The Anthropocene and the Problem of Young People and Uncertain Futures

Rosi Braidotti (2019) argues that the humans and non-humans that occupy the biosphere are ‘currently situated in a posthuman convergence between the Fourth Industrial Age and the Sixth Extinction’. A convergence ‘between an advanced knowledge economy, which perpetuates patterns of discrimination and exclusion, and the threat of climate change devastation for both human and non-human entities’.

In this presentation I examine how young people and futures are recognised, named or visualised in ‘official’ discourses of education in the 21st century. In these discourses, this post-human convergence is little recognised, as education is imagined as being best able to equip, to develop, to ‘make-up’ populations of young people who can successfully navigate futures characterised by crises and uncertainty. They play a significant part, as I will illustrate, in the production and reproduction of deficit models of young people’s becoming, and in cycles of disadvantage in the places that these discourses touch down.

Drawing on two longitudinal, video-based action research projects at the Young People’s Sustainable Futures Lab, based in the inner northern suburbs of Melbourne, and the regional city of Geelong (Australia), I will provide an account of a number of young people’s stories gathered during the darkest days of the COVID pandemic during 2020-2023. In telling these stories I aim to trouble dominant understandings of young people’s education in these contexts, and suggest some ways to reimagine the temporal and spatial ‘scales’ at which we understand young people and futures, and to reconsider what the ‘promise’ of education might be in the aftermath of the pandemic, and as the crises signalled by the posthuman convergence of the Fourth Industrial Age and the Sixth Extinction escalate.