5th ISA Forum of Sociology (6-11 July 2025)

Conceptual debates about “youth” abound across the globe, and some of the most interesting ones have in recent decades emerged in the global south (Diouf 2003; Durham 2004; Honwana and de Boeck 2005; Mbembe 1985). While these debates have shown that youth is more than “just a word” (pace Bourdieu), scholarship continues to struggle with the exceeding diversity that the concept, or social category, of “youth” tends to absorb. In this panel, we seek to explore youth afresh from a ‘global’ and biographical perspective. Zooming in on the methodological potential of biographical approaches, we try to understand what it means to be a young subject in an increasingly trans-locally connected world and to what extent biographical approaches allow us to get a grasp of the liminality and ambiguity of a period of life that sits uneasily between biology, social status, and metaphor. We encourage proposals that focus on how youthhood is experienced and narrated, whether in life-course trajectories and biographical stories, in accounts of socialization and existential ruptures, in processes of subjectivation, de-subjectivation and individuation, in coming-of-age novels and films, on social media feeds and other emerging media.