Future-Making in an Uncertain World: The Presence of an Open Future in Danish Young Women’s Lives

Abstract

Reporting from a three-year longitudinal study following 16 young women through their upper secondary schooling, this article explores the lived experiences of future-making. By unpacking the striking finding in our material that for these young women, future-making consists in an ongoing labour to keep the future open, we complement studies showing how ideals of success in education affect young women’s everyday life. Our analysis reveals that although this mode of future-making induces anxieties and cruel labours, young women also navigate and negotiate their uncertain conditions. We show how they manage to (partly) escape extreme performance demands and how they connect to collective futures, thus challenging the individuality of neoliberal subjectivity. We contribute to a sociology of the future by demonstrating an approach to studying the future that zooms in on the practices and affective experiences, through which futures exert agency and organise the everyday lived present.

Keywords

aspiration cruel optimism education future-making hope neoliberal subjectivity

Introduction

It doesn’t really make sense in one way or the other. It’s like I’m fighting towards nothing. (Amira, upper secondary school student)

Amira is a student in an upper secondary school, located in one of the suburbs surrounding Copenhagen. We interviewed Amira six times over a three-year period as part of a longitudinal study of how young women develop aspirations. During one interview, Amira describes an ambivalence, indeed, in her words a ‘contradiction’. On the one hand, she conveys her ambitious goal of not ‘slacking’ and thus achieving the high grades required for certain higher educations. Conversely, however, she also voices a desire not to choose or commit to any specific aspirational future, instead emphasising the importance of ‘expanding her horizon’ and not being ‘locked’ into a particular path. Confronted with the inherent contradiction in her statements, she utters the words quoted above. When engaging with her future, Amira finds ‘nothing’, or rather the absence of something, to fight for or aspire to. This encounter elicits in her an eerie sense that something does not ‘really make sense’. The eeriness lies in the seeming agency of an absence: there is a ‘nothing’ that Amira is nonetheless struggling to reach. She goes on to explain that she has no idea what lies at the end of her struggle, saying, ‘I don’t know, what I expect.’ Yet the struggle is indisputable: ‘It just seems as if that’s what’s right’, she declares.

Amira’s reflections were hardly unique. Throughout the 82 interviews of our study, the 16 young Danish women we followed through their three years of upper secondary schooling recurrently described their careful and consistent efforts to keep their futures open and indeterminate. In this article, we take Amira’s eerie encounter with the agency of an empty future as our epistemological access point for studying how the future is present in young women’s lives. In unpacking our empirical material, we found that although uncertain futures complicate young women’s present, their future-making revolves around sustaining contingency and indeterminacy, rather than reducing uncertainty.

We situate the study in discussions about how ideals of success in education and work life affect young women’s everyday lives and experiences of future-making (Allen, 2014; McRobbie, 2015; Mendick et al., 2015; Ringrose, 2007; Skeggs, 2005; Walkerdine, 2003). A rich stream of sociological work has explored how young women, in particular, have become positioned as neoliberal subjects par excellence, expected and expecting themselves to build ‘successful’ futures by flexibly and resiliently overcoming structural constraints (Allen, 2016; Gill and Scharff, 2011; Ringrose and Walkerdine, 2008; Scharff, 2016). With ‘good lives’ awaiting hard-working and self-responsible individuals, future-making for young women has been shown to be ridden with demands, contradictions and affective tensions as neoliberal promises do not converge with contemporary conditions of diminished possibilities and prospects for the future (Sellar and Zipin, 2019; Thomson and Østergaard, 2020; Vaadal and Ravn, 2021).

This article extends such studies by focusing on the role of the future in Danish young women’s everyday lives, and particularly, by analysing the figure of an open future we identified in our empirical material. We investigate how the desire to sustain open futures both conflates and conflicts with neoliberal pressures inherent in performing aspirational normativity. We supplement existing studies emphasising how future uncertainty induces anxiety and becomes a demanding imperative of perpetual performance. However, we also further complicate such accounts, showing how young women negotiate and utilise uncertainty to create small spaces free from extreme performance demands, and how broader, indeed, planetary uncertainties entangle and make future-making an ethical and political practice.

