School of Social and Political Sciences - Theses
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ItemFrom everyday life to the long-term future: young adults’ plans, hopes, and future imaginaries( 2016)Research considering how the long-term future of society is perceived has generally focused on governance of the future, as well as on single issues that have acted as proxy categories for this temporal horizon. As a result, in-depth consideration of how the future of society is perceived on an individual, rather than institutional, level has received comparatively little scholarly attention. This thesis seeks to address this shortcoming by studying how individuals perceive the long-term future of their society. Specifically, the thesis responds to recent claims that young adults focus on short-term, personal issues to the exclusion of long-term, societal concerns by questioning how members of this demographic relate to the long-term future in a general sense, rather than in relation to specific concerns. In order to address this question, data collected from in-depth interviews conducted with 28 members of an 18-34 year-old demographic is placed into dialogue with existing research conducted in the sociology of time, youth and the environment. Beginning with considerations of the short-term, personal future, it is found that the ways in which the respondents related to the personal and societal future were interconnected due to their use of congruent strategies while perceiving each of these horizons. This claim, when placed alongside the finding that their perceptions of the societal future were also related to aspects of their personal identities and subjectivities, is used to contend that the respondents’ perceptions of the long-term future form part of the intersubjective lifeworlds that constitute their everyday domains of experience. Although the respondents displayed varying abilities and inclinations while relating to, and planning for, the short-term future – with some forming concrete plans for their lives and others avoiding dwelling on future concerns whenever possible – their perceptions of the long-term future did not reflect these tendencies. Instead, although some of the respondents struggled to engage with the long-term issues that concerned them in meaningful ways, they were all nevertheless able to form coherent imaginings of this future horizon. Moreover, their imaginings conformed to markedly similar themes across the sample, and were largely divisible into two distinct social or future imaginaries: one based on a narrative of decline, the other premised on a sense of hope. While the decline-based imaginary resonated with a number of prevalent sociological theories concerned with individuals’ perceptions of the contemporary future horizon, the more hopeful narratives presented a challenge to many of their claims. In response to this finding the thesis presents a critique of accounts that depict societal imaginaries in an overly homogenous or unified manner, and which thereby tend to underplay the diverse range of historical, cultural, and personal resources from which imaginaries are formed and through which they may be individuated. Drawing these findings together, this thesis ultimately concludes that although the short-term and long-term future are inexorably related, the latter dimension nevertheless has a distinct character, and cannot be understood when it is treated simply as a mere extension of the former.