“Let Your Confidence Shine?”

Location: Room 316, Liu Institute for Global Issues, UBC

Join Anne Kukuczka, a visiting international research student (VIRS) at UBC who is a PhD candidate at the University of Zurich. Anne explores the experiences of Nepali women in the labour market.

“Let your confidence shine”: this and similar slogans circulate widely on the social media accounts of Nepal’s numerous cabin crew training institutes. These institutes, part of a broader private skills training industry in urban Nepal, promise that the acquisition of soft skills, alongside bodily and personal transformations, significantly increases trainees’ chances of recruitment into domestic and international airlines. In the context of shifting gendered possibilities, young Nepali women born in the 2000s dare to dream of forms of spatial mobility in ways that were largely unavailable to their mothers’ and grandmothers’ generations. As the figure of the flight attendant has until recently been predominantly constructed as female in Nepal, young women in particular join these institutes in hopeful anticipation of a future yet to come: a future, they are told that is of their own making, achieved through a positive attitude and hard work.

Based on 18 months of ethnographic research with trainees enrolled in private cabin crew institutes, this talk centres on young women’s labour toward mobile futures. Anne explores “confidence” as promise, soft skill, and a personal quality, cultivated through work on the self, including “personality development”, grooming and communication in English. While institutes emphasize effort and self-improvement, Anne argues that this framing individualizes responsibility for success, obscuring how caste and class shape access to education–and thus produce an unequally distributed capacity to “become confident.”

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Host or Publisher UBC Himalaya Program