Valentina Cuzzocrea

Students’ narratives of the future: Imagined mobilities as forms of youth agency?

ABSTRACT In the context of the ‘iFuture’ research project, 341 18-year-old Sardinian students were asked to write an essay in which they imagined themselves at 90 and described what their futures (in the past) would look like. Such data allow us to investigate the notion of agency. Agency and the future are deeply intertwined: agency involves the idea of projection and implies anticipation; the ‘desired’ futures have an impact on the ways in which youth act in the world today. We focus on the analysis of one of the emerging findings, which expresses an interesting configuration of youth agency, namely the imagination of youth mobility. This finding expresses the desire to put some projects into place, yet it concurrently implies that youth believe that these projects are impossible to achieve in the current context. After offering an overview of imagined destinations, we identify two ways in which imagined mobility emerges from the rich material collected: (a) mobility as an entry ticket, to bypass the uncertainty associated with crude reality and (b) mobility as an occasion for self-experimentation and self-growth. We conclude by discussing in what ways these forms of imagined future mobilities may be seen as youth agency.

Domesticating the City: Family Practices in Public Space

The aim of this article is to rethink the analysis of urban life and the practices involving the use of urban space. To that end, we focus on the value that such practices have for social enquiry by employing the concept of domestication, which was originally elaborated by Silverstone in the field of media and technology scholarship. Specifically, the potential value of such usage is to embed practices that produce space in the complexity of the everyday culture of families, and to enable an analysis of urban space in its dual articulation in both public and private culture. A discussion of how the concept has been applied in a study of how parents in a small Italian city include urban space in the domestic sphere offers an empirical substratum to our argument.

Collaborative individualization? Peer-to-peer action in youth transitions

In this article we propose the notion of collaborative individualization (henceforth, C.I.) as a means of characterizing young people’s attempts to define their identities as simultaneously self-reliant and in need of support and collaboration. Our arguments are based on the findings of a transnational case study: a recent Council of Europe policy project called Edgeryders, an online platform whose participants were invited to discuss their experience of attempting to achieve ‘fully independent adulthood’. In light of findings which suggest that individualization amongst the young might take forms which are more collaborative than self-focused, we argue that youth scholars ought to rethink the assumptions made about the nature of individualization in youth transitions. We propose that such theorizations should embrace the potential described by C.I. in order to provide constructive responses to young people’s changing socio-economic needs, and refocus attention on young people’s situatedness within the communities many are demonstrably committed to working with and for.

Squeezing or blurring: young adulthood in the career strategies of professionals based in Italy and England

In moving the first significant steps into a meaningful graduate career, young adults need to elaborate strategies, which consist in identifying and activating what seems useful in ones own context of reference. Specifically looking at the meaning of being young adults in two countries belonging to different welfare systems and thus diverging regimes of transitions to adulthood, i.e. Italy and England, this paper analyses how two groups of early career professionals conceive of and forge the specific position they occupy in the life cycle in the course of developing particular strategies of career construction. The findings of 60 in-depth interviews compare and contrast a first dimension of young adulthood accounted for as a favourable condition to delimit, emphasise and be collocated within in order to maximise its potential. This is the case of young adults based in England, who ‘squeeze’ their youth to enact career strategies. The second dimension is constructed as a penalising condition not to be associated with, in an effort to reduce the discomfort it causes. It is the case of young adults based in Italy, who work out their strategies while feeling caught in the blurred and indefinite condition of youth.

Occupabili più che occupati? Ambiguità di un concetto di policy nel caso italiano

Secondo il principio di occupabilita, promosso dall’Unione Europea e da vari governi nazionali tra cui quello italiano, il lavoratore o aspirante lavoratore e ritenuto responsabile della propria posizione nel mercato del lavoro. Il focus sul miglioramento della capacita di ognuno di collocarsi nel mercato del lavoro, e di mantenere una posizione lavorativa, da luogo ad un vero e proprio discorso sull’occupabilita, che e diventato dominante nelle politiche del lavoro e di formazione. Nonostante la sua diffusione, il concetto di occupabilita e rimasto principalmente un concetto di policy ed e stato raramente oggetto di riflessione teorica. Questo contributo riflette sulle definizioni del concetto, ponendole in relazione al contesto italiano e a recenti dibattiti su come si stia trasformando il welfare italiano, e mira a metterne in evidenza alcune ambiguita, in particolare la sua valenza ideologica, concludendo che ad una maggiore occupabilita possa non seguire necessariamente una maggiore occupazione.

Moratorium or waithood? Forms of time-taking and the changing shape of youth:

Developing Erikson’s concept of ‘psychological moratorium’ (1968), literature on youth transitions has a central focus in the procrastination of adult roles. Forms of time taking may either be erratic, or take more institutionalised and/or middle-class-oriented shapes such as ‘gap years,’ and they are generally justified by the aim of self-experimentation. However, on a different institutional level, they enter in contrast with the recent imperative of becoming ‘fit for work,’ which is realised mainly through obtaining an increasing number of qualifications and skills considered essential to meet the challenges of employment, and ultimately embody a model of ‘active citizenship.’ But how do these two contrasting demands come to terms with each other in the experiences of youth? And how is youth itself re-shaped through this interaction? Contrasting the concept of psychological moratorium (and its developments) with a wider literature on social acceleration, where an emphasis on active citizenship and employability can be framed, this article revisits forms of time taking among youths. It does so by discussing a Sardinian case study, where varieties of time taking also reverse into forms of ‘waithood,’ and are therefore in contrast with social acceleration. More analytically, I have identified two modalities of moratorium (i.e. classic moratorium and waithood) and two sub-modalities of waithood (justified by either the accomplishment of procedures or by waiting for someone else’s intervention). These findings are discussed with reference to a broad political framework through which it is possible to revisit the changing shape of youth under the pressures of late modern society.

