Learning to Labour In the 21st Century: Critical Perspectives on Vocational Education

This session invites contributions that critically examine how stratified upper secondary education systems distribute opportunities and constraints among young people. In particular, it seeks analyses that interrogate the shifting role and status of vocational education and training (VET) in structuring young people’s education, their well being at school, and their transitions from education to work. Across diverse national contexts, VET is frequently positioned as a key institutional mechanism for facilitating school-to-work transitions and addressing labour market needs. At the same time, vocational pathways remain deeply embedded in broader regimes of social stratification, intersecting with inequalities related to class, gender, ethnicity, migration background, and regional disparities.

Bringing together theoretically informed and empirically grounded studies, the session aims to advance sociological understandings of how vocational pathways are structured to produce differentiated transitions to adulthood. We are particularly interested in contributions that examine how competence-based frameworks and skills regimes shape educational identities, occupational trajectories, and forms of recognition; and how policy designs and institutional arrangements may reproduce or mitigate inequalities in increasingly precarious and uncertain labour markets.

Conceptual reference points may include, but are not limited to, theories of social justice, social stratification, and skill formation. We also encourage engagement with emerging debates on the intersections between vocational education, social resilience in times of crisis, and the imperatives of the green transition.