Abstract
Temporality is a key principle of the constitution of youth as a life phase. Historically, ,invented‘ and institutionalized as moratorium, youth has been reserved for preparation for adulthood, thus contributing to the sequential order of the modern life course. Institutional age marks in school, youth welfare or citizenship claim to explicitly demarcate beginning and ending of youth in a linear way. Not only but most lately in the context of the activating welfare state, temporal normativities and normalities of growing up seem to have lost consistency. Consequently, young people have to position themselves with regard to chrononormative markers of the ‘right age’ reflected by distinctions from, ‘too young for …’ or, ‘too old for …’.
The article analyses blurring temporalities of the youth phase by relating changes of the temporal regime(s) of young people's growing up and their individual and collective time work from a doing transitions perspective. The complexity and paradox of these temporalities are illustrated by three exemplary empirical case vignettes: Coping with suspended transitions in the pandemic; Fridays for Future as intergenerational struggle for future; and youth cultural practices expressing attempts of slowing down. In these constellations tensions of temporality emerge: the tension between moratorium and acceleration, between orientation towards the future and orientation towards the present, between simultaneity and linear sequentiality. A relational approach to the temporalities of youth is developed along with concepts like relative time and asynchronicity while young people's time work is reinterpreted in terms of doing youth in time. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of relational temporality for conceptualizing young people's agency and consequences for youth research.
Following Musgrove (1964), youth was ‘invented’ in Western modernity as a time during which young people prepare for adulthood, which was increasingly institutionalized as the period in the life course when people obtain gainful employment and citizenship status according to age and gender (see, e.g., Ariès, 1962). Still focussing on Western societies, Kohli (1985) introduced the notion of the ‘institutionalized life course’ as a temporal reorganisation of social reproduction under conditions of secularization and individualisation. More recently, research has focused on the life course as a normative temporal regime (Torres, 2021) institutionalized by education and welfare systems, which finds its strongest articulation in the transitions between life phases. Therefore, as a socially constructed life phase, youth was, and still is, constructed temporally. Our paper starts from the question of whether we are currently witnessing a change in the temporal regime that has structured the youth phase for at least two centuries and how youth studies can adequately address these changing temporalities.
It is important to note that there is no singular category but a diversity of constellations of youth. This is evident across three levels: first, in cross-national and cross-cultural perspective not only within but especially beyond Western societies; second, historically, young males were referred to as youth before young females; third, youth applied to young people born into higher classes before being extended to include working-class youth (see Ariès, 1962: 316–323). With young women's participation in education, gender-based differences have diminished since the 1960s (McLeod, 2015), although expectations around parenthood affect the timing of young women's and men's lives differently. Nonetheless, socioeconomic, institutional, and regional contexts as well as shorter and longer educational pathways or periods of unemployment continue to shape different temporalities of youth (Furlong and Cartmel, 2006) along with war, flight, and migration. The latter often blur distinctions between youth in the global north and south while existential risks inherent to such conditions may also make references to ‘transitions’ obsolete.
The dominant institutionalization and representation of the youth phase in Western societies has been roughly constructed along three temporal dimensions: first, by a strong reference to the future as it functions to prepare young people for becoming adults (Ariès, 1962: 316–323); second, by a resulting prolongation, postponement and slowing down of growing up, organizing the present in terms of moratorium (Erikson 1959; Zinnecker 2000); and, finally, by the linear sequentiality that has long dominated the image of growing up. Over time, these temporal dimensions seem to have successively become less self-evident. Young people are now understood as being actively involved in the constitution of the youth phase as they make meaning of increasingly uncertain futures through youth cultural practices characterized by, among others, an emphasis on the present. Accordingly, youth no longer only means a phase of young people becoming adults but also the period of being young (see Mørch, 2003). This coincides with the increasing de-standardization of the life course and the emergence of constellations of reversibility and the precariousness of youth transitions. In the recent turn towards activating welfare states, policies also seek to re-standardize transitions to adulthood mainly to reduce the age when young people enter the labour market, yet, without reducing uncertainty and risk in young people's lives (see, e.g., Stauber and Walther, 2006; Walther, 2012). Thus, the logics of acceleration and self-optimization increasingly undermine the moratorium of youth (Rosa, 2010).
