Third ISA Forum of Sociology (July 10-14, 2016)

JS-56

Young Activists, Subjectivity and "the Future They Want"

RC47 Social Classes and Social Movements (host committee)
RC34 Sociology of Youth

Language: English

This session welcomes contributions on how young activists imagine, shape and implement alternative futures. As framed in the third ISA Forum presentation, “Tomorrow no longer appears as pre-determined by inevitable trends but as a rather contingent outcome of complex, typically multi-scalar dynamics that vary in their intensity of contentiousness.” Young people aspire, desire, envision, expect, fear, imagine, plan, project, reject, sustain, and wage war over futures. Young activists are major actors of our societies in shaping our possible futures. 
We notably welcome contributions on young activists’ perspectives on the future and how these perspectives shape their subjectivity and their personality. Young green activists and their visions of a future on a limited planet prove particularly insightful in that perspective. 
However, to understand the specific potential of their vision – at the centre of which stand autonomy, self-determination, experimentation and creativity together with a high level of personal responsibility – the widespread representation of the future expressed by contemporary young people has to be considered. For the majority of them, the future is related above all with indeterminateness and uncertainty. Moreover, the imperative of choice is not flanked by their conviction that personal decisions will be effectively able to condition future biographical outcomes as well as collective environment. Posters: