Conceptualising Youth and Future Holistically

Abstract

The notion of futurity has captured attention in the sociology of youth since the beginning of the sub-discipline. In recent decades scholarship in this area has been dominated by a host of typologies seeking to capture the differing ways in which young people orient themselves to the future (e.g. Brannen and Nilsen 2002). While this work has added nuance to existing debates, it nevertheless tends towards a vision of young people as individualised. Moreover, while it has considered the role of institutional attachments in forming young people’s orientations to the future, until recently it has attended comparatively less to the significance of their wider social context. In this chapter we build on scholarship that has begun to consider how young people’s orientations to the future are shaped by significant others (Woodman 2011) and by the wider social context in which they are situated (Cuzzocrea and Mandich 2016; Cook 2018b). Young people’s orientations to the future provide important insights into the nature of the new adulthood, as successive generations build their lives under conditions that previous generations did not know. We draw specifically on longitudinal qualitative data in order to illustrate what stands to be gained by attending to future thinking in this way. In so doing we contend that the way forward in debates concerning youth and futurity lies not in sharpening categorical depictions of future orientations, but in shifting towards a holistic approach to the future that is capable of accounting for individuals’ embeddedness in both their immediate social relationships and their wider imagined communities.