This article focuses on these tensions and how they affect the relationship between being young and becoming adults in young people's lives. We start from the assumption that the linear temporal regime which has been effective in institutionalizing youth as a life phase is becoming increasingly blurred. We can by no means assume a uniform ‘new’ youth temporal regime. Instead, youth must be understood as the nexus of tensions that exist between future orientation, postponement, and linearity on the one hand, and present orientation, acceleration, and simultaneity on the other. Linearity still informs how public institutions structure youth, especially education and its inbuilt promise of a pathway to a normal life course (and a ‘good life’). At the same time, non-linear temporalities are not entirely new but are increasingly visible under conditions of de-standardisation and diversification. Unsurprisingly, this has led to the emergence of discussions of chrononormativity as a critical concept to describe hegemonic temporalities predominantly in queer studies (Freeman, 2010), while critical disability studies refer to the particular temporalities of ‘crip time’ (McRuer, 2018). This suggests that to some extent temporalities may have changed while discursive shifts are necessary to render diverse temporalities visible.
Analysing the changing temporal regime is also more complex if institutional and discursive changes are related to young people's individual and collective time work (Flaherty, 2003). Both concepts, the temporal regime and time work, share interactionist origins. Yet, time work has been primarily introduced to address how young people negotiate time and timing, moments and durations, and the sequences and pace of the youth phase (Flaherty, 2012). By contrast, the concept of temporal regimes embraces poststructuralist as well as new materialist perspectives and has been developed to encompass interrelated dimensions of time (Torres, 2021, 25) from the micro to the macro. To avoid falling back on dualistic perspectives of institutional and subjective temporality, we suggest a relational perspective like that developed in the context of reflexive research on transitions in the life course. The concept doing transitions conceptualises transitions as interrelations between individuals’ movements from one life phase to another and the constant re-constitution of these movements and respective life phases in and through social practice in which discourse, institutions, and individual positioning are interrelated and emerge across interpersonal, material, and temporal dimensions (Stauber et al., 2022).
In sum, we will conceptualise youth temporalities from a relational perspective as ongoing practices of time work emerging in terms of ‘doing youth in time’ against the backdrop of and contributing to changing temporal regimes. The article begins with an overview of the temporalities that have shaped youth research as well as their limitations for analysing social change in youth. It then illustrates constellations of contemporary youth temporality between de- and re-standardization across three vignettes constructed from empirical cases in Germany: transitions during the pandemic, the youth cultural practice of ‘chilling’, and the Fridays for Future movement. These different constellations reflect tensions between the present and the future, between postponement, suspension, and acceleration, and between linearity and simultaneity. Based on these reflections, the article concludes by introducing concepts of temporality that have the potential to shed light on the complexities and contradictions of the constitution of youth in late modern societies. Neither the linear temporal regime nor the blurring temporal constellations which we will describe are understood as universal but reflect a Western – or better: a German – perspective. However, we think that applying a relational perspective to changing temporal regimes and the role of young people's time work may be fruitful for the study of the complex and dynamic temporalities of youth in other contexts.
Youth as ‘becoming’? Linearity, postponement, and future in youth studies
The concept of time that underlies the institutional life course was and is both linear and oriented primarily towards employment and family as core markers of adulthood. In the semantics of Western societies (see Schmidt-Lauff 2014), linear concepts of ‘becoming’ are inevitably normative, insofar as development ultimately aims at reaching a ‘higher’ stage. Consequently, in research youth was ascribed an ‘incomplete’ transition status that preceded achieving independence and full social participation as an adult in the future (Wood 2017: 1178). Thus, institutional markers of transitions reflect the chrononormativity (Freeman 2010; Riach et al., 2014) of the life course and its underlying temporal regime (Torres, 2021: 63). Such chrononormativity implies that there are ‘right’ moments for transitions and life phase sequences as well as ‘normal’ durations for related processes. Labels such as ‘early’ school leavers who leave school before reaching an average degree, ‘teen moms’ who become mothers before reaching socio-economic independence, or school leavers labelled as ‘lacking maturity for training’ (literal translation of ‘fehlende Ausbildungsreife’, a German term that applies the concept of ‘employability’ to access to vocational training) are only a few examples of the normative temporal markers that structure transitions from youth to adulthood in Germany. Young people in transitions to adulthood are labelled as ‘no longer’ (young) but ‘not yet’ (adult) and assessed as being either ‘too early’ or ‘too late’ when they deviate from the dominant temporal regime and its linear sequence of school, training or studies with respective certificates, leaving home, entering partnerships and forming families. Research objects in youth studies were thus drawn from such deviations (Mørch, 2003). It was only in the 1970s that participation in youth cultures, youth associations, or sports came into the focus of research, apparently expressing a status of youth as a life phase in its own right. Interestingly, at the same time ‘being young’ became a dominant orientation for fashion, body work, and juvenile aesthetics across life ages (Fornäs, 1995; Miles, 2000).
