Responding to diversity : lessons for career guidance from the global South

Abstract

This paper draws on my experience and involvement in two comparative research projects on career guidance (CG) in the Mediterranean region that were carried out within ten years of each other (Sultana & Watts, 2007; Sultana, 2017). Here I highlight the main learning point from this research in the ‘global South’, namely, that ‘context matters’. There is an increasing interest in our field in the manner in which local realities shape career. Nevertheless, there is still a tendency for many of the leading theoretical models to either privilege ‘universalisms’ over ‘localisms’, or to consider localisms as mere exotic exemplars of cultural diversity, requiring theory ‘adaptation’ and ‘adjustment’. Instead, I approach such diversity as an opportunity to prise open spaces for critical reflection about how career guidance can serve the interests of global justice. Such a position draws on post- colonial perspectives and ‘southern

epistemologies’ that critique the universalising claims about knowledge we find in Euro-American narratives. These master narratives also underpin what we understand by CG, providing its core assumptions, and defining as well as guiding its interactions with society. Here I first look at some of these assumptions, with a view to troubling and further unsettling their taken-for-granted nature. I then argue that ‘localisms’ are not only more likely to be relevant and useful in response to the specificity of context – they are also more likely to serve the interests of social justice.