As such, we also contribute to a sociology of the future by developing and demonstrating an analytical approach to future-making that attends to the future’s presence and agency. The future is increasingly impacting how the (western) world is organised, governed and experienced (e.g. Andersen and Pors, 2016; Anderson, 2010; Coleman, 2012; Esposito, 2018). Yet, it remains a challenging object of study because of its ever-intangible, elusive and fictional nature (Coleman, 2017; Lyon and Carabelli, 2016; Ravn, 2021). We offer an approach to studying the future by zooming in on the practices and affective experiences through which futures exert agency and organise the everyday lived present.

Future-Making and Aspirations

A rich body of literature on how young people shape their futures has focused on aspirations, arguing that they are formed in intersections of social structures such as family and class (Archer et al., 2012b; Ball et al., 2002), gender (Archer et al., 2012a, 2013; Vaadal and Ravn, 2021) and nationality and ethnicity (Archer and Francis, 2006; Devadason, 2008). Driven by questions of how dominant discourses (Mendick et al., 2015), spheres of influence (Archer et al., 2014) and formational logics (Zipin et al., 2015) condition aspirations towards particular educations and occupations, this work has been hugely important in challenging a conception of aspirations as individual cognitions, seeking instead to firmly embed such formations ‘in the thick of social life’ (Appadurai, 2004: 67). Yet, in concentrating on why and how particular aspirations crystallise, such studies disregard practices of relating to open and indeterminate futures. Unpacking our empirical findings, we extend this literature by investigating what it means to perform aspirations when their crystallisation is constantly deferred.

Another stream of work exploring young people’s future-making has identified the neoliberal pressures produced and disseminated by education policies (Sellar, 2013; Sellar and Gale, 2011), corporate discourses (Carr and Kelan, 2021) and popular culture (Mendick et al., 2015). Such studies have demonstrated how young people are encouraged to think about themselves as human capital and to become entrepreneurial in their pursuit of upward mobility, self-improvement and constant quest for possibility (Walkerdine, 2003). Several studies have emphasised that neoliberal discourses are gendered, showing how young women in particular have become positioned as neoliberal subjects (Gill and Scharff, 2011; Ringrose and Walkerdine, 2008; Scharff, 2016). Addressed as agentic, individualised and entrepreneurial, young women have been cast as objects of high expectations and called upon to excel in education and career-making as well as in constant self-improvement as part of their future-making (Allen, 2016; Gill and Scharff, 2011; McRobbie, 2007, 2015; Vaadal and Ravn, 2021).

Owing much to Berlant’s (2011) work, scholars have also drawn attention to the ‘cruelty’ of such neoliberal narratives and their promises of ‘the good life’. Berlant’s (2011: 24) concept of ‘cruel optimism’ describes a situation wherein the very attachment to such promises diminishes life in the present, yet its loss is difficult to endure, because it ‘provides something of the continuity of the subject’s sense of what it means to keep on living on and to look forward to being in the world’. Taking inspiration from Berlant, scholars have criticised neoliberal promises for assigning responsibility to individuals, who are led to believe that success (or failure) depends solely on talent, willpower and hard work (Ravn and Churchill, 2019; Raynor, 2021; Sellar and Gale, 2011). In highlighting individual heroics in the face of hardship, neoliberal policies and discourses elide structural conditions and disparities, thus shaping future-making into a cruel individual project entailing multiform affective labours performed to sustain such optimistic attachments (Mendick et al., 2015; Raynor, 2021; Thomson and Østergaard, 2020; Zipin et al., 2015).

