Exploring Lived Temporalities: Narratives of Adolescents in Urban Poverty Contexts

This communication is situated within the framework of the panel "Contested Everyday Temporalities. Children and Youth in Contemporary Changing Worlds". It examines how young individuals, aged 11 to 15, all enrolled in programs for disadvantaged youth, perceive what constitutes their daily lives and activities through their narratives. The study delves into the daily temporalities experienced by adolescents in low-income neighborhoods. It analyzes how they organize and narrate their week, uncovering variations and commonalities in their experiences. Through semi-structured interviews with adolescents, detailed accounts of their current week were gathered. This approach enables the collection of specific narratives, highlighting significant (marked) and less emphasized (unmarked) social aspects (Brekhus, 1998), thus revealing the diverse daily experiences despite a shared disadvantaged youth context. The narratives illustrate the diversity of adolescents' priorities. While some structure their week around family responsibilities, emphasizing familial obligations, others prioritize unstructured activities, focusing on time spent outdoors and leisure without adults. Still others highlight activities structured by adults, such as schooling and organized leisure, like clubs and extracurriculars. This diversity underscores how adolescents experience daily life, balancing the search for autonomy, family commitments, and institutional expectations. To deepen this analysis, the concept of budget-time has been mobilized and reinterpreted as "experiential time-budget." Unlike traditional time-budget (Sorokin and Berger, 1939), which focuses on precise measurement of activities, experiential budget-time relies on adolescents’ narratives. This subjective approach allows for a better understanding of how young people navigate their daily lives in urban poverty, considering the elements they find worthy of recounting and those they omit. In conclusion, this communication offers an exploration of the lived temporalities of adolescents in urban poverty contexts. By examining their narratives and applying the concept of experiential budget-time, the study sheds light on the complexities and variations in their temporalities, considering their experiences in vulnerable situations.