Trajectories, vectors and change: mapping late neoliberal assemblage

The international financial crisis has brought change to the lives of young people in the UK, and to young people’s education and welfare services. The event of the financial crash of 2008 continues to powerfully condition reform of the public service assemblage, including education and youth services. There is a growing body of work that puts assemblage theory to work in interrogating a range of substantive contemporary social phenomena. ‘Assemblage ethnography’ anticipates mapping the arrangement and effectivity of productive forces of specific assemblages in the orders, where ‘mapping’ takes on a particular meaning with respect to the dynamics of machinic assemblage. Neoliberalism is a means of thinking about the power that consists in a regulatory relation between the practice of everyday life and the state, whereby the local functioning of affinities, desire and habit are constituted and invested through technologies of marketisation, audit and performance management.