Young people's representations of the future and the acceleration of time: a generational approach

"Der vorliegende Beitrag betrachtet mittels eines generationellen Ansatzes das Thema der Zukunft und der biographischen Projektierung in der Epoche der Zeitbeschleunigung. Das Ziel ist eine Analyse der Strategien der Jugendlichen, sich mit ihren wirtschaftlichen wie gesellschaftlichen Problemen in einer immer ungewisseren Zukunft auseinanderzusetzen. Sie bewegen sich in einer immer 'situativer' angelegten Zeitkonstruktion; somit können sie sich zustimmend mit einer Gesellschaft in Einklang bringen, die durch ein beschleunigtes soziales Tempo gekennzeichnet ist und insofern die Idee der Zukunft sowie der zeitlichen Kontinuität zu pulverisieren vermag. Um diesen Prozess näher zu beleuchten, gilt das besondere Augenmerk der Untersuchung den Modalitäten der Zukunftskonstruktionen bei den baby boomers. Bei dieser Generation hat in der Tat der intergenerationelle Konflikt im Rahmen der Wirtschaftsexpansion uneingeschränkte, individuelle und zugleich kollektive Formen von Projektierungsfähigkeit angetrieben." (Autorenreferat)"This paper makes use of a generational approach to deal with the theme of the future and biographical projectuality in the epoch of the acceleration of time. Its object is to analyze the strategies, to the extent that they exist, through which young people in the new century come to grips with a future that is more and more uncertain both economically and socially. Young people today seem to be constructing their own time of life in such a way as to keep pace with a society characterized by ever more accelerated temporal rhythms - a society capable of pulverizing the very idea of the future and of temporal continuity. The paper aims to concentrate on these new modalities, comparing them, in particular, with the relationship with the future that was constructed by the generation of the baby boomers. For this earlier generation of young people, in fact, the centrality of intergenerational conflict within a horizon of economic expansion was able to give an impulse to the construction of a projectuality that was at one and the same time collective and individual." (author's abstract

Youth and the Reinvention of Politics. New Forms of Participation in the Age of Individualization and Presentification

According to mainstream theory, citizens and among them young people in particular are disenchanted and increasingly skeptical of representative democracy and traditional political organization. Indeed, the decline in conventional participation is accompanied by a process of the reinvention of politics, characterized by the spread of unconventional participation and innovative approaches and repertoires of action. New practices configure themselves as informal, non-institutionalized, horizontal, increasingly di-vorced from traditional collective social cleavages, but personally meaningful and individually oriented. Finally, politics also divorced from long terms projects, as the future folds back into the present, it is ab-sorbed within it and it is consumed before it can really be conceived. The present appears as the only di-mension available for the definition of choices, a fully-fledged existential horizon which includes and sub-stitutes the future and the past. The acceleration of social life and its various times renders these two di-mensions ever more evanescent as reference points for political action. Yet despite all of this, individuali-zation and presentification do not equate with depoliticization. In a con-text shaped by the privatization of social and political experience and by a presentification of life-projects, the new forms of mobilization protagonized by youth can be analyzed as the search for a collective project by means of articulating and integrating diversity – as well as a way to express a deep form of indignation. In this monographic issue of Partecipazione e Conflitto we have recollected contribution which analyze the reinvention of participation – in direction of an alter-activism - in the age of individualization and presentification,

Normas y valores de los jóvenes en el Mediterráneo árabe: un análisis de género

This article reflects on the changes and continuities in the cultural values and norms of young men and women with regard to gender relations and roles in five Arab Mediterranean countries: Algeria, Morocco, Lebanon, Tunisia and Egypt. To do this, attention is given to the processes and practices of cultural innovation that have arisen among the region’s generations of young people since the 2011 uprisings. The empirical analysis is based on qualitative and quantitative data gathered through the multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork and international survey of the SAHWA research project. The analysis reveals young people who are social actors able to confront structural limitations and mechanisms of exclusion; at the same time, it describes the distinct way young men and women in the region inhabit the ambivalent condition of “waithood"