Temporally displaced and dispossessed: the 'failure' of vocational students under global capitalism and neoliberal meritocracy

Abstract

This paper examines how working-class vocational students in Turkey perceive their stigmatisation and relative failure within the education system. The findings reveal that these students experience deep disorientation, anxiety, and humiliation. While they exhibit partial awareness of structural constraints, they often internalise beliefs in individual agency and personal responsibility to explain their circumstances. Drawing on Ramsay's concept of temporal displacement - originally developed in the context of forced migration - the study reinterprets educational marginalisation through a temporal and affective lens. It argues that Turkey's integration into global capitalism, through economic liberalisation, labour deregulation, the privatisation of education, and the valorisation of individual responsibility, produces new forms of displacement and dispossession. These processes limit students' prospects for social mobility and thrust them into a condition of uncertainty. At the same time, they erode collective moral frameworks and solidarities, replacing them with neoliberal ideals of grit, resilience, and self-blame. By illustrating how global capitalist transformations are lived and internalised in national and educational contexts, the study contributes to critical debates on vocational education and offers insights with relevance beyond the Turkish case.