Keywords

These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Introduction

Youth is widely understood as a time of transition, a movement from childhood to adulthood. Many of the most influential twentieth-century views on human subjectivity saw youth, or adolescence, as a life stage with a particularly important relationship to a person’s future identity (Erikson 1968). As this transition may have significant implications for the future of both the individual and the wider society they are part of, general social anxieties about change and progress are projected onto young people (Tilleczek 2011). These anxieties are both temporal and spatial. Young people are imagined as being at risk in terms of both their youth, with the experimentation and risk-taking in public space that this is seen to entail, and their transition to adulthood, which carries the risks of failed social integration or social reproduction if this process goes wrong (Bessant and Watts 1998). It has been argued that anxieties about the pace of social change in the contemporary world translate into ever-growing anxiety about youth and hence a growing number of interventions that target young people and the risks they represent (Kelly 2006).

In this context, while attention to research questions concerning time and space has vacillated in the social sciences in general, youth researchers have maintained a consistent interest in the temporal and spatial dimensions of youth and how they link to broader public anxieties. In this chapter, we review these interests and introduce the questions that youth researchers today find most pressing. In the first part, after briefly discussing the meaning of time and space in sociological analysis, we consider the changing times and spaces that shape youth studies. Then we analytically separate youth studies research on time and space, discussing both before turning to the way that time and space are in fact interwoven. We finish the chapter by suggesting that the study of temporal-spatial elements of youth will acquire even greater significance in coming years.

Time, Space, and Sociological Analysis

Is time really a topic of sociological importance? Do we need time to produce convincing analysis of social life? Since the work of one of the founders of sociology Emile Durkheim (1912/2001), sociology has given affirmative answers to both of these questions. Sociologists have shown firstly that time in human lives is not an objective natural fact but a social (as well as religious and political) institution; secondly that consciousness of time has changed in different periods according to specific forms of social organization; and thirdly that, because of these characteristics, thinking about time highlights connections between individual and social processes, biographies and history, culture, and structure (Adam 1990; Elias 1992; Nowotny 1994; Zerubavel 1981). Because individual and social life is constructed within and around time, examining the latter also sheds light on the former.

The social characteristics of space are equivalent to those of time. Like time, space can be shaped by oppressive institutional forces (Hubbard and Kitchin 2011), or it can be a tool for forging active and creative ways of relating to the world (Lefebvre 1991). As Massey (2005) effectively underlined, space possesses important dynamic and relational characteristics, meaning that it is misleading to view it as a fixed, static dimension. On the contrary, space – all space – is potentially indeterminate and open to change. It is shaped by relations and is capable of shaping them in turn. Thanks to the connection between space and intersubjective interaction, space and time are intertwined. By generating cultural forms, the relations that space fosters are indeed capable of creating particular experiences and institutions of time. Spaces are steeped in time, while time, for its part, constantly bears the mark of the spatial trajectories (today both in “cyberspaces” and the “offline” world) that intermingle in everyday life.

Considering space in relation to youth studies in particular, it is important to remember, in line with the analytical perspective pioneered by De Certeau (1984), that in everyday life, space (and specifically urban space) can become the privileged arena for minute but powerful “tactics” of resistance, capable of subverting the meaning assigned to places and their specific functions. In this sense, as De Certeau (1984, p. 117) writes, space can be seen as a practiced place. Yet there is another aspect that should be highlighted when analyzing time and space as lived dimensions (and therefore closely bound up with the bodily sphere): the relationship with politics and the governing processes of social change. Action on space and time indeed proves crucial both for exercising forms of personal autonomy and as the decisive arena for social change. In particular, from the perspective presented in this chapter, the cultures that young people create, thanks to their relations with time and space, appear central.

Changing Times and Spaces

One way sociologists describe contemporary societies is in terms of temporal and spatial relations in comparison to previous eras. An example is the argument that globalization has “shrunk” space by speeding up communication and travel. The sociologist Hartmut Rosa (2013, p. 283) makes this point but argues against understanding the difference between the contemporary social world and previous eras in terms of a simple binary between static and dynamic societies. For Rosa, change is an inherent part of all human social life, but it has particular significance in contemporary societies because the speed of social change is accelerating. Rosa (2013) proposes that this social acceleration is driven by three interrelated factors: the pace of technological development and obsolescence, an exponential growth in production and consumption, and an increased pace of everyday life. The hurried pace of modern life creates a feeling of being unanchored or rushed, as people are forced to adapt to new economic pressures, and compulsions to ever greater levels of consumption. The acceleration of contemporary social life is related to what sociologists have labeled globalization, a growing density of connections and speed of movement of capital, goods, people, and culture across the world.

For young people, new economic and cultural pressures and possibilities are transforming patterns of education, labor market outcomes, and styles of life (Bynner 2005; Leccardi and Ruspini 2006). A change in the experience of youth is not only a phenomenon of the “minority world” of the countries of the “Global North,” such as in countries North America and Europe, but also unfolding in Africa, Asia, and South America (Nilan and Feixa 2006; Tranberg-Hansen et al. 2008). Young people are both experimenting with new ways of living, for example, using new communications technologies to build and maintain disperse networks, and having new ways of life imposed upon them, for example, as higher education becomes increasingly necessary while also less sufficient for employment security (Brown et al. 2011).

This growing complexity characterizing young lives, such as greater uncertainty in transitions through education and into employment, raises new questions about the way time and place impact young lives. Some argue, for example, that new uncertainties linked to the acceleration of social change, such as the rise and fall of new industries, have made it difficult to plan for all but the near term (Leccardi 2012). In parallel, the push toward the ideal of simultaneity, based on a combination of speed and efficiency, is filtering through from the business world to the entire social universe.

These new temporalities foster a “culture of immediacy,” a new “art of life” that affects both old and new generations alike but that affect young people in particular. As Bauman puts it, new values and even a reversal of values lie behind this “art of life.” While once it was unproductive uses of time, contrary to the “Protestant work ethic” that were considered wasteful, today actions are as likely to be considered wasteful or even “sinful” when the opportunity for new experiences or consumptions is forsaken (Bauman 2008, p. 44). Adults can misinterpret this as evidence that young people do not care about their future and are hedonistically pursuing pleasure in the present.

Time in Youth Studies

These broader changes set the context in which youth researchers try to understand the relevance and significance of space and time for young lives. In this section, we introduce the ways that youth researchers are attempting to understand time and temporal processes. Across the diversity of questions and approaches, three major areas of research can be used to characterize time-related research in the field of youth studies, and we cover each below. The first is studies of youth transitions.

Transitions

Youth is defined by many as a change or transition , from the biological or psychological standpoint a period of physical and mental development to adulthood and from a sociological standpoint from childhood to adult roles. This includes the transition from education to employment, from dependence to independence, and from family of origin to family of procreation. For sociologists, “transitions” refer to trajectories, not through space but through education and employment, housing, and relationships. As such, researchers in this field will be interested in the outcomes and speed of transition of young people of different class backgrounds, ethnicities, or genders through education and into the workforce or from the family home to setting up a household with an intimate partner (Cieslik and Pollock 2002).

In the context of the social changes introduced above, as more young people move into further education, mix work and study, and start a family and move out of the family home at a later age, some researchers have suggested adding what amounts to a new stage to the life course. Some, such as proponents of “emerging adulthood” (Arnett 2004), are relatively positive about this new stage, believing that on balance social change is providing new opportunities for young people to take their time to experiment with a greater number of career and lifestyle options. This seemingly allows young people to develop a better sense of themselves and adopt lifestyles in line with their values. The emerging adulthood approach makes two related temporal claims. As well as claiming that the timing of the life course is changing, it also presents an argument that young adults in their twenties are now using their time in a way once associated with “adolescence.” In this approach, social change is seen as adding the additional stage of a psychological “moratorium” in which exploration is possible and in which young people are “allowed to move into adult responsibilities gradually, at their own pace” (Arnett 2004, p. 7).

Others are far less optimistic about these changes, seeing instead an “arrested adulthood” (Côté 2000). For Côté, while nominally there may be a greater array of lifestyle possibilities available, the social infrastructure that facilitates a successful adult identity, such as quality education, a clear transition pathway to secure employment and affordable housing, is being dismantled (Cote and Allahar 1996; Côté 2000). While these perspectives differ in whether they conceptualize young people as primarily grasping a new opportunity to experiment or being stuck in a socially imposed liminal phase for longer periods, the core temporal claim is similar, that the transition to adulthood has been extended.

Others have argued instead that it is less the case that transitions in general have been delayed than that there is more complexity and variability in these transitions. These scholars argue that young people are increasingly mixing statuses that are traditionally associated with youth or adulthood at the same time. For example, many young people in employment remain living with their parents, while others are living with an intimate partner while still students. Contemporary social conditions do not so much extend transitions as lead to a greater number of young people finding themselves only temporally occupying an adult status or recognized as adult in some spheres of their lives and not others (Blatterer 2007). So, for example, a full-time job is less likely to be ongoing, and the chances of unemployment followed by a return to study and possible return to the parental home have become more likely in many parts of the world. These transitions have been conceptualized as reversible, “yo-yo” transitions and nonlinear transitions (Biggart and Walthers 2006; du Bois-Reymond and te Poel 2006; te Riele 2004). Others scholars have taken this argument a step further, suggesting it is not primarily that the nature of transition has changed but that the meaning of youth and adulthood is changing. So rather than an extended youth of change and experimentation leading to stable adult identity, “new youth” (Leccardi and Ruspini 2006) involves incremental steps into a “new adulthood” itself defined by precariousness and relative instability (Wyn and Woodman 2006).

Youth Cultures

The branch of youth sociology that investigates youth culture also focuses on temporal questions. An ongoing and unresolved dispute in research about youth cultural formations concerns their continuity over time and how this relates to a grouping’s cultural and political significance (Bennett 1999; Hall and Jefferson 1976; Hebdige 1979; Muggleton 2000; Shildrick and MacDonald 2006). Some scholars argue that youth cultural groupings, such as punks or metalheads, are relatively solid collectives formed around long-standing social divisions, particularly class positions. From this perspective, some groups can be seen as representing a new generation of working-class young people responding to their placement in the social structure by adopting confrontational styles, a subculture within larger class cultures (Blackman 2005; Clarke et al. 1976; Shildrick and MacDonald 2006).

Others argue that even if this was the case to some extent for the youth “subcultures” of the previous generation, the social conditions of “acceleration” we discuss above mean that contemporary youth cultures have a more ephemeral existence. From this perspectives, youth cultures, such as those formed around electronic dance music, are increasingly assembled out of young people from a variety of class and ethnic backgrounds and across genders (Muggleton 2000). These “neo-tribes” are also less exclusive and demand less of a long-term commitment. They represent a new temporality, a deeply felt sense of connection with others but only for the time being, what Maffesoli calls (1996, p. 75) a “preoccupation with the collective present.” Even the political content of youth culture may need to be reconceptualized, from ongoing groups resisting the social system to coalitions coming together for momentary experiments with new types of self-realization in everyday life (Melucci 1989).

Orientations and Biographies

Another group of studies focuses specifically on young people’s subjective temporal orientations. Researchers undertaking these studies investigate the way young people think about their biographical futures. Overlapping with the research on transitions and youth cultures discussed above, these scholars ask whether the speed of economic and social change, including changes in timing of transitions and cultural engagements, has shifted the way young people think about the future. Some argue that new uncertainties make planning for the future more important and more common (Brooks and Everett 2008; du Bois-Reymond 1998). Others argue that planning is increasingly difficult and arguably less relevant (Brannen and Nilsen 2002). These researchers argue that conceiving of long-term biographical planning has little utility in an increasingly contingent social world, where the speed of change makes the future and past less relevant reference points for planning action. The relative predictability of the life course allowed the “modern” subject, through to the later parts of the twentieth century, to be a planner of the biography. The moderns saw the future as open, but predictable, and this allowed a sense of the future as governable and moldable, both personally and collectively through social movements. Contemporary young people live in a different world. Today the subjectivity that is valued is one of “entrepreneurial” adjustment to an ever-changing horizon of opportunities and dangers (Kelly 2006). A way to reconcile conflicting views on planning has been proposed that demonstrates a situation is emerging where planning is arguably becoming more important but concurrently for many people impossible (Leccardi 2012).

Finally, some researchers have tried to understand young people’s temporal orientations and how they are changing from a biographical perspective, investigating the interaction of different spheres of a young person’s life over time and how these are narrated by young people (Henderson et al. 2007). Taking this approach means treating a young person’s life holistically, recognizing that engagement in an area of life, such as caring for a sick relative or otherwise nurturing an intimate relationship, will demand an investment of time and energy that is likely to put pressure on the time and energy that is available to invest in other biographical fields at play in a young person’s particular social location (Henderson et al. 2007, p. 13). This allows researchers to nuance their accounts, showing how young people may actively defer thinking about some elements of their future but not others, be it deferring decision making in some spheres, such as housing, to pursue concrete decisions they have made for the future in other spheres of their lives such as education (Woodman 2011).

Space in Youth Studies

As with questions with a temporal dimension, interest in the way young people occupy spaces has been of ongoing interest to youth researchers. In particular, there is a long history within the youth culture research tradition of explorations of the way particular youth groups are attached to particular places, focusing on youth “gangs” (Cohen 1956; Foote-Whyte 1943; Thresher 1927). In this section, we look at recent work on young people’s use of space, the way that this space becomes meaningful to people as a “place” and finally in the way that contemporary researchers are focusing less on particular places than on “mobility,” foregrounding the connections and movements between places.

While youth research has long taken an interest in young people using space, recent youth research is becoming better at explicitly theorizing the complexity of social space and its meaning (Valentine et al. 1998, p. 6). Many contemporary youth researchers, particularly from human geography, have argued for understanding space and its significance for young lives as a creation of social interaction. The geographer Doreen Massey argues for thinking about social spaces as network of interrelations, from the global to the intimately tiny, in which any culture will have a particular location (Massey 2005, p. 9). Young people’s lives are often understood as lived within a nested set of scales starting from the smallest scale of the individual body, followed by home, town or “community,” region, nation, and the globe. Yet, the “largest scale,” the globe, is not necessary the most important spatial scale in shaping a young person’s life.

The scale s that are significant for understanding youth will differ in different contexts (Hopkins 2010; Massey 2005). For example, being from a particular neighborhood or particular city, a New Yorker or a Porteño from Buenos Aires may be more significant for some young people, while for others, it will be being an American or Argentinian. Young people’s identities are often embedded within and across these multiple places, with some identities more important at particular times, and may even include connections to places where they have never lived. This understanding of social space as relational does not abandon the concept of scale completely but provides a messier and more complex understanding of space than the metaphor of a set of nested containers mentioned above. For example, when elements from different cultures are mixed together in particular places, the meaning of these elements changes, so that in each place, the mix between local elements and “global elements,” such as “hip-hop” culture, will be different (Niang 2006; Nilan and Feixa 2006).

Place

If social space is conceptualized as the outcome of interacting social relations, power becomes an important element in any analysis of place in young people’s lives. One of the major topics investigated by youth researchers is the way individuals and groups work to create and maintain territory under their control. Young people’s activities in making their own territories are often looked upon negatively by broader society and sometimes academics. If young people who use the street for their leisure are part of a collective doing so, they are often labeled, and sometimes self-identify, as a gang (Blackman 2005). Youth researchers have also been at the forefront of challenging these representations (see, e.g., the section on “Place” in this handbook).

Particularly from the 1970s, one of the most influential strands of youth research within the sociological tradition has focused on reconceptualizing the same behaviors that others saw as juvenile delinquency and gang behavior (Blackman 2005; Clarke et al. 1976; Cohen 1972). This analysis of youth groups as a “subculture” within wider culture has both challenged this negative portrayal of young people while trying to understand why young people come to represent such a threat. Winning of cultural and physical space, particularly in an environment that is breaking down other opportunities to maintain a sense of community, can be seen not as evidence of delinquency but legitimate political resistance to inequality (Clarke et al. 1976). Since this time many researchers have highlighted the creative practices that young people deploy in their everyday lives and as citizens to negotiate structural constraints and create spaces of their own (Isin and Wood 1999; Miles 2000, p. 60; Silverstone 2006). Efforts to create “territories” have multiple possible motivations, and these are not necessarily exclusive, with oppression, resistance, and creativity potentially coexisting in one place (Massey 1997; Shildrick et al. 2010, p. 4). It is through these efforts that meanings are embedded in space, turning it into places that are unique and that have significance to people (Agnew 1989).

Recognizing the complex and multiple ways that space is used and contested allows researchers to challenge simplistic “moral panics” that overexaggerate the dangers of young people’s use of space and demonize their actions (Cohen 1972). Through surveillance, policing, and increasingly urban design, such as anti-skateboard technology built into pavements and other structures that would otherwise appeal as a site for skateboard tricks, public space is often made into adult space (White 1996). Young people are often drawn to particular public space that seems less inviting, a bus shelter, for example, not only because other public spaces are “adult” spaces and hence there is nowhere else to go but also because it is unsupervised, open, and affordable (Hall et al. 1999). Not all youth are equally suspect in public space or equally subject to surveillance. In New York City, for example, young men from black or Hispanic backgrounds are much more likely to report interactions with the police (Fine et al. 2003).

At the same time, it is important not to overly romanticize young people’s use of space (Hall et al. 1999, p. 507). Young people themselves worry about the impact of their own actions and the behaviors of other young people. The spaces where young people congregate can be dangerous to some young people, and youth cultural forms can be exclusionary and oppressive (McRobbie 1991; Thornton 1996). While some have argued for seeing public space as an escape and respite from parental interference, for some young people, the private space of the bedroom can offer some respite from both parents and exclusionary public spaces (Lincoln 2004). Some researchers have argued that the more celebratory affirmations of youth “subcultures” as resistance have tended to be gender blind, failing to recognize the different social practices of young women and the gender inequalities that were being recreated within youth subcultures (McRobbie 1991).

Mobility and Hybridity

Contemporary conditions have been characterized by many researchers as defined by global flows, global networks, and mobilities driven by changing landscapes of opportunity and risk (Ong 1999; Rizvi 2012; Bauman 2008; Helve and Evans 2013). Research on youth subcultures in the 1970s and 1980s did to some extent recognize “hybrid” youth cultures, conceptualizing youth cultures such as punk as stylistic “bricolage” combining elements of style with origins in different parts of the world such as Jamaica, Africa, and Britain. This research however tended to focus on hybrid culture in one place. Recent work on space and place in young lives has shifted from a focus on young people in place to their movements, and the flows of youth cultures, across space. This new research recognizes the way people can maintain connections to multiple cultures and places concurrently (Vertovec 2009; Rizvi 2012).

Mobility has increased for people across different social positions. At one extreme are refugee young people seeking asylum from persecution or fleeing war or starvation (Hopkins 2010). At the other are young people from privileged backgrounds traveling for study at prestigious institutions or undertaking work experience elsewhere in the world while taking a “gap” between periods of study (Ansell 2008; Simpson 2005). The “gap year” has been growing in popularity among the affluent in developed countries and has spawned an entire industry of travel companies specializing in organizing and supporting this type of mobility. A gap year enables the building of cultural capital for a globalizing world – either from visiting or working in other minority (“developed”) world contexts or as a marker of a “global perspective” and an ability to navigate risk through visiting a part of the majority world understood as more risky than the home country, such as parts of Africa or South America (Ansell 2008).

Politics and Space

As we discussed in the last section, some scholars of youth social movements argue that these movements are characterized by a new temporality (Melucci 1989). Similar arguments have been put forward about how social movements featuring young people are using space. Castells argues that new uses of space can emerge from the mixing of older forms of territorial struggles with new experimental forms of politics. In particular, he believes that the use of cyberspace for activism, drawing on digital communication technologies, is connecting people and ideas in new ways (Castells 2012). Some scholars see great potential in new mobilities of ideas and people. Rizvi, for example, sees the potential for the flows of people and ideas to set young people “free from structures” (2012, p. 194). Others are far more ambivalent. Nilan and Feixa (2006), for example, point to new possibilities to assemble diverse identities and to create nomadic youth movements across the globe, yet also point to continuing and seemingly deepening inequalities. In a similar vein, the sociologists Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (2009) recognize the potential for greater exposure to the way other people live to raise expectations such that a greater number will challenge any claim that global inequality is simply fate, yet argue that it is not so much freedom as “insecurity” that is the primary youth experience that is transcending borders. For example, the experiences of insecure work and life without a welfare safety net are increasingly the experience of young people in the Global North as well as the South (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2009, p. 33). These authors argue that the world facing this youth generation is one of almost compulsory contact across borders that are increasingly less efficient as boundaries in the face of global capital and flows of people and ideas. The political outcomes of these mobilities could be new struggles for freedom, such as the rise of a global “precariat” movement but also the rise of new reactionary movements defending and reimaging exclusionary borders and divisions. In the current world, both types of movements are likely to use social media.

Conclusion and Future Directions

The previous sections have discussed the state of thinking about time and space, respectively, in youth studies. The most pressing challenge, however, is to conceptualize time and space together in the analysis of youth experience. It has been variously argued that academic thought has a tendency to privileged time or space over the other, particularly by representing one as the other. Time is often represented spatially, as a straight line with points of at which events occurs, at varying distance from each other (Grosz 1995, p. 95). Alternatively, space can be turned into and deprioritized relative to time (Soja 1989). One way through which this occurs is to conceptualize space primarily on the basis of how fast it can be bridged. Another is the way differences between contemporaneous places have been represented as different “times,” sometimes for political ends, such as the understanding that some cultures, communities, or nations are ahead or behind in their development. The human geographer Doreen Massey argues, and many social researchers agree, that the best conceptualizations of space and time are to treat them relationally and, instead of reducing one to the other, to investigate how they are co-constituted in social practices (Massey 2005, p. 29).

Space is created through social practices, practices that necessarily unfold over time. Massey uses the concept of “spatialization” to denote an activity or practice rather than “space” as a dimension and argues that space is the bringing together of multiple “trajectories” or “narratives” (Massey 2005, pp. 23–24). Creating shared territories is also about creating particular experiences of time (Adam 2004). Time and space are intertwined in concerns about young people. So, for example, social anxiety about the adults young people will become is entwined with concern about young people’s use of public space. It is often not the particular actions of young people in public space that is the cause of consternation among adults, Instead, it is a lack of action that is condemned, that they are simply hanging out in public space, loitering. This lack of productive activity is not only something that may be filled by dangerous activity but a marker of a risk to the future transition to productive adulthood that requires continual investment (Hall et al. 1999). The most pressing challenges for contemporary youth studies as it continues to grapple with the place of time and space in young lives will include continuing to develop empirical projects and conceptual frameworks that address time and space concurrently.

Another challenge is understanding inequality. In the emerging global network of new types of places and new experiences of time, the working of inequality is particularly complex and will take the efforts of many youth researchers to unravel. One recent illustration of this complexity is research that highlights the way that young people in the emerging middle class can find themselves serving the working class of the Global North. For example, educated young Indonesians with high cultural capital, and seen by potential employees as embodying “Western” dispositions, are staffing the cruise-ship industry catering to working-class Australians on holidays (Artini et al. 2011).

Another factor making the spaces of young lives increasingly complex is the rise of digital technology and with it the rise of new “cyberspaces” (Boyd 2008; Buckingham 2008). Understanding the way young people use these technologies, how virtual and non-virtual space intersects, and the role of this new type of space in the web of spaces within which young people are embedded represents one of the most pressing contemporary questions for understanding contemporary youth. The rise of digital technology has not only allowed new connections between places and social systems that were previously cut off from each other but also allows new types of communications between significant others, such as family and friends. Studies have taken up the challenge of understanding spaces of youth culture in the digital age, but this work is just beginning (Buckingham 2008; Lasén 2006). Young people can use social networking sites and mobile phones to say in contact with friends who move away.These technologies also Facilitate new types of interaction for young people, including those with a disability or who are same sex attracted, whose potential uses of public space were previously highly curtailed (boyd 2008).

The rise of new digital technologies is also changing the time and space of young people’s political action. Young people have been at the center of the social movements shaking Western Asia and North Africa. As well as inspired by calls for democracy, these movements are in part driven by the failure of governments to reward young people who invested in higher education with the job opportunities promised (Castells 2012, p. 66). Uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, for example, have been fostered by a highly educated but underemployed cohort of young people demanding new employment and lifestyle opportunities.

For Castells (2012), famous for his theory of a global “network society,” these social movements are networked, but in multiple ways. They are not simply built on Twitter and Facebook. These movements use both online and offline communications, in the wake of an emotional trigger such as the immolation of the young street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi in Tunisia, to coalesce disparate groups into a movement. One of the major forms of offline communication, like movements in the past, is the occupation of physical urban space such as Tahrir Square in Egypt. Flipping the direction in which such flows of youth cultures are often assumed to take, the social movements that arose in parts of the Global North in recent years, such as Occupy, were inspired by youth movements in other parts of the world including Western Asia (Castells 2012, p. 66).

The entire alternate globalization movement cannot be left out when discussing the relationship between politics, space, and time (Pleyers 2010). The practices of this movement are based on challenging dominant conceptions of space and time , starting from the hegemony of the abstract, monetized space/time that currently structures global economic interaction and much national and international politics . This challenge takes the form of protests against global capitalism and the increase of social inequalities it causes, focusing on creating democratic forms of global political community with a different territoriality and temporality. Cosmopolitanism is one aspect of this critique of the dominant conception of time (Cwerner 2000), opening up new temporal forms capable of connecting up to the past through the collective memory and to the future through radically democratic participation beyond the nation-state framework.

The activists of the alter-globalization movement assert the here-and-now possibility of living in a different space-time and “defend the autonomy of their lived experience” (Pleyers 2010, p. 39) by constructing spaces-times separated from the domain of market calculation. In this way, a social center, an occupied space, or an international gathering of the movement can not only become liberated spaces-times but also manifestations of “creative experimentation” (Pleyers 2010, p. 38). In other words, in collective cultural and political action as well as their own lives, despite being faced with accelerating social processes that generate new and deep-seated inequalities most young people appear capable of constructing times-spaces within which to practice forms of social and cultural engagement and to experiment with new forms of politics.

A concept increasingly deployed in youth studies, in the context of understanding the changing times and spaces of young lives including globalization and digital revolutions, is “generations” (Leccardi 2012; Wyn and Woodman 2006). The lives of young Europeans or Australians working in insecure employment in the retail service industry while they study will be very different from the lives of young Indonesians working in the cruise industry and from young women from the Philippines traveling to the Global North or affluent parts of Asia to work as maids. Yet, all are living lives shaped by new global insecurities and lives radically different to their parents. Understanding these similarities, differences, and inequalities is the challenge facing a globally oriented youth studies attuned to questions of time and space.

The chapters in this section provide an introduction to the current state of thinking in youth studies concerning time and space, taking up in greater detail and with greater nuance many of the topics discussed in this chapter. Peter Hopkins introduces the way that youth researchers in human geography think about space and place. Discussing how best to conceptualize the relations that create these spaces, he introduces the concept of scale and debates about the best way to conceptualize this term, showing the multiple approaches to the concepts of scale and border that are currently in use.

Amparo Lasen in her chapter introduces the way that time and space can be considered as actions, created in social practices, not preexisting categories. Using research on young people’s use of digital technologies, she shows how human interactions, drawing on material and immaterial cultures and technologies, create particular social spaces and social rhythms. In their chapter, Rachel Thomson and Janet Holland highlight that time does not flow in a linear and regular manner. The experience of time, as of place, is punctuated by “events,” and this needs to be properly theorized. “Events” can only be understood in broader context of social structure and the life course.

In the final chapter in this section, Carles Feixa and Tanja Strecker introduce the concept of “chronotope” as a theoretical approach to studying time and space. Chronotope, a term taken from the literary scholar Bakhtin and widely used in philosophy and literary studies, provides a heuristic for understanding global youth cultures and for reading broader society through the narratives young people tell about their lives. Feixa and Strecker propose this term as a way to work through the challenges of thinking time and space together, and this final chapter closes out the section by showing the value of a concurrent approach to time and space for a satisfactory account of contemporary young lives.

Cross-References