Biopolitics at the margins of human capital investment: vocational education in the affect economy of Cusco, Peru

Recent global education policy literature pays much attention to the expansion of formal education and skill formation for school-to-work transition. This paper discusses Peru’s vocational education formalisation, influenced by technocratic and individualist discourses of human capital investment. The author introduces biopolitics as a useful range of analytical tools for tracing the logics underpinning policies, as well as for examining how regimes of education and labour become enacted and lived. Based on research with students, alumni and education staff in the increasingly professionalising vocational training sector in the city of Cusco, the author argues that the Peruvian national skilling imperative adds new layers to the multi-faceted biopolitics facing underprivileged young people. It embeds them further in a postcolonial history of social, cultural, economic and territorial inequalities, creating gendered financial, social and work pressure at the margins of Cusco’s urban service economy. Moreover, it shows a biocapitalist tendency to economise and pre-empt young people’s affectivity and futurity.