Linear conceptions of youth as ‘becoming’ are found both in structural-functionalist conceptions of socialization as ‘being socialized into a society’ (see Parsons, 1964), and in developmental psychological conceptions of children and adolescents undergoing and completing developmental tasks and phases of personal development (Havighurst, 1972). In both traditions, youth is assigned the character of a ‘moratorium’ for education (Zinnecker, 2000) or psychosocial development (Erikson, 1959). Although emphasizing the relevance of socio-historical and socio-cultural contexts like the combination of new levels of economic wellbeing with a prolongation of growing up, the developmental concept associated with psychophysical ‘maturity’ in particular risks naturalizing temporal sequences and pathologizing deviations. It has been also criticized for generalizing the life realities of young white American men in the 1950s. It is important to note, however, that—even in postponing adult obligations—a moratorium does not mean a weakening of the transitional and linear character of the youth phase. Instead, it primarily reflects the institutionalization of a longer and more individualized preparation for adulthood that coincided with increasingly complex and contradictory demands and expectations about self-responsibility.
These ideas have been challenged by signs of prolonged transitions into adulthood that resulted from expanded educational participation in the 1960s, socioeconomic changes in transitions to work, and sociocultural changes in family and gender relations. Transformed understandings of markers of adulthood therefore reflected increasing demands and difficulties in becoming adults as well as growing youth cultural autonomy (see, e.g., Fornäs, 1995; Miles, 2000). For example, Böhnisch and Schefold (1985) interpreted the increasing orientation toward the present inherent to young people's engagement in youth cultural practice as an expression of ‘coping with life’ reflecting young people's attempts to maintain agency in the face of the limitedly attainable normal life course (see, Stauber and Walther, 2006). These changes in young people's future orientation is thus an expression of their time work in the context of de-standardization and increasing uncertainty in life course transitions (Flaherty, 2012). Leccardi (2021) refers to such future orientations that do not limit their ability to ‘be’ and to act in the present as ‘extended present’.
The persistence of linear concepts of temporality in youth studies is also evident in how the prolongation of the youth phase has been addressed in terms of ‘a new youth’ (Leccardi and Ruspini, 2006), uncertainty (Blossfeld et al., 2006), or ‘inventing adulthoods’ (Henderson et al., 2007). Predominantly, these studies address the challenges of social change while remaining ‘deeply linked to ideas about the sequential development of citizenship capacity and entitlement’ (Harris 2015: 86) and to a ‘youth-as-transition approach’ (Wood 2017: 1179). This also applies to whether and how the expansion of the transition to adulthood has led to a new life phase between youth and adulthood. Arnett (2000), for example, justifies his developmental psychological concept of ‘emerging adulthood’ with new developmental tasks. Thus, a normative essentialization of a life phase is reintroduced through the back door. Instead, Stauber and Walther (2006) developed the metaphor of young adults’ ‘yoyo’ transitions primarily as a heuristic lens for analysing emerging life conditions ‘inbetween’ which had long been overlooked and neglected in both youth studies and by the welfare state; conditions characterized by particular temporalities such as reversibility instead of linearity, which is evidenced by movements in and out of education, employment, or housing, oscillating between youth and adulthood or of simultaneously being young and becoming an adult. Against the background of conditions in the Global South (partly including also Southern Europe), the contingency of a youth-as-transition approach is even more obvious. A widespread constellation is that formal education has been implemented and—albeit to different degrees—has replaced traditional structures of growing up without developing corresponding labour markets. This results in phenomena of temporal alienation reflected in experiences of ‘boredom’ (Dalsgård et al., 2014) and conditions of ‘waithood’ (Cuzzocrea, 2019; Masquelier, 2023).
A relational perspective, as developed, for example, in the context of reflexive transition research, allows for a consideration of such complexities. The concept of ‘doing transitions’ conceptualizes transitions in the life course as performative social realities that are constantly shaped and constituted in terms of social practice. Discursive, institutional, and individually ascribed practices are interrelated and evolve across dimensions of interpersonality, materiality, and temporality. From such a perspective neither social states (such as youth), social processes (such as transitions) nor social actors (such as young people or adults) exist independently of their mutual relationships (Stauber et al., 2022). A relational perspective therefore calls into question what becomes visible and what remains invisible if youth is conceptualized as being a future-oriented moratorium on a linear path towards adulthood.
Blurring temporal constellations in contemporary young people's lives
The following section depicts three vignettes that exemplify constellations of the blurred temporalities that contemporary youth navigate. The vignettes have been constructed based on recent empirical findings from various studies. They are meant to highlight central aspects of young people's lives and practices in Germany: Transitions in the pandemic, the youth cultural practice of ‘chilling’, and the Fridays for Future movement. These constellations reveal particular temporal tensions, which stimulate the theoretical reflections reconstructed in the subsequent section.
