The perezhivanie of discouragement among young graduates: A historical-cultural approach
discouragement; unemployment; young; University education.
Youth unemployment is a constant in Brazil and in the world. In general, youth is the category most sensitive to economic crises, as well as the most exposed to the reality of unemployment and informality. In this context, despondency, that is, giving up for looking for an occupation reached in 2018, 2.4 million young people aged between 18 and 29 years, a number that tends to increase with the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, although discouragement has always been present among the youth segment, the academic debate on the subject is still restricted to a statistical definition and propositions that point to investment in qualification as an alternative to breaking with the condition. However, contrary to this perspective, the presence of discouragement among young people with higher education is a reality that points to the need to understand this phenomenon beyond its description. Therefore, from the scope of the culturalhistorical theory (THC) in conjunction with some assumptions of cultural psychology, the general objective of this work is to investigate the perezhivanie of despondency in the face of permanence in the place of non-work occupied by young people with University education. To achieve it, it is specifically intended, (a) to reconstruct the individual trajectory of the young person with regard to the sphere of work; (b) characterize the block of meaning in the face of discouragement and (c) apprehend the quadratic unit of meanings attributed by the young person in view of that permanence and the actions he develops to deal with that block of meaning. To this end, two case studies were carried out with young people in a state of dismay, by conducting five in-depth interviews with each of them using the methodological strategy Trajectory Equifinality Model (TEM). The interviews were transcribed and, based on them, the trajectory of each participant was reconstructed, an element that allowed the analysis of the experience of the despondency of each one in the absence of work. Finally, the findings are discussed in the light of (THC) and allow accessing discouragement in its complexity so that more effective alternatives can be devised by the young person to deal with their situation on a microgenetic level, as well as on a social and political level, broader, enable a more accurate and contextualized understanding of the phenomenon.