Paper short abstract:

The paper deploys ethnographic investigations of the ways in which multiple possible futures are given substance in shifting everyday contexts.

Paper long abstract:

This anthropological study is based on in-depth interviews and focus groups with high school adolescents from two Croatian cities, Split and Knin, The aim of the study was to explore the intimate hopes and ideas of better life in the post-post war society faced with radical changes in different domains of everyday life.

Croatian society, especially Knin and Split are often defined as towns with a great potential developmental force, but stacked in the past due to the destroyed economy and the transitional context. In this study we aim to bring a sense of futurity in the positive context by presenting hopes and ideas of young people born after the war and the socialist period. The paper charts a new theoretical terrain through the focus on the post-socialist, post-post transition theory and post-conflict forms of 'hope' by critically reconsidering the social and intimate life of Croatian youth with different socioeconomic backgrounds.

The paper deploys ethnographic investigations of the ways in which multiple possible futures are given substance in shifting everyday contexts. By investigating adolescent's yearnings for possible futures and their capacity to engage in creating them we try to explore anthropologically the intimacy of feelings related with hope in everyday life in the transitional post-post war and pre-EU context.