Extending such rich work, we zoom in on young women’s future-making. Like the aforementioned studies, ours shows how young women internalise individual responsibility for future success. However, by exploring practices of relating to uncertain futures (Allen, 2016; Brannen and Nilsen, 2002), we also bring attention to how young women navigate and circumvent the cruelty inherent in future-making in the context of neoliberal narratives. Adding to the existing literature, our study appreciates the complex relationships between cruel optimism and hope that may characterise contemporary experiences of future-making. Moreover, by attending to how not only individual but also collective and, indeed, planetary futures are present in the informants’ lives, we draw attention to how individual and collective futures become entangled and render future-making an ethical and political practice.

The Labour of Future-Making

To make the future’s presence an explicit object of analysis, and to understand how informants relate to an indeterminate future, we draw on theorisations of hope (Anderson, 2006; Coleman, 2017; Muñoz, 2009). As Coleman (2017: 533–534) argues, to hope is exactly a practice of relating to something that cannot be known in advance.

First, we draw on work emphasising hope as a labour. This literature addresses not the content of hope but how it takes place and what it does (Anderson, 2006). As Pettit (2021) argues, hope should be studied as a series of practices undertaken in the present to sustain a sense of faith in the future (see also Raynor, 2021). Conceiving of hope as labour enables us to examine the narratives, knowledge, affects and techniques that go into future-making in the face of uncertainty. This focus will also help us study future-making without conceiving of the future as a far-off horizon, but instead as something that holds agency in the present. As a practice characterised by anticipation and potentiality (Muñoz, 2009), hope confuses linear temporality, making the future not only a far-off temporality distinct from the present but something experienced and felt in the present (Coleman, 2012, 2017).

As Anderson (2006) emphasises, hope has a complex affective structure and is neither simply cruel nor unequivocally positive. As he puts it, hope’s ‘taking-place, its mode of operation, remains an aporia’ (2006: 733). Arising from a desire for something else and bound to the ever-deferring not-yet of the future, hope embodies a simultaneity of potentiality and uncertainty. Citing Bloch (1998: 341), Anderson suggests that a hopeful body inevitably holds ‘the condition of defeat precariously within itself’. With this, we can explore how future-making also concerns sustaining hope through practices saturated with contradictory affects such as enhancement/diminishment, excitement/disappointment, freedom/enclosure, energising optimism/paralysing anxiety.

Finally, we draw on Derridean notions of hope and the future to come (Derrida, 1994). For Derrida, the future to come differs from a future horizon because it breaks with any planning, anticipation or expectation of the future. The future to come is that which is always beyond existing horizons, the Other whose arrival one cannot expect or predict. This future constitutes what Derrida (1994: 64–65) calls a messianic hope for its arrival – a hope for which one must leave an ‘empty place’. To hope is thus to leave a space empty for an arrival that ‘cannot be awaited as such, or recognized in advance’ (Derrida, 1994: 65, emphasis in original). This experience of hoping is thus a form of hesitation (Derrida, 1994: 169). Yet, it is not a pacifying but an active stance, vibrating to sustain the empty place. For Derrida (1994: 169), this hesitation is what allows decisions, responsibility and ethical questions to come to the fore. As such, Derrida portrays hope as a responsible and ethical practice of sustaining an anticipation of precisely that which cannot be anticipated.

These ideas allow us to explore and discuss the informants’ mode of relating to the future. Scrutinising how their future-making pivots on keeping the future open, we consider the hard labour and anxieties this labour elicits, but also how it draws the informants into responsible and ethical deliberations. Hence, with this conceptual framing of hope, we can extend the literature on the cruelty of neoliberal narratives with a discussion of how young people relate to the future in manners saturated with questions of ethics and responsibility.

Methodology

The article presents qualitative data from a three-year longitudinal study (2019–2022). The study formed part of a larger research project examining the gendered formations of educational interests and aspirations, focusing particularly on science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) subjects. The longitudinal study on which this article is based consists of interviews with 16 young women during their three years of upper secondary schooling. The interviews, 82 in all, were conducted biannually, with one round conducted as focus group interviews with three–five participants in each. We held five of the six rounds at the schools and one round (spring 2020) remotely as video interviews due to the COVID-19 lockdown. The interview length varied between 30 and 45 minutes for the individual interviews and between 90 and 105 minutes for group interviews. All interviews were recorded and transcribed. Participants’ informed consent was obtained during the recruitment process and renewed before every interview round. Names and other identifying characteristics have been changed to ensure anonymity. The study was approved by an ethics committee and complies with the Danish Code of Conduct for Research Integrity.

