REDI news – Hierarchies of Belonging Youth and the Subjectivity of Civic Life Seminar 7 October
Interdisciplinary Grant: Call for Applications for 2021 Round
The Deakin Science and Society Network is pleased to announce the call for applications for its third annual interdisciplinary grant scheme. Applications are invited from early- and mid-career researchers for the Interdisciplinary Project Incubator Grant. The Deakin SSN Interdisciplinary Project Incubator has been developed to provide Deakin early and mid-career academic researchers (EMCARs) with resources, tools and training to conduct high quality and impactful interdisciplinary research. The Incubator will provide up to $7,500 of seed funding to each successful applicant, as well as providing mentorship, regular feedback on project development, and assisting in brokering collaborative interdisciplinary relationships. The aim is to develop interdisciplinary projects that bring together STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) disciplines and HASS (Humanities and Social Science) disciplines.
Applications close on Friday 6 November 5:00pm AEST
For more information, check the scheme web page.
Hierarchies of Belonging: Youth and the Subjectivity of Civic Life
Wednesday 7 October, 10.00 am—11.30 am
Join REDI’s Dr Ros Black this Wednesday morning as she presents ‘Belonging to the Future: Beyond Homo Promptus’ with Professor Lucas Walsh (Monash University) as part of Newcastle Universtiy’s Youth Studies Network’s ‘Hierarchies of Belonging’ seminar:
Belonging to the Future: Beyond Homo Promptus
Lucas Walsh (Monash University) and Rosalyn Black (Deakin University)
The association between young people and the future is curiously persistent within public and educational discourses. The young person is variously positioned as an ‘affective proxy for “the future”, a figure of hope’ (Threadgold 2019, p. 8) and as ‘a resource for others, for future economic growth and global competition, and for the maintenance of our society’ (Nikunen 2017, p. 673). Young people are also collectively constructed as ‘‘seismographs’ of the future, warning beacons of social and cultural change’ (Johansson 2017, p. 510).
Whichever discourse is applied to them, young people’s navigations of the world are always understood to be about ‘movement toward the future’ (Hardgrove et al 2015). This movement is anything but simple, however. Young people’s relationship to the future is not a linear progression but an engagement with complex temporalities. It is a series of encounters with ‘entangled threads, traces, ruptures and creases and ghostly lines of borders [or] constellations’ (Wood 2017, p. 7). These encounters also affect young people’s sense of belonging to and in the future. Yuval Davis has suggested that belonging is ‘an emotional (or even ontological) attachment, about ‘feeling at home’’ (2011, p. 10). Our question in this seminar is: how can young people feel at home in a post-pandemic world?
In our most recent book (Black & Walsh 2019), we proposed the concept of homo promptus to understand how young university students move towards imagined futures that may be subject to economic downturns, mutable labour markets and all of the other uncertainties of the contemporary economy. We suggested that homo promptus as an individualised youth subjectivity or self is entrepreneurial/enterprising and strategic, expected to plan for the future while forced to live in the short-term, and permanently in ‘situational’ mode. We also suggested that homo promptus is living towards a future that is fundamentally unknowable.
The COVID-19 pandemic and the emerging global recession that attends it are exacerbating this unknowability in ways that are certain to have lasting effects on young lives. As Kelly and Goring have recently noted, young people are now forced to imagine their futures ‘in times and spaces of uncertainties and likelihoods, of possibilities and impossibilities, of probabilities and improbabilities’ (2020).
This requires new thinking about young people’s relationship to the future and how we think about uncertainty. Three sketches of uncertainty are posed, with the third being salient to this discussion. It is asked: should we accept this socially constructed form of uncertainty, or imagine better alternatives? Is the new normal a kind of downward shifting baseline as suggested in the field of ecology? How can homo promptus help us to understand the present and enable us to move beyond young people as a figure of hope?