, some analytical categories have been discussed and analyzed using a theoretical framework about the notions of youth, life projects, and field of possibilities using and empirical evidence of the ethnographic study performed. The research concluded that, although young people had different ways of organizing their life projects, most of them shared the desire to be someone in life.