Standstill? Transitions in the pandemic
Currently, it is very frustrating to be at the same point as last year before the hard winter of restrictions that seemed to last an eternity […]. I am worried about missing my life and not being able to take advantage of professional opportunities because I am not feeling well psychologically due to the lack of perspective (Quote from a respondent of the JuCo 2 study, translated from Andresen et al. 2022: 4).
‘Frustration about missed opportunities, reports of stress and pressure to perform, and expressions of fears about the future’ (Heyer 2022: 77) are key observations of a German study on young people's experiences of time during the pandemic (Andresen et al., 2022). It is important to note that ‘in childhood and adolescence, lifetime has a different experiential meaning than in adulthood, and restrictions have a more long-lasting effect on the everyday lives of children, adolescents, and young adults’ (BJK 2021: 21). The possibility to plan and shape the immediate future (in education and work, but also leisure time and peer cultures) was extremely limited during the pandemic; job interviews were cancelled, fewer apprenticeship contracts were signed (see, e.g., BiBB, 2022), internships were suspended, plans for higher education were postponed or cancelled, and many young adults stayed in—or returned to—their parent's home for longer than they had planned (Barlovic et al., 2020). At the same time, however, young people and young adults felt extreme pressure from educational and youth welfare institutions to plan their next educational and vocational steps, even during the pandemic, when they were increasingly less able to think about the future. This contributed to young people's stress and fears about the future and negatively impacted their mental health (Andresen et al., 2022).
Even before the pandemic, the expectation that young people could plan their educational and training transitions represented a paradox against the backdrop of increasing contingencies and imponderabilities. As career entry was becoming increasingly precarious, the consequences of lacking the possibilities to plan were omnipresent (Stauber and Walther, 2006; Walther, 2012). Such precarity can be seen in Germany in the cancellation of almost every fourth signed apprenticeship contract and a university dropout rate of about one in three (BiBB, 2022; Rudnicka 2022). However, even under pandemic conditions, institutional actors insisted that young people could plan and shape their own life course transitions. The contradiction between institutionalization and individualized responsibilization of success and failure in youth transitions thus reached a new level during the pandemic as the quote at the beginning of this paragraph exemplifies. Even if young people had accepted the persisting planning imperative during this forced moratorium, they could not translate their plans into corresponding action. Nonetheless, it was clear that they would be individually ascribed the responsibility for ‘missed opportunities’. This may explain the continuation of a recent trend among school leavers from the lower tracks of the differentiated German school system who aim to prolong school education and increase their school qualifications rather than taking up available vocational training immediately in order to gain time and increase options for choice even after the pandemic. This is noteworthy in the German context as it occurs despite the resistance of institutional gatekeepers who are concerned about a shortage of skilled labour, especially in the trades, industry, and social services (Walther, 2015).
‘Chilling’ as a practice of slowing down
When you’re chilling, it's like this (..), fuck it, you don’t even notice how time passes (..) and you don’t plan it (..), you just do it, let it happen (quoted and translated from Mengilli, 2022: 198). Chillin’ for me is really (..), my friends are around (..) and we talk (3), that's chilling for me (..), relax and talk (quoted and translated from Mengilli, 2022: 210).
The term ‘chilling' first emerged in the techno scene in literal reference to the ‘chill-out spaces’ where young people could ‘cool down’ from fast beats, shrill sounds, and long sets of excessive dancing. If the speed of techno could be interpreted as symbolizing the general acceleration of individual and social life (Rosa, 2010), the practice of chilling was positioned as the cultural counterpart that would allow people to cope with this demand. While techno has always been limited to a particular youth cultural scene, it is all the more surprising that nowadays young people in Germany across different age groups, milieus, and youth cultural styles refer to chilling as a relevant, youth-specific practice. This is the second particular finding of Mengilli's (2022: 226) study, elaborated from group discussions with a diversified sample of peer groups: the wide range of different forms, content, and meanings of this practice vary in its existential urgency and stylistic sovereignty according to young people's social positioning.
Youth cultural practices of hanging out or doing nothing are not new phenomena but are shared by many young people across different geographical and historical contexts. For example, Cuzzocrea (2019) has found constellations of ‘forced waithood’ among young people in Southern Italy which appear similar to young people's ‘work of waiting’ in Niger as they cope with a lack of work, status, and occupation by cultivating a traditional ritual of tea drinking in public (Masquelier, 2023). By contrast, chilling appears as a ‘tactic’ (De Certeau, 1988), a means of slowing down to regain time and control as an insistence on a ‘right to the present’ in terms of a self-determined short-term moratorium. It shares similarities to the ‘Tang Ping’ movement (lying flat) of young people in China in the face of career pressure. The case of Japanese ‘Hikikomori’ seems to be even more extreme involving physical withdrawal from any social engagement and contact and is, therefore, not only problematized but even pathologized in the context of an extremely competitive education and employment system (see, e.g., Coeli et al., 2023).
Fridays for Future as an intergenerational struggle for the future
I think it's important that young people in particular are on the streets and stand up for their future to really make a difference […] to show that we students are a big group that cares about their future and also have political opinions (Quote from interviewed young people, translated from Sommer and Haunss, 2020: 33).
At the same time, protest is not only a struggle for the future but also the present. Concrete struggles regarding whether Fridays should be considered days of demonstration and or regular school days reflect both experiences of school attendance as alienating, especially in the face of a threatened future, or claims for self-determined time management. Twelve-year-old speakers at demonstrations in public spaces have challenged the chrononormativity of political articulation and subjectivity as much as sixteen-year-olds draw on detailed knowledge of climate studies in TV talk shows as they fight the adult generation to define power, recognition, and alternative logics. Thus, the age-related subject positions of legitimate speakers are questioned: at what age is political articulation legitimate and political expertise recognized?
At the same time, uncertain transitions and the hardly redeemable demands of life planning affect even semi-professional activists. It is only an apparent paradox, that the struggle for a global future, at the same time, is also a strategy for coping with the expectations and demands of an accelerated, anticipated, and optimized adulthood. The moral charge of the reference to ‘one planet’ and a self-designation as the ‘last generation’ provides a moral advantage in this intergenerational power struggle. Such a strategy, however, also requires particular starting points and resources (especially in terms of education and lifestyles) which are distributed unequally. In terms of the reproduction of social inequality, this strategy does not differ so much from other ways of gaining time in transitions to adulthood, such as gap years or world trips (see Della Porta and Portos, 2023).
Being and becoming: tensions and relationality in the temporality of youth
The three exemplary constellations described above (transitions during the pandemic, the youth cultural practice of chilling, and Fridays for Future) indicate a need to rethink the linear concepts of temporality that have structured the Western institutionalization of youth and have dominated youth studies from their inception. Inherent temporal markers, assumptions, expectations, and perspectives increasingly seem to be contradictory, leading to ambiguous constellations of being and becoming, albeit without suspending the reproduction of unequal possibilities to act. This section outlines the different tensions evident in the vignettes presented above under the lens of relational concepts of temporality: between present and future orientations, between postponement and acceleration, and between linearity and simultaneity.
‘Relative time’ between the present and the future
Youth research has largely interpreted the transformation of the youth phase as a shift from a pure orientation toward the future to an increasing orientation toward the present. Recent research underscores, however, that these orientations occur simultaneously leaving young people to cope with the resulting contradictions on their own. On the one hand, they must navigate the intergenerational expectation that they will establish a life plan, although this is increasingly becoming more difficult to realize even for young people who follow institutional guidelines. On the other hand, they are confronted with the youth cultural imperative that ‘you only live once’. The young people Andresen et al. (2022) interviewed during the pandemic expressed a loss of perspective, both in their ability to envision an individual plan for the future as well as in their ability to enjoy collective practices in the present. TikTok trends like ‘What I would have worn …’ (e.g., at the missed senior prom) came to symbolize a missed life that young people could no longer live. At the same time, these trends can be understood as the only accessible artefacts of how young people captured the quality of the present. By styling themselves in ever-new variations, young people shape possible futures in the present (Heer, 2022).
In contrast to the 1980s, orientations towards the present and the future thus appear more intertwined. While chilling practices express a right to the present, they remain limited to youth cultural and temporal ‘niches’ in view of the increasing demands that young people self-optimize their futures. Those who have sufficient economic, social, and cultural capital can refer to present (youth-cultural) lifestyles as the key criterion of biographized life planning. Yet, such imaginations are hardly available to young people who grow up in constellations of social disadvantage—and especially in regional contexts with a lack of reliable future options. In the case of Fridays for Future, for example, the temporary suspension of school and education in favour of engagement and protest depends on certain prerequisites and is, thus, socially selective; not everyone can opt for a self-determined educational moratorium in favour of political protest. Not every young person manages to find their way back to their original educational pathway or can succeed in using such moratoria as gateways for the transition to training, study, or employment (see Lütgens, 2021). Here, temporalities reveal both to be different and to reproduce inequalities: those with sufficient resources to secure a future in and through employment can afford the present; those whose futures are uncertain and insecure constantly have to legitimize their use of the present.
From a subjective view, present and future can neither be played off against nor separated from each other but are continuously entangled. To address the multiple and contingent linkages between historical, institutional, and biographical temporalities, Sánchez-Mira and Bernardi (2022:122) refer to ‘relative time’, which transcends the one-dimensional linearity of before/after or earlier/later in terms of a […] more comprehensive and explicit theoretical conceptualization of time […] that goes beyond an absolute understanding of time to encompass notions of relative time […] that integrates […] the multidirectional, elastic, and telescopic nature of time.
