Paper short abstract:

In times of globalization and global flows the concept of generational experiences – broadly used for familial and national narrations – needs to be opened up to be able to describe more complicated global relations and aspects of global belonging today.

Paper long abstract:

Generation is a concept which is broadly known for kinship relations connecting e.g. family memory over time. Generation is responsible then for various interconnections and transmissions over different age-generations, re-organizing ideas of what builds the family. In that way feeling part of generational bounds is part of becoming a family on the daily basis of "doing family" (Schier/ Jurczyk 2007).

The concept of generation is also used to describe experiences and relations with members of the ‚state-family' sharing the same lifetime. Generation then gets a broader meaning for different experiences shared with (un-)known others, also related to narratives of some kind of ‚Zeitgeist', but still claimed to take place in a national frame (Mannheim 1964).

In times of globalization and global flows the concept of generational experiences needs to be opened up to be able to describe more complicated relations and aspects of global belonging: Shared experiences and feelings of connection are necessarily "multi-sited" (Marcus 1995) and multi-temporal today. This can be examined for media experiences, global events, but also for experiences of human movement like travel and migration.

Based on semi-structured interviews with informants from different parts of the world therefore a new concept to examine global generations is discussed on the example of especially mobile and privileged group: Backpacker.

Global generations are perceived as temporary, yet multidimensional "imagined communities" (Anderson 2005) bringing together people from different backgrounds, nevertheless sharing experiences that allow them to feel part of a global generation and share the idea of global belonging