The Speculative Labor of Schooling: Pursuing Middle-Class Futures in Cambodia

The Anthropology Department welcomes Jennifer Estes to deliver her lecture “The Speculative Labor of Schooling: Pursuing Middle-Class Futures in Cambodia.”

Across the globe, young people are encouraged to invest in education as a pathway to economic security and upward mobility, even as the costs of schooling rise. Drawing on ethnographic research in rural Cambodia, Estes's talk focuses on the speculative labor that students undertake in pursuit of middle-class futures. She will explore how the privatization of state secondary schooling compels youth to make careful decisions about where to invest their time, money, and attention in hopes of securing future economic returns.

Estes will also examine how narratives of meritocracy sustain the idea that education will pay off in the long run, and how the labor of speculation extends across multiple family members. In doing so, she argues that the speculative labor of schooling reflects and reproduces class inequalities, while putting the meaning of education itself at stake.

Jennifer Estes, Ph.D., is a senior lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the National University of Singapore. Her first book, Betting on Education: The Costs of Schooling for Cambodian Youth, was published by Rutgers University Press in 2026. Her current project explores the politics of development finance in Cambodia's education sector.