The Temporality in Contemporary Youth: Experiences Surrounding Time in School Trajectories

Contemporary youth face accelerated changes in various social aspects, which affect their perception and experience of time. Thus, the question of time is an issue that is relevant to the study of young people's lives and whose relevance is renewed especially in the post-pandemic period, as time presents reconfigurations in their lives and in their trajectories in the school space. This merits, in theoretical terms, to deepen the way in which temporality is interconnected in their lives, observing the play of this in everyday life, biographical time and that of generations (Woodman & Leccardi, 2015; Leccardi, 2022), accounting for juxtaposition of temporalities. With that idea, young people attending high schools in Argentina were consulted about: how do you feel time passes in your life when you think about its speed, how do you think time moves in your life and how do you see yourself in the future and what does it depend on. This survey was carried out within the framework of a longitudinal research being developed by the Youth Program of FLACSO Argentina, period 2022-2024, which addressed the issue of time based on the perceptions of the young population of vulnerable sectors. Among the results, it is observed that uncertainty appears as a central characteristic in youth. With respect to secondary school, the processes of dropping out and re-engagement in education reveal new ways of managing time, insofar as it appears that the interruption of trajectories is not an irreversible fact at present, but that these events are seen by young people as an unfinished process, which allows them to foresee the possibility of re-engaging and continuing their studies in the near future. In other words, temporality appears in a flexible and dynamic way.