Imagining the future in a difficult present: storylines from Spanish youth

ABSTRACT

This paper examines Spanish juveniles’ effort to imagine the future in times of uncertainty. The breakdown of youth strategies to adulthood exacerbates the disarticulation of imagined futures. ‘Presentism’ is further intensified by the 2008 crisis, making it difficult for youth to ‘find their place in the world’. Our evidence comes from biographical narratives collected in the form of ‘letters’ written by Spanish university students. Borrowing from literature on youth transitions, temporal sociology and situated culture, we develop a narrative analysis which shows how, in the process of imagining their future, Spanish youth are reconsidering their expectations and generating new solutions. Their accounts show how they manage to connect their individual experiences with the collective, generational dimension.

KEYWORDS:

• Youth
• future
• narrative
• crisis
• Spain

Acknowledgements

We appreciate the work and support of our research partners. An early version of this piece was presented at the XX Conference of the Spanish Federation of Sociology (FES, Gijón, July 2016).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

María Luz Morán is Professor of Sociology at the Universidad Complutense of Madrid (Spain). Her recent research focuses on the representations of citizenship among Spanish young people, and on the impact of socioeconomic crisis on the legitimisation basis of the Spanish Welfare State. Results of her research have been published in various scholarly journals, including European Societies, Revista Española de Investigaciones Sociológicas, Revista de Estudios Sociales and Revista Internacional de Sociología.

Laura Fernández de Mosteyrín is a Lecturer at Universidad A Distancia de Madrid (Spain). Her recent research focus is on cultural dimensions of youth politics. Results of her research have been published in scholarly journals including Revista de Estudios Sociales and Revista Política y Sociedad.

ORCID

María Luz Morán http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7310-8037

Laura Fernández de Mosteyrín http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6040-2832

Notes

1. In the second quarter of 2016, 46.5% of Spaniards aged between 16 and 25 were unemployed. (Survey of Active Population, INE, 2016).

2. In 2015, the average age at which Spanish women had their first child was 31.20 years (INE).

3. This marginalisation was however compatible with minority political activism in alternative politics and protest movements. See López Blasco (2005) and Jiménez Roger et al. (2008).

4. We have analysed this phenomenon in more detail in Benedicto et al., 2014.

5. The replication of this study with other groups of young people remains pending.

6. Thirty-four letters were written by men and 29 by women enrolled in university courses in Barcelona, Madrid, Salamanca, Badajoz and Granada. Two letters were written by students while abroad (Sweden and Mexico).

7. We processed our data with qualitative software assistance, but instead of sorting out pieces of texts we treated each letter as a single unit and analysed it in its own context. Following a systematisation of sequences by type (‘atopic’ and ‘utopic’), we looked at how the authors presented themselves, their feelings, emotions and attitudes towards the future, and how the storyline evolved: expectations, experiences, the role of the crisis in the narrative and the strategies for the future.

8. Although we assume there are different dimensions (age, type of college degree, family of origin …) that might work in their imagination of future, in this paper we are just concerned with types of sequence and distribution by gender.

9. Two letters are addressed to their ‘future me’.

10. Only one letter uses particularly colloquial language littered with swear words: ‘(…) you’re swanning around France with a fucking great job while things back home are getting worse and worse (…)’ [L27. Male].

11. With the exception of one letter writer who adopts a pseudonym (Popeye).

12. Only one letter writer reports having ignored the advice from her family:

The truth is, if I look at the situation people of my age find themselves in, I feel quite thankful. When I finished high school, despite my mother's opposition, I decided to sit the entrance exam to a military academy. I got the place I wanted and now I’m an officer in the Spanish army. [L53. Woman]

13. For these university students, their previous Erasmus experiences and knowledge of languages normalise the possibility of their having to emigrate.

14. In analysing the narratives, we have only considered the type of future (open or closed) that is presented. In this paper, we do not consider other dimensions.

15. We detected 32 tales of ‘utopianisation’ and 31 of ‘atopianisation’. Among women, there were 17 ‘utopian’ and 12 ‘atopian’ from a total of 29 narratives. Among men, the distribution was 15 ‘utopian’ and 19 ‘atopian’ from a total of 34 pieces.

Additional information

Funding

This paper is a result of two research projects. The first study, funded by the Spanish Institute for Youth (INJUVE), has already been published (Benedicto et al., 2014). The second study, ‘Redefining citizenship: the impact of socioeconomic crisis in the social basis of the Spanish Welfare State’, was funded by the Spanish National R&D and Innovation Plan (MINECO. CS2012-30773).