Young Australians navigating the ‘Careers Information Ecology’

The policy orientations of advanced neoliberal democracies situate young people as rational actors who are responsible for their own career outcomes. While career scholars have been critical of how this routinely ignores the unequal effects of structural constraints on personal agency, they have long suggested that young people should have access to the best available ‘roadmaps’ and advice to navigate the uncertainties baked into the contemporary economic landscape. Complementing the significant attention that is given to the (potentially emancipatory) experience of formal careers guidance, we present findings from a multi-method study. We explore young Australians’ (aged 15–24) navigation of careers information through a nationally representative survey (n = 1103), focus groups with 90 participants and an analysis of 15,227 social media comments. We suggest that the variety of formal and informal sources pursued and accessed by young people forms a relational ‘ecology’. This relationality is twofold. First, information is often sequential, and engagements with one source can inform the experience or pursuit of another. Second, navigation of the ecology is marked by a high level of intersubjectivity through interpersonal support networks including peers, family and formal service provision. These insights trouble a widespread, but perhaps simplistic, reading of young people having largely internalised a neoliberal sensibility of ‘entrepreneurial selfhood’ in their active pursuit of a range of career advice. Throughout our analysis, we attend to the ways that engagement in the career information ecology is shaped by social inequalities, further underscoring challenges facing careers guidance and social justice goals

The 'Solanum pimpinellifolium' 'Cf-ECP1' and 'Cf-ECP4' genes for resistance to 'Cladosporium fulvum' are located at the 'Milky Way' locus on the short arm of chromosome 1

The interaction between tomato and the leaf mould pathogen Cladosporium fulvum is an excellent model to study gene-for-gene interactions and plant disease resistance gene evolution. Most Cf genes were introgressed into cultivated tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) from wild relatives such as S. pimpinellifolium and novel Cf-ECP genes were recently identified in this species. Our objective is to isolate Cf-ECP1, Cf-ECP2, Cf-ECP4 and Cf-ECP5 to increase our understanding of Cf gene evolution, and the molecular basis for recognition specificity in Cf proteins. The map locations of Cf-ECP2 and Cf-ECP5 have been reported previously and we report here that Cf-ECP1 and Cf-ECP4 map to a different locus on the short arm of chromosome 1. The analysis of selected recombinants and allelism tests showed both genes are located at Milky Way together with Cf-9 and Cf-4. Our results emphasise the importance of this locus in generating novel Cf genes for resistance to C. fulvum. Candidate genes for Cf-ECP1 and Cf-ECP4 were also identified by DNA gel blot analysis of bulked segregant pools. In addition, we generated functional cassettes for expression of the C. fulvum ECP1, ECP2, ECP4 and ECP5 proteins using recombinant Potato Virus X, and three ECPs were also expressed in stable transformed plants. Using marker-assisted selection we have also identified recombinants containing Cf-ECP1, Cf-ECP2, Cf-ECP4 or Cf-ECP5 in cis with a linked T-DNA carrying the non-autonomous Zea mays transposon Dissociation. Using these resources it should now be possible to isolate all four Cf-ECPs using transposon tagging, or a candidate gene strategy