‘Times’ of Transitions Rather Than ‘Timing’ Transitions? Revisiting ‘Doing Nothing’ and 'time Suspension' for Young People in Italy

Much has been written to address the increasing complexity of youth temporalities, especially through a focus on when adulthood is reached, an approach which informs the tradition of youth studies called ‘youth transitions’. This presentation discusses some of the shortcomings of this approach that emerged during the global pandemic. Specifically, it merges literature on youth and on time to address the node of ‘doing nothing’ as a specific form of time suspension which is generationally connoted.

The pandemic has predominantly been seen as a ‘suspension’, with implications in particular on two different temporal dimensions: on the one hand, young people have experienced profound changes in their everyday lives due to lockdowns restrictions; and, on the other hand, at the biographical level, a search for alternative lifestyles has emerged, impacting on mid-term perspectives. These changes urge us to reconsider various phenomena of time suspension associated to youth, such as moratorium and waithood, paying attention to the value that young people attribute them.

The presentation reflects on a case study of young people in Italy, and how a disregard for the temporalities that are typically of value to youth appears to have taken place in the governance of the pandemic, based on documentary sources and qualitative material analysed for the project IANG. By reflecting on the changes on the ways of looking at young people during the pandemic, and zooming in on some rituals that were reworked due to lockdown restrictions such as the final school exam, I conclude that we should shift attention from ‘timing transitions’, to ‘times’ in transition, and look more attentively at the meanings attributed to various forms of time suspension and possibly ‘doing nothing’ that make up ‘youth-hood’ through specific youth temporalities.