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

Time in people's lives is not a natural factor, rather it must be seen as a social institution (Woodman & Leccardi, 2015b). From the perspective of the sociology of youth, three temporalities are interconnected during people's lives -the temporality of everyday life, biographical time and the timescales of generations- in order to think about the relationship between transitions and youth cultures. Timescales and intergenerational temporalities are also studied in the sociology of childhood, problematizing the “developmentalist” temporalities that had been the classical frame to interpret childhood. What this lines of work illuminates is the complex nature of time and the role of children and youth in remaking temporalities.

Contemporary capitalist social worlds are marked by forms of precarity and uncertainty that are the core temporal modes of government (Lorey, 2016) and that connote the social reproduction (Fraser). Global economic changes shift the grounds of the future when many children learn skills that will not help them later on because of rapidly changing environmental and labor conditions (Katz 2004). In this panel, we aim to discuss everyday temporalities for children and youth living in urban poverty. Our objective is to analyze the evidence of the different temporalities faced by children and youth in urban poverty. This includes, for example, their participation in informal work, household care tasks, their exposure to situations of vulnerability at an early age, and the negotiation of emerging and shifting possibilities of inclusion or inclusion (Cole and Durham, 2014).