Becoming Self-Entrepreneurs through the Debt. the Processes of Residential Emancipation of the Young People in the Basque Country (Spain).

The presentation focuses on some results obtained from a recently finished thesis about the residential trajectories of young people in the Basque Country.

In Spain and in the Basque Country a generalized precarization process intertwines with a residential culture that fosters the home ownership. The subjections and strategies that simultaneously are producing the job insecurity and the indebtedness —due to “the goal of the property”— requires to rethink not only terms like young, adult or emancipation, but also what kind of representation of the individual is working behind them. From this framework the self-entrepreneur emerges as a useful concept to understand the logics of action of an actor that, in order to develop his/her life project, is obliged to manage entrepreneurially not only a debt, but also a wide range of resources, bonds, affects and dependencies. So two are the main ideas to be exposed: The extension of youth can be better understood focusing the attention in the precarization of the adult identity or the “arrival position”. And, the responses to that de-stabilization can be better grasped through the logics of action and self-management strategies that sets the self-entrepreneur. In short, the emancipation processes of youth have become reversible and they don´t result in definitive subject-positions. Rather, they have become an uninterrupted work of self-maintenance —mediated with others.