Thank you to Mariana Lucas Casanova for this reflection on the ECADOC summer school. Mariana is a Psychologist with over 20 years of experience working with higher education students and graduates, specialised in Educational Psychology, Clinical Psychology, and Vocational and Career Development. She is an Integrated Researcher at the Centre for Research & Innovation in Education (inED) at the Faculty of Education of the Technical University of Porto. Using mixed methods approaches, her research explores experiences of work, precarity, unemployment, psychosocial uncertainty, green guidance, and political participation.
Returning to ECADOC as a keynote speaker this year was a wonderful and deeply meaningful experience. At the 13th ECADOC Summer School, Critical Perspectives within Lifelong Guidance, held at Trinity College Dublin from 17 to 21 August 2026 in collaboration with the COCAG COST Action, I had the privilege of sharing reflections that have grown out of my work as both a practitioner and a researcher. The invitation also brought a particular sense of connection since my experience at ECADOC as a doctoral student in Athens in 2018 and Malta in 2019, and the people I met along the way, helped shape my own career.
Looking back, what stays with me from those earlier summer schools is not simply the opportunity to encounter new theories or discuss research methods. It is also the experience of being part of a community in which questions could be shared, assumptions challenged and emerging ideas taken seriously. The conversations, relationships and different perspectives I encountered became part of how I understood my research, my practice and my place within the field of career guidance.
Returning in a different role therefore felt especially rewarding. It was fantastic to contribute to a space that had contributed so much to my own development, and to share my thinking with a new group of doctoral researchers. This also demonstrates that our careers are not individual projects unfolding in isolation: they are shaped through encounters, collective learning and the opportunities that others help make possible.
Understanding the History of Work to Build Career Imaginaries in Times of Uncertainty
Closely related with the chapter I am working on for the COCAG edited collection, my keynote explored the question: how can understanding the history of work help us build new career imaginaries in times of uncertainty?
In my work with higher education students and graduates, and through my research on work, precarity, unemployment and psychosocial uncertainty, I have repeatedly returned to the relationship between personal experiences and the wider conditions in which they take shape. How do cultural, socioeconomic and political contexts influence what people expect from work, how they experience their careers, and the futures they feel able to imagine? And how do these same contexts shape practitioners’ assumptions, guidance practices and public policies?
This was an opportunity to bring these questions together. Rather than treating work as a fixed or self-evident feature of human life, I invited participants to consider it as a historical construct whose meanings, social value and organisation have changed over time. Drawing on Dominique Méda’s analysis of work and Bernard Stiegler’s discussion of proletarianisation, I explored the historical transformations through which work came to occupy such a central place in social organisation and individual identity. My purpose was not simply to revisit the past. It was to open up a possibility: if our relationship with work has been historically constituted, it can also be transformed.
Moving beyond individualised accounts of uncertainty
This historical perspective provided a starting point for questioning dominant contemporary understandings of work and career. Deregulation and the erosion of labour rights, along with individualisation and competitiveness have fostered precarity and weakened communities, extending precarity beyond employment contracts into existential forms that undermine collective agency.
These questions matter directly to career guidance. They invite us to reflect on what happens when difficulties rooted in social and economic arrangements are understood primarily as individual problems to be managed. They also challenge us to consider whether guidance should focus on helping people navigate existing conditions, reproducing the status quo, or whether it can create empower people to question those conditions and imagine alternatives. This means challenging the commodification of work, individuals and career counselling so that it can promote critical consciousness to construct new ways to envisage relationships between work, careers, and their meaning and role in our lives.
Carrying the conversation forward
My warm thanks go to the organisers, the ECADOC community and COCAG for making this encounter possible. It was a privilege to return, to contribute, and to continue imagining together what work and careers might become.
Join us at COCAG in exploring how career research, practice and policy can help us question the present and co-construct alternative futures for work and careers.
Main references
Lucas Casanova, M., Menezes, I., Coimbra, J. L., & Lawthom, R. (2019a). Precarious living: The social origins of uncertainty. Portuguese Journal of Social Science, 18(3), 319–340. https://doi.org/10.1386/pjss_00013_1
Méda, D. (1995/2010 Le travail, une valeur en voie de disparition. [Work: An endangered value]. Champs Essais.
Stiegler, B. (2015/2016). Automatic Society, 1: The future of work. Polity Press.
