The Youth and the Perception of the Future. Between New Values, Transnational Orientations, and the Reinvention of Politics

The aim of the paper is to shed light on the new transnational orientations that spread among new generations and on their perceptions of future. The goal is to provide a critical assessment of macro-trends of change affecting youth, regarding the system of values, the relationship with religion, the family and love, the involving in social relations (peer to peer groups, insertion in social networks), the approach to study and work, the civic and political involvement, leisure and cultural consumption, deviant behavior. We will explore how these variable influence the perception of the quality of life, the feeling of vulnerability and uncertainty, the perception of the future. Finally, we will identify the way in which youth frame and try to actively build the future, both on the individual and on the collective level. The analysis is carried out comparing data provided by major international and national survey on young people and exploring surveys and analysis conducted by national institutes devoted to youth studies. The analysis will focus on three Southern European countries: France, Italy and Spain. The hypothes we follow is that the younger generation presents multiple and original synthesis between subjectivity and collective dimension.  implicitly suggesting new social arrangements. Particular attention will be paid to the political youth movements arised in the three countries, and to the more recent mobilisations, as indignados movement, as example of a reinvention of politics leaded by young generations, that experiment new combination between individual and global concerns and between individual and collective future. The critical analysis of the empirical evidence provided by macro-data, may represents, in our opinion, a step forward in overcoming rethorics and stereotypes conditioning youth studies, to be integrated with more qualitative analysis focused on individual narratives and devoted to in-depth analyse new forms of social and political interactions.