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Paper short abstract

This paper discusses two groups having incorporated 'uncommon futures' (Valentine & Hassoun 2019), with a focus on the affective dimensions of people identifying as punks with their ethos of no future, as well as former Jehovah's Witnesses who lived under the constant threat of the end of the world.

Paper long abstract

In many societies, the life course and especially ageing is articulated within a preventive logic. What about members of groups that resist such a linear timeline and preventive logic? Refusing the future impacts identities, or, as Sobo (2016) puts it, it is ‘affiliative’. Punks’ famous ‘no future’ slogan and its implicit credo of living in the now, as well as Jehovah’s Witnesses' belief in the end of the world, both refer to alternative temporalities transcending a linear life course. The refusal to engage with future-oriented practices can have a significant impact on an individual’s health, education, and, more generally, life opportunities, both positively and negatively. Seen from this kind of perspective, aging is conceived as ‘liminal’, as speculative, negotiated, and, following Homi Bhabha, as an in-between state with the potential for subversion. This talk explores this state, especially its affective dimensions, by juxtaposing the two groups, which show astonishing similarities.