I’m going to make sure I’m ready before I leave: The complexity of educational and mobility decision-making in a Canadian coastal community

This paper draws on an analysis of migration from a coastal community in Atlantic Canada through the fisheries crisis of the last decade. Despite a persistent rhetoric of crisis and decline, the community remains difficult to leave for many young people. This paper examines the dimensions of this difficulty and the way that formal education sets up expectations for outmigration but few supports to families who have multi-generational linkages to local communities. Ironically the very discourse of crisis that is meant to propel youth out of the community may end up playing into a parallel discourse that has long predicted the collapse of urban economic and social structures. This in turn generates and propels a survivalism that inflects educational decision-making in ways that create deeply ambivalent and problematic conceptions of place and mobility for rural youth. This discourse in turn complicates simplistic neoliberal notions of educational choice.