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Paper short abstract:

In this paper, I discuss the moving relations between past, present, and future while discussing experiences of the future. The paper builds on interviews with youth about their experiences of temporality, with a focus on current and past experiences of waiting on the future.

Paper long abstract:

Discussions on temporality and the future are no stranger in youth studies within the humanities. For example, discourses on the ways youth orient themselves towards the future have shaped past and recent youth studies. Following Melucci (1996, p. 3), time is one of the categories through which we construct our experience.

This paper builds on interviews conducted with Finland-Swedish youth and young adults about their experiences of temporality, with a special focus on questions related to the future. Interview questions related to waiting are especially interesting for this paper. I have for example asked the youth what they are waiting for in life and what it feels like to wait for these things, but also about earlier experiences of waiting, such as waiting to start school as a child or waiting to turn eighteen.

Through the interviews, I discuss the messy and moving relations between past, present, and future, when focusing on the future. In addition, the paper shows how ecological transformations in the era of the Anthropocene and other societal changes shape how possible futures are encountered and understood.