Project overview

 

iFuture Young people, citizenship and capacity to aspire

The project is being carried out by Giuliana Mandich, Ester Cois, Valentina Cuzzocrea and Simona Isabella at the University of Cagliari from September 2012 to August 2014 and is funded by the Regione Autonoma della Sardegna.

Dawn Lyon (University of Kent), a researcher form the project Living and Working on Sheppey, acts as a research consultant; also Myriam Ferrari, expert in education, has joined us and lead the collection of essays amongst students in Cagliari.

 

Why doing research on youth and the capacity to aspire?

 

If we look at the discourse emerging in the political sphere and the media in Italy, a widespread alarm on  youth’s situation seems to have grown recently. Expressions such as “immobile youths” or “voiceless generation” immediately convey the idea of a future which has been appropriated by previous  generations  and erased for the younger ones. The struggle for the future seems to suggest a new field of social and political conflict. Far from solving the problem, this alarm can even exacerbate it eroding young people capacity to aspire as effect of two major mechanisms.

In the first place, the fact that little policies effort seems to be put into place by the Italian government. The challenges posed by the European Union on the minimum criteria for citizenship of young people are particularly critical to meet in Italy because of the coexistence of heterogeneous principles in the national welfare regime, which is not favorable to outsiders (often, young people).

Secondly, the uncertainty about the future does not affect all young people in the same way. Within a frame of “individualized futures”, the cultural resources young people are able to use to project into the future are very important. Within this perspective, we combine Appadurai’s concept of capacity to aspire (Appadurai 2004) and Bourdieu’s forms of anticipation (Bourdieu 1998) within the frame of social futures studies (Adam 2010) and methodological reflections on future narratives (Mische 2009, Uprichard 2010) to understand young people’s imagined futures.

 

WP1. Welfare state intergenerational equity and youth.

The first focus is on the understanding of the structural and institutional conditions shaping young people’s opportunities. On this theme, we will concentrate on the perspective of intergenerational welfare system and intergenerational equity. The idea is to use a secondary data analysis approach with the aim to compare research findings related to different countries and different perspectives. We hope this will allow us to gain a better understanding of the problem and  increase policy oriented knowledge. While intergenerational exchanges emerge at the intersection of family, demography and welfare state provisions, the same intersection is rarely analyzed systematically. The separation among different research fields does not allow to see the complex context in which generations interact and the variety of resources available for each generation.

WP2. Young people and the capacity to aspire.

The research focuses on the analysis of ca 300 essays written by students from the last second years of some high schools in Cagliari and Nuoro, in Sardinia. Inspired by the research project “Living and working on Sheppey” (Lyon D., Crow G., 2012; Lyon D., Morgan B., Crow G., 2012) students were asked to write a short essay addressing the question: “Imagine to be 90, tell the story of your life”.The imaginative process of projecting into the future requires what Appadurai (2004) calls “capacity to aspire”, that is to say the set of cultural resources shaping the ability to project into the future. The aim of this part of the research is to explore the very complex field in which the capacity to aspire emerges as stretched out between the forms of practical anticipation incorporated in the habitus (Bourdieu, 1997) and  the cultures of the future inhabiting the public domain (as produced by technologies, media, institutions). Strongly connected with the concepts of reflexivity and creativity, the “capacity to aspire” has to be seen mainly as the ability to project present opportunities using socially relevant narratives. The future is understood in this perspective as a narrative space inhabited by a plurality of possible worlds.

Departing from the results of this first part of the analysis, a series of focus groups with students and teachers of the selected high schools have been scheduled.

 

Policy implications

 

In the first lines of the document “An EU Strategy for Youth” (Youth framework 2010-2018), the European Commission states that “Europe’s future depends on its youth. Can young peoples’ futures count on European institutions and more broadly, on national and local institutions? Departing from this angle, we will focus on the issue: what does it mean to take into account young people’s capacities to aspire in shaping youth policies?