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Paper short abstract:

Young people trend to dissociate their views on their own futures from those on the global futures. The aim of this contribution is to explore young people’s imagined futures with their internal tensions and, through this, inquire some challenges of futures research.

Paper long abstract:

Being able to project futures and to project oneself in those futures means, on the one hand, to mediate and negotiate our hopes and uncertainties with wider contextual phenomena and discourses; and, on the other hand, to identify the social position recognizable as suitable and desirable for oneself. When asked about the future, young people trend to dissociate their own futures from the global futures, expressing completely different and distant attitudes towards the two spheres. The aim of this contribution is to explore young people’s imagined futures with their internal tensions and, through this, inquire some challenges of futures research.

First, I expose the main elements constituting youth's imagined own futures and its distance from their views of society’s future. Then, I explore the particularities of studying “what hasn’t happened yet” in the case of youth population. Specifically, I focus on the methodological and analytical access to young people’s imagined futures in a context of increasing uncertainties that makes them adopt “defence strategies”, which are based on avoiding to have a discourse about the future -by the absence of projection or the embarrassment in expressing it- or having a discourse absolutely distant from their daily life.

The data for this contribution is based on an ongoing case study conducted in an academic upper secondary high school in Catalonia (Spain). Data includes field notes, 24 in-depth interviews with biographical techniques and 186 letters written “from the future”, both with first years in different tracks of academic upper secondary studies (16yo).