Panel: "Generational Passages and Impasses"

The figure of the young subject plays a key role in how we imagine the future and negotiate ideas about political and social progress. In historical and contemporary works of art, literature and film, as well as political discourse, children and adolescents function as rhetorical constructions of innocence and futurity, and are figured as sites to work through social, ecological and biopolitical issues. Meanwhile, as young activists such as Greta Thunberg and Autumn Peltier have argued, today’s youth have inherited massive challenges from previous generations and suffer – both materially and psychologically – in the face of an increasingly bleak future.

In this seminar, we will explore the imaginary horizons, affective structures and complex futurities that mark generational transitions. We are interested in how temporalities and affects associated with youth are negotiated in a variety of cultural productions – from the Bildungsroman to contemporary television series – and in how these give voice to youth in ways that dissent from common expectations about their coming-of-age. How can we think critically about the passages and impasses between generations at a moment in which the present is untenable and the future inaccessible?