‘Time work’ between postponement and acceleration
The three constellations presented above challenge and question the idea of a self-evident moratorium as a structural element of youth, albeit in different ways. First, young people (not only in Western societies) are largely perceiving and accepting (or rejecting) demands that they adapt to new future realities and self-optimize the current ‘future’ at an increasingly early stage as the ‘rush hour of life’ of the late 20 s and early 30 s (Bittman and Wajcman, 2000) has expanded to both younger and older ages. In Germany, for example, institutional attempts to re-standardize the life course have included reforms to shorten secondary education, like how bachelor's and master's degrees replaced the former diploma, or the distinction between labour market policies for those under and over 25 years of age. These attempts claim to maintain or ‘reset’ the age markers of the normal life course, and to increase the efficacy of educational investments, which applies also to compensatory educational ‘catch-up programs’ launched in the supposedly ‘post-pandemic’ summer of 2022.
Second, it seems increasingly uncertain whether, when, and how the adult status that the institutionalized moratorium targets can and will be achieved. The pandemic revealed that even within the still dominant discourse of acceleration, waiting times occur that are perceived as being unproductive and meaningless. At the same time, accelerated positioning processes mean that young people and young adults are also trying to gain time and postpone decisions. This can include continuing their schooling (even against external advice and institutional resistance), chilling, or engaging in political activism. These practices not only shift temporal priorities but also involve negotiating what and whose future is at stake. Accordingly, the idea of a moratorium not only persists but also seems to be re-appropriated in demands for a ‘right to be young’.
The delimited moratorium is closely connected to social selectivity and inequality: young people have by no means equal access to the time needed to shape their own lives or to endure periods of unproductive postponement. By contrast, looking at who is granted how much time in transitions allows for a reconstruction of differentiated social positioning (see, e.g., Stauber and Walther, 2006; Cuzzocrea, 2019). These differences and inequalities are institutionally regulated and generated by shorter versus longer educational pathways, an earlier educational start compared to university studies and correspondingly different career-entry expectations (Diepstraten et al., 2006). Increased forced and chosen detours between leaving school for the first time and starting vocational training have significantly diminished such differences in Germany (BiBB, 2022). This is particularly noteworthy among young people who have been attributed a chrononormative deviation as their low or poor school-leaving qualifications force them into the prevocational schemes of the so-called ‘transition sector’, which are in most cases unproductive waiting loops. By contrast, in Southern Italy, where such measures do not exist despite high youth unemployment, young people experience phases of imposed and unproductive moratorium until an age normally attributed to adulthood which Cuzzocrea (2019) refers to as ‘forced waithood’ (for contexts in the global South, see Dalsgård et al., 2014). In some cases, however, unexpected timeouts—even pandemic-related lockdowns—can also be perceived as time gains that offer relief from the pressure of having to keep up and struggle with peers (Leccardi, 2021). How moratoria are unequally imposed and managed reflects gaps between poverty and affluence, different time spaces for travel and volunteering as well as for distance learning or chilling with peers (Andresen et al., 2022). This is even more accentuated for young people in the processes of migration, whose youth seems ‘suspended’ by forced waiting periods when they arrive in their host country (Bhatia & Canning, 2021). Finally, different inequalities are also expressed in different chilling practices to gain time, which are more or less urgent, sovereign, and subjectively successful depending on the social situation, available resources, and scope of action (Mengilli, 2022).
A concept which seems particularly adequate for different forms, experiences and interpretations of both waithood and chilling is the concept of time work by which Flaherty (2003: 19) aims to integrate agency and temporality in the sense of subjective efforts ‘to promote or suppress a particular form of temporal experience’ be it duration, frequency, sequence, timing, or time allocation. For Leccardi, this concept captures young people's agency in the face of uncertain transitions: Time work is expressed through the re-elaboration of the relationship to the mid- and long-term future, … by engaging in time work, subjects operate personal choices based on ad hoc evaluations. However, these are constrained choices (Leccardi, 2021: 91).
Beyond linearity and simultaneity: relational time
Corresponding to the institutionalized life course, the youth phase was designed and generally perceived to be a linear sequence of steps of growing up, marked mainly by transitions into, within, and out of the educational system as well as by the age limits of maturity and the legal majority, and symbolized by rites of passage such as confirmation or consecration (Wanka and Prescher, 2022). A central aspect of the ‘young adult’ heuristic and the ‘yoyo’ transitions metaphor was the prolongation, reversibility, and, thus, the increasing simultaneity of transitions in different life spheres (Stauber and Walther, 2006). It was therefore not expectations but possibilities that transitions into adulthood could be planned that had successively decreased. As education and employment were decoupled, labour-market contingencies, unplannable family dynamics, the idiosyncrasies of biographical construction, and partial transitions increasingly followed their own logics and occurred at different and sometimes unpredictable speeds. Scholars—beginning in the 1980s and continuing nowadays—have similarly questioned the linear sequentiality and future-relatedness of transitions throughout the youth phase, whether it be in the face of global crises of war, forced migration, or climate change (Böhnisch and Schefold 1985; Cuzzocrea, 2019; Leccardi, 2021). During the Covid-19 pandemic, this planning paradox became noticeably more acute.
