Whose Futures? Why Youth Studies Scholars Study “Futures” and What That Means for a Global Sociology of Youth

2025 marks a pivotal inflection point in the global economy. The second Trump administration's retreat from the post-Bretton Woods neoliberal order, combined with geopolitical fragmentation, ecological crisis, and the exhaustion of the Mass Production paradigm, signals a potential rupture in the rules-based international order that has structured global development for eight decades. It is precisely in moments of systemic transition that the question of futures becomes most urgent and most contested.

Youth researchers invoke "the future" constantly, in studies of aspiration, transition, precarity, and possibility, but rarely interrogate why, or examine the disciplinary and political assumptions they bring to the task. This session takes the study of "futures" itself as an object of critical inquiry within the sociology of youth, asking contributors to reflect on the epistemological and political stakes of futures-oriented research.

The question of North-South difference is not incidental. The post-war order whose unravelling we are witnessing embedded assumptions about development, progress, and youth transition that were always more legible in some contexts than others.

We welcome theoretical and empirical papers that engage with questions such as: What is the distinctive contribution — and blind spots — of a sociological approach to youth futures? How do dominant frameworks carry implicit assumptions rooted in Northern developmental models? What alternative temporalities emerge from Southern contexts? Whose imaginaries are centred in futures-oriented research, and whose are not?

We particularly welcome contributions engaging with the global South and young people's own sense-making amid structural change.