Adolescence Locked Down? Morphing Temporality as a Strategy to Construct Hope and Control in Visions of the Future by Adolescent Girls Under Lockdown

Abstract

The article examines how visions of the future were constructed by eight adolescent girls graduating from secondary school under a COVID-19 lockdown in Germany. Employing grounded theory method to analyse interview data, it theorises how the girls under lockdown constructed visions of their future along space and time in terms of traffic mobility, nature and embodied reproduction. The findings indicate that the girls creatively used topic-dependent constructions of space and time to generate hope and control and thereby maintained their agency and an adolescent self-identity for their anticipated futures during the lockdown-present. These findings are then integrated into a theoretical model that introduces the strategy of ‘morphing temporality’ to describe how the girls constructed hope and control and maintained agency and an adolescent self-identity despite the sudden spatial lockdown constraints.

Keywords

COVID-19 lockdown future grounded theory interviews life course qualitative research self-identity youth

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