Upper secondary schooling was chosen as it constitutes a social context where the importance and influence of the future are concentrated, made explicit and lived (Reay, 2005: 914). We recruited the participants in collaboration with four schools located in Greater Copenhagen and the Zealand region, that is, in urban, suburban and more rural areas of Denmark. The schools were selected to represent an average sample of the segment, measured by grade-levels and the socio-economic statuses of the geographical areas. Participants either responded to our announcement, in which we looked for female students newly enrolled in study programmes with STEM profiles or were asked to participate by our contacts at the schools, who applied the same criteria. This sampling approach might suggest that the participants were interested in thinking and talking about educational choices or were perceived by the contact persons as well articulated. During our study, we indeed experienced the participants to be reflective and articulate. While this has helped us attain rich and detailed accounts of participants navigating and negotiating their educational choices and future-making, it might also suggest that the participants are particularly reflective students, and, as such, not a representative sample. Also, the fact that the interviews took place in the context of education may have led informants to focus their answers on education and educational performance.

The participants come from a range of ethnic backgrounds and have mostly middle-class upbringings. The majority of their parents hold vocational educations and have professional jobs. For example, some work as teachers or nurses, others in IT or engineering, and others again in real estate or sales (online Appendix I). While the neoliberal discourses discussed above cut across national borders, they are simultaneously situated locally (Anderson, 2016). The Danish context entails a strong and extensive welfare state, which, despite decades of austerity policies, offers a relatively high level of opportunity and safety. Primary, secondary and tertiary education is publicly funded, without admissions fees, and unemployment rates are relatively low.

We chose individual, qualitative interviews as our primary method to explore informants’ subjective experiences of future-making. We approached the interviews with a constructivist epistemology, understanding knowledge as co-created rather than residing within the informants (Järvinen, 2000). The interviews followed a semi-structured interview guide centred on their everyday lives: what subjects and projects they found interesting and motivating and why; the decisions already made and those pending; their ideas and notions of the future; and how they imagined approaching or pursuing the future (online Appendix II). The longitudinal design allowed us to notice patterns developing across interviews and to ask participants to elaborate on themes from previous interview rounds, thereby providing ample possibilities for attaining detailed accounts of the labours of future-making (Andersen et al., 2020; Thomson and McLeod, 2015). To connect the interview situation more closely to the intensities of quotidian experiences, we also experimented with individual photo-elicitation interviews (Round 3) (Harper, 2002; Ravn and Demant, 2017). Moreover, we sought to bring a material and visual element into a study otherwise dominated by language by conducting focus groups organised as collage-making workshops, thus creating a potential for presenting the self in different manners (Round 4) (Butler-Kisber and Poldma, 2010; Mannay, 2010). In the analysis, we do not differentiate between the different forms of interviews as this mixed-methods approach was mainly designed to build rich and nuanced account of participants’ future-making.

To obtain the necessary knowledge and embodied understanding of the participants, both authors conducted interviews in each round. However, the majority of the interviews were conducted by Sharon Kishik, who is a multi-ethnic male in his mid-20s and thus relatively close to the participants in age, which might have created a sense of shared experience and promoted the trust-building necessary for the participants to share their thoughts, concerns and doubts more freely. However, this may also have enhanced a felt expectation to match the interviewer’s presumed social position (Vaadal and Ravn, 2021). Discussions on aspirations can be highly susceptible to social desirability and risk producing the expectation that participants must give ‘successful’ accounts of themselves (Allen, 2016). To counter this tendency, we discussed it explicitly with the participants, reiterating that we were interested in their straightforward and sincere views and thoughts. We also consistently responded to their answers with appreciative statements, carefully seeking to produce a situation where not having a plan, not being normatively ambitious or not being sure about one’s present or future were as acceptable as the opposite.

