Speaking through Crisis: Youth Languages In Turbulent Times

Across the world, young people are navigating societies that feel increasingly unstable — marked by economic precarity, ecological crisis, political stagnation, and the erosion of once taken-for-granted pathways to adulthood. This session asks how language mediates young people's experience of these turbulent conditions: how they talk about uncertain futures, negotiate the gap between what is possible and impossible, and make sense of worlds that seem to offer less and less room to move.

We bring together scholars from sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, conversation analysis, sociology of education, and youth studies, and from researchers working in any national or regional context, including Korea, Japan, East and SouthEast Asia. We are interested in how language, youth, and social change intersect across diverse spaces — everyday conversation, institutional encounters, digital and media spaces (especially since the visual components of digital media have impacted younger adults’ language use).

We invite paper proposals on topics related, but not limited to, the following topics:

-how young people talk about work, aspiration, and the limits of possible futures

- how institutional languages of education and employment intersect with younger adults’ sense of self

- crisis (social, ecological etc.) are narrated and negotiated in everyday talk

- how language mediates the relationship between personal biography and structural constraint

-how these social structures play out in digital (social media) spaces