Nonetheless, and despite being counteracted by young people's everyday lives and life courses and the complex demands of reconciling different timing and contingent transitions in institutional and everyday life contexts, the persistent linearity institutionalized in the transitions in education and to employment makes coping with this contingency more difficult. While higher education offers longer and more flexible periods (e.g., gap years) for such processes of reconciliation, secondary education is formed by short and rigidly timed periods. This applies even more to young people leaving care as well as to refugees and migrants whose transitions are compressed and who have a significantly higher risk of deviating from the chrononormativity of the temporal regime of the life course (Cuzzocrea, 2019; Smith and Dowse, 2019).
In young people's biographical constructions and youth cultural practices, this simultaneity is expressed in multiple ways. For example, one goal seems to be to gain more time for the simultaneous demands of orientation, decision-making, and coping. This is reflected both in the preference for further schooling and study over early entry into the labour market by taking an apprenticeship immediately after completing secondary school and in the different practices of chilling. Climate protests, with their references to the future, insist on more possibilities to self-determine simultaneous demands (e.g., politics and school), framed in terms of youth culture and politically and morally legitimized. However, its partial recognition (vis-à-vis other, more silent practices or practices that are more likely to be categorized as deviant) also points to social inequalities in how young people are confronted and how they cope with simultaneity. And, of course, some young people combine postponing professional choices, chilling, and activism.
Given the ideological limitations and contradictions of linear perspectives on time in conceptualizing youth, Wood (2017) draws on Ingold's (2007) ‘history of lines’ to deconstruct the linear, modern rationality of progress and conceptualise time in terms of ‘entangled threads, traces, ruptures and creases and ghostly lines of borders, constellations or dreamtime’ (Wood, 2017: 1182). To better understand youth temporalities, she proposes three alternative research approaches. The first is to complement the present, that is, the future fixation of youth research by looking for ‘genealogies’ and longer timeframes to reveal the historical sediments of current situations of disadvantage, risks of exclusion as well as acts of positioning in and through (youth-)cultural practice and, thus, prevent individualized attributions. The second is to reflect and disentangle the interwovenness of time spun into ‘threads’ to allow for a better understanding of its interrelatedness with space as well as with intersectional social positioning. The third approach, ‘wayfaring’, requires adopting research strategies, which—like multi-sited ethnography—avoid focusing on spectacular ruptures (transitions) as isolated events but follow the apparent detours that young people's everyday life practices take through different spaces and moments to reconstruct their processual emergence and social embeddedness. All three figures are helpful for the analysis of the tensions outlined above as they not only undermine apparently obvious logics in terms of ‘either – or’ but also draw attention to the interplay between different temporalities (moratorium and acceleration, future and present orientation, sequentiality and simultaneity). Wood thus suggests adopting ‘cyclical’ rather than linear time. We argue that adopting such an approach would be better suited for research on the simultaneously shrinking and enlarging phases of time and the contradictions between young people's time work and institutional regulation—which at times also sanctions young people's time work—as asynchronous (Torres, 2021) and the corresponding research perspective as relational.
Conclusions: blurring boundaries, relational temporality, dispersed agency
This paper underscored how the linear concept of temporality dominates scholarly understandings of the youth phase whereby even recent conceptualizations that intend to break with the reification of linearity are shaped by (late) modern ideas of progress continue. The ideological function of such chrononormativity of ‘doing youth in time’ becomes visible and questionable as life course boundaries are blurred. As queer studies and disability studies emphasize, it probably never corresponded with how time is lived in the first place. Indeed, the observations we describe from research on north-western European contexts show how the simultaneity of standstill and time pressure in transitions into adulthood during the pandemic, how young people attempt to gain time through youth cultural practices of ‘chilling’, and how they seek to re-appropriate the future through climate protests reflect temporal tensions that are characteristic of how young people cope with the youth phase, including postponement versus acceleration, future versus present orientation, and linearity versus simultaneity. These tensions exist not only between societal demands and young people's subjective and collective meaning-making but also result from contradictions between different external demands and attributions as well as biographical perspectives and young people's cultural practices. They result in life planning dilemmas and a need to cope with everyday life which, in turn, differ according to social situations and positions. Time off can be made productive or stay unproductive in different ways, while attempts to gain time are granted and recognized to different extents— sometimes even sanctioned (Cuzzocrea 2019)—reflecting how youth chrononormativity is intertwined with capitalist, ableist, colonialist assumptions, and hetero-normativities (Freeman 2010).
These tensions indicate that linearity, postponement, and orientation toward the future are no longer useful for characterizing the youth phase. Instead, we suggest that in the complexity of a dynamic and contradictory temporal regime of growing up and the interactive time work young people invest in coping with and making meaning of chrononormativities, temporalities are blurred. Consequently, analysing doing youth in time requires a relational conception of time to reconstruct how different historical, institutional, biographical, everyday temporalities, and temporal layers are interrelated (Torres, 2021; see also Koselleck, 2000 and Elias, 2007). Accordingly, the historical and societal situatedness (Haraway, 1988) of the institutionalization of youth as well as of youth (cultural) practices can and must be interpreted in relation to socio-historical developments, which take very different forms in global comparison. In Western societies and the shift towards activating welfare states, the de-standardization or de-limitation of the life course needs to be contextualized in terms of policies aimed at re-standardization (Walther, 2012) and how these establish incentives for future-oriented investment. Increasing investments in education, increasing attention to early life course phases and individual responsibility for the entire life span, for example, in organizing career guidance early in lower secondary school and the demands of ‘lifelong learning’, are sold as a means to prioritise prevention over intervention with securing later life phases viewed as a social burden. Here, linear temporality is by no means obsolete; instead, it materializes in educational and social policies. The latter reproduces the idea of investment in accelerated and individualized biographies (Rosa, 2010) including the responsibilization of documenting one's own life course (see, e.g., Walther, 2015).
Accordingly, there is a need to explicate these normativities and to reconstruct how they are entangled in youth-phase institutions and reflected in the ‘methodological institutionalism’ of youth research (Schröer, 2015). Temporal markers of stages and transitions and assumptions about their ‘normal’ duration still follow – at least in countries of the global North – a predominantly linear temporal regime while how young people deal with contradictions, contingencies and imponderabilities are addressed in terms of deficit or deviance. With Emirbayer and Mische (1998), Flaherty (2003), Wood (2017), and Sánchez and Bernardi (2022) in mind, we have proposed a relational perspective on the constitution of youth that complements linear and one-dimensional notions of temporality. Concepts of temporality such as relative time, time work, and asynchronous time can provide useful lenses for highlighting the temporal openness of youth cultural practice in the light of contingencies, unplannability, unavailability as well as biographical idiosyncrasies and unpredictability. Contextualising them with regard to the complexity and contradictory dynamics of temporal regimes, they enable a relational as well as a reflexive view on theoretical questions of ‘doing youth in time’ across three considerations. First, they show the inappropriateness of simply ‘stretching’ the life course, for example, by adjusting age limits or introducing new age phases as in the concept of emerging adulthood (or, in older age, by distinguishing the third and fourth age). A relational concept of time seems to be more appropriate for understanding the diffusion of formerly sequentially organized demands as developmental tasks in the institutionalized normal life course, the simultaneity of delimited life courses and their institutional (re)standardization, and the resulting contradictions and tensions. Second, inequalities within youth can be reformulated and analysed as temporal inequalities. This is not only evident globally, but also in educational trajectories and transitions into training and work, since performance is seen as something that can be fixed at certain points in time and poor performance is attributed to individual deficits via class repetitions and waiting loops, and perpetuated in corresponding access opportunities in the life course. Third, looking at temporal relationality allows for a differentiated view of agency in the context of growing up, especially as the present and the future become more precarious (Leccardi, 2021). While on the one hand, post-pandemic educational catch-up programs are driving young people further into accelerated socialization, young people have also been using these discursive occasions to claim a right to the present and to the future, sometimes also by reversing priorities. During the pandemic, but also in the practices of chilling—which are both different from constellations of ‘forced waithood’ and ‘work of waiting’—young people have found ways to escape a strict meritocratic orientation towards achievement; at the same time, however, the turn towards activation and acceleration in the life course regime can also be seen in the biographies of youth activists. Thus, temporalities contribute to subjectivation in the sense of a powerful dialectic dynamic that implies subjection as much as it generates agency (Butler, 1997).
Thus, a relational temporal perspective on doing youth in time allows for a better understanding of the relations with which young people have to deal: different affectedness, vulnerabilities, and perspectives. We suggest that such an approach allows young people's practices to be better deciphered as attempts to deal with contradictions and to meet demands, regardless of form and across different historical and geographical social contexts.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The authors wish to thank the fellows of the Research Training Group Doing Transitions as well as the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
