Vocational labour and resistance in Flemish youth work: A call for obstinacy

Vocational education and training (VET) finds itself in an ever-deepening crisis - both in Flanders and internationally. Attendance is dwindling, labour market shortages persist, and VET is increasingly viewed as an unattractive educational path. Dominant responses frame this as an economic issue. Yet, these instrumental perspectives rarely consider what is educational about vocational labour itself. While critiques exist, few address concrete vocational practices as educational environments in their own right. This article engages with the work of Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge - particularly Geschichte und Eigensinn (1981) - to explore how vocational labour practices can function as sites of education. Drawing on their concept of Eigensinn [obstinacy], it argues for a shift in how we understand labour as educational. Using Flemish youth work as an example of a vocational labour environment, this article shows show how everyday labour practices can express forms of resistance, transformation, and suspension that are educationally significant. This reveals that obstinacy is not only possible but already occurs in everyday labour practice. Ultimately, this article calls for VET research to take such obstinate practices seriously as essential and everyday expressions of people living together in new and educational ways. By attending to this obstinacy in research, we can develop more concrete and critical understandings of vocational labour as spaces where individuals learn how to live and move together, here and now.