Introducing the need to study young people in contemporary Italy

1. The idea of this Special Issue arises from reflections shared between the guest editors while participating in the Pool of European Youth Researchers, a group of researchers coordinated by the Youth Partnership between the Council of Europe and the European Commission, with whom we have collaborated over the past few years. Along with passionate discussions with colleagues studying youth in various European countries, it became evident to us that the need to shed light on the multifaceted challenges faced today by young people in Italy was particularly urgent. It was our feeling that when discussing the problems of youth in Italy we were also facing the challenge of understanding to what extent this group is distinctive or particular when compared to others in Europe, and if so in what ways. In other words, can we talk about an Italian case? How is the national societal landscape changing in relation to the factors that put youth in such hard conditions? Are existing categories useful for studying the specific conditions of young people in contemporary Italy? How are Italian young people coping with increasing diversity in terms of social and economic status, opportunities, support from the family of origin – among other factors – and how are they taking these as new challenges? To stimulate discussion on this theme, we launched an open call for papers. Our starting point is the need to deconstruct misrepresentations of Italian youth and stimulate an articulated international scholarly debate. At the same time, it is vital to identify common grounds for and patterns in the plethora of social conditions faced by Italian youth, and to do so through investigation of the cultures and lifestyles that they embody and the choices they make, which in turn constitute a trait of Italian culture. In fact, considering the conditions of today’s Italian youth as a barometer for the future of Italian society, their ability to cope with structural conditions determines how the country will be able to reproduce itself in the years to come. In this sense, a focus on young people is crucial to all those who want to obtain an in-depth and well-grounded understanding of contemporary Italy, and therefore to the wide readership of the Journal of Modern Italian Studies. What is the framework within which young people operate? They are continually confronted by the severe conditions of the labour market, conditions that have led to unprecedented youth unemployment rates and consequent brain drain, as well as a more general decrease in expectations regarding the full realization of their ambitions, dynamics that they share with their counterparts in some other EU countries (e.g. Spain and Greece). In comparison to other countries, however, in Italy this challenge has coexisted with the use and reproduction of stereotypes in political and

‘Rooted mobilities’ in young people’s narratives of the future: A peripheral case:

Youth research recognises that the struggles typical of the transition to adulthood can no longer be assumed to occur ‘at home’. However, few investigations have focused on how the imagination of mobility shapes that which is not home yet but which may later become so. To address this lacuna, this article engages with how the imagination of the future of young people is entrenched with ‘motility’, namely, the possibility for a type of movement that arises out of a specific relationship with one’s current context. Focusing on Sardinian youth, the article problematises the strong mobility orientation which can occur through the unfolding of an imagined continuous ‘lived’ relationship with Sardinia. The author calls this ‘rooted mobility’. The article discusses the limits that accompany such mobility, and the potential for social action that emerges, framing narratives of the future within the conditions of peripherality in which young Sardinians live. The article draws on 341 essays on the topic of the future collected from students in their penultimate year of school.

A Possibility to Square the Circle? Youth Uncertainty and the Imagination of Late Adulthood

Youth transitions literature has traditionally devoted great attention to identifying and analysing events that are considered crucial to young people regarding their (short term) orientation to the future and wider narratives of the self. Such categories as ‘turning points’, ‘critical moments’, and ‘crossroads’ have been used to identify and explain the events around which young people take important decisions in order to realise the so-called transition to adulthood, each suggesting a sense of rupture. This focus sits within a central interest of youth transition literature, namely to investigate what hinders or facilitates independence. When looking more broadly at how young people imagine their future, however, taking a longer perspective opens insights not only in terms of ruptures, which these categories tend to refer to, but also in terms of the continuities that might also be very important in these narratives. Despite the methodological difficulties in getting young people to speak about their long future, this article seeks to discuss how they see their late adulthood through reflecting on how their narratives play out across different temporal horizons in order to establish their current priorities. Empirically, it is substantiated by essays on the future written by 18-year-old students based in Sardinia, and discusses in particular an emphasis which they put on the long as a term of fulfilment of their values.

Erasmus and Citizenship

Since 2014, a range of actions associated with the preceding Youth in Action initiative have been interpolated into the Erasmus programme, including voluntary placements and other forms of short duration exchange. In this chapter, we elaborate upon the shift away from academic mobility and towards establishing a clearer personal-political agenda in Erasmus+. We also examine the potential role of Erasmus in encouraging active citizenship, taking into account the value of mobility to its realization. Evidence is used from empirical material gathered in Estonia in the form of interviews with young people conducted before and approximately seven months after they had participated in a mobility project, with specific emphasis on the development of citizenship competences.