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© 2020 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. Young people’s processes of forming identities, linked to the work of anticipating futures, involve significant labors of thought, feeling, ethics and imagination. These labors proceed across both life-worlds and school-worlds, often in tension, especially for those from marginalized positions in social-structural power relations. This paper explores such identity labors, drawing on rich ethnographic data from research, during 2013–2014, that engaged students in Years 9 and 10, from working-class, immigrant and refugee backgrounds, who attended an inner-suburban school in Melbourne, Australia. We investigate two student groupings: (a) selected by the school for “accelerated” curriculum paths; and (b) the “others” we label written off by the school in terms of academic potential (a division we diagnose as driven by policy measures of institutional “performance”). In different ways among students in each grouping, we find their identity labors to reflect historical conditions for what Berlant calls “cruel optimism” about futures. Yet their identity dynamics also draw on rich funds of knowledge from their life-worlds that our research shows to offer resources–funds of identity–for more viable future imaginaries. We argue for curriculum and pedagogy that supports young people in their identity labors to live from their present into emergent, new-generational futures.

This chapter takes up the suite of policies that reflect a growing determination of national governments to manage university teaching as a mechanism for building the alignment between higher education and the economy. It examines the policy trajectories of higher education systems in targeting teaching within quality assessment and funding mechanisms. These mechanisms produce what Stronach, Corbin, McNamara and Warne (2002) call an 'economy of performance'. that attends selectively to those aspects most readily made visible and measurable and, at the same time, re-orients the field from 'teaching' to 'learning' .