We both read the transcripts after each interview round and in preparation for the approaching rounds. Over the three-year period, we regularly discussed the material between ourselves and in the larger research group, considering insights and emerging findings as they presented themselves. About midway through the study, as we were mapping themes and patterns in the material during an early, inductive round of coding, the attachment to an open future emerged as one of several themes. In the following rounds, having expected to see aspirations slowly take form, we became increasingly curious about what an open future entailed, deciding to dedicate this article to exploring the theme in detail. In the subsequent rounds of data analysis, in tandem with how we also gradually developed our theoretical repertoires for understanding attachments to open futures, we identified three subthemes: (1) the labours of keeping the future open; (2) how the open future is also used as a resource for protecting the present from performance pressures; and (3) how an open future is entangled to collective conditions. We used this coding to select the excerpts appearing in the following analysis. The excerpts were translated from Danish by the authors.

Analysis

We begin by identifying attachments to open futures, whereafter we investigate the labour needed to sustain them. We then explore how open futures are also utilised as a resource for protecting the present from performance pressure, and, finally, we discuss entanglements with collective futures and how these open possibilities for challenging the individuality of neoliberal subjectivity.

Caring for Open Futures

All interviews in the study included a set of questions concerning the participants’ outlook on their futures and their aspirations after graduating from upper secondary schooling. Although a few mentioned aspirations for particular occupations, most were reluctant to specify any wishes or plans for the future. Instead, they expressed aspirations to ‘have as many options as possible’ (Sia) and to ‘maintain the possibility for – or postpone the choice of – real or final [tertiary] education’ (Luna). Rather than become fixed on particular career trajectories, the informants seemed more attached to possibilities and openness. Ann said:

I think I make choices about them [potential future educations] by making sure not to tie myself to anything, so that I don’t have to become one particular thing. For example, I don’t want to become a nurse, because then I would have to become a nurse. And I think that’s too limited. I want something more open – with lots of possibilities. So, if I feel like changing direction somewhere along the line, I can.

In this excerpt, Ann rejects an attachment to a particular profession, preferring to keep possibilities and the option to change direction open. She sees a given path as limiting, instead valuing the preservation of her future ability to become something unexpected. Future-making thus emerges not as the pursuit of a certain path in order to arrive at a future destination – but as the creation and protection of a space of potentiality. Left open for the potential of ‘changing direction somewhere along the line’, the future thus contains something Ann cannot anticipate, but which she nonetheless awaits.

The young women further described how they make decisions based on concerns for keeping their future possibilities open. They overwhelmingly valued subjects and educational trajectories that afford access to a multitude of tertiary educations. Aida said:

I’m really happy for my choice of this Biotech track, because it can give me access to natural science educations in the future, but it also gives access to things that are not natural science [. . .] That’s why I chose this track, because it doesn’t tie me to one thing or the other.

Layla concurred: ‘I’ve heard that it opens possibilities for everything if you have mathematics on the A level – almost everything! So, yes, I chose that to get – what’s it called? – to get as many opportunities as possible to work with.’ Layla seems excited about A-level mathematics because it could open opportunities. Marie also appears excited about open possibilities:

I like to think that you have all possibilities available. For example, geography gives me the possibility to become almost anything within engineering and health. I can even become a veterinarian. And I didn’t even know that. I haven’t even . . . man. You can really become everything, and I think that’s wild!

Here, Marie shows enthusiasm when thinking about the wide range of options available from choosing geography. When thinking about the surplus of possibilities her choice of subjects has opened for her, she seems overwhelmed by optimism and excitement. As such, she also performs her attachment to an open future in an affective register. However, whereas Layla and Marie invest positive affects in their attachment to an open future, other informants relate open options to their doubts about whether their skill and talents will allow them to pursue certain career tracks. Answering a question about her desires for the future, Amira said:

I’m not very specific. Well, I think it’s difficult to dream, when you don’t have the grades [to support those dreams]. I mean then you don’t know whether you can get in, so if you’ve made your mind up, you’ll be disappointed.

Amira’s attachment to openness is thus related to her concerns and doubts about what futures will be available to her, and so her attachment seems invested with more negative affects. In line with the argument concerning neoliberal pressures, she expects herself to be flexible and resilient in the face of challenge and diminished possibilities (Carr and Kelan, 2021). Whether generating excitement or self-doubt, attachments to open futures were often directly related to questions of identity and how the young women perceive themselves and their own personalities. For instance, Sia said:

I never had a clear vision about where I’m going. Some people are like ‘I’m going to be an engineer, I’ll become an architect, or I want to work in biotech or something else.’ I never had that, you know, this is what I’ll do. Because there are so many things, I find interesting.

This concern for not shutting the door on any possibilities is present throughout the three years of interviews with the young women in all four schools. Future-making emerges as an effort to keep the future open and indeterminate. However, as we will pursue below, this hesitation is anything but passive or undemanding. Rather, it is a restless hesitation (Derrida, 1994: 169), requiring labour if one is to sustain an attachment to the promise of a future always to come.

Future-Making as Hard Work

The informants put a lot of thought and effort into keeping their futures open. One kind of labour is maintaining high grades. Grades are among the access criteria to tertiary education and therefore related to future possibilities. However, for the informants, high grades were less a path to a particular tertiary education than a means of not losing possibilities. As Ann explained: ‘You strive for high grades [. . .] to keep options open. The higher grades you’ve got the more possibilities.’ And Layla added: ‘Well, I’ve always heard that the better grades you’ve got, the more opportunities you have, and I really just want to have as many options as possible.’ With high grades connected to future possibilities, the present becomes a place where expectations regarding one’s own discipline and preparation for classes and exams are high. Layla said:

I have this idea that I need to get the best possible grades [. . .] It’s because I think I’ll do better in the future [. . .] I mean have more possibilities, so I can do whatever I want. I always prepare very carefully for my exams and focus on doing as well as possible, and I do get very disappointed if I don’t live up to my expectations.

Here, the sense of disappointment with a low grade relates to a closure of potential possibilities. To keep options open, nothing (less than the top mark) is ever good enough. Amira said: ‘I need to keep my grades high. I can’t slack now. I really need not to do that because then doors will close.’ Caring about future possibilities makes the present an intense site rife with anxiety, for any present failure is seen as determining the future. What is more, present choices become a precarious affair permeated by a pervasive fear of choosing wrongly. Sia said:

I think, it’s like [. . .] I’m really afraid of making a wrong choice. I mean, to make some kind of decision that I regret later on. I would much rather have as many possibilities as possible, so that when I find out what the right choice is, then I still have the possibility to choose that.

Here, a future to come complicates Sia’s present, as the threat of future regret causes fears in her present. Managing these fears thus becomes a labour of making constant choices that will not foreclose any future possibility. The open future, it seems, binds the present in such ways that every decision potentially jeopardises the informants’ future and its openness.

Thus, consistent labour is organised around an attachment to an open future. Remaining hopeful for the future is a practice in the present ridden with contradictory affects such as optimism, excitement, anxiety and concern (Anderson, 2006). Despite its uncertainty, the future is not a far-off horizon. Rather, the attachment to an open future intensifies the present by making every decision, every test or exam an event that risks compromising the future. As such, one might describe the informants’ future-making as a cruel experience of sustaining an attachment, even though that very attachment engenders a labour detrimental to their flourishing in the present (Berlant, 2011). Our findings can thus be read as reiterating previous studies showing the expectations young women impose on themselves to excel in education and career-making (McRobbie, 2007, 2015; Ringrose, 2007; Walkerdine, 2003). Indeed, it seems the informants have internalised neoliberal responsibilities and the belief that a future ‘good life’ depends only upon individual talent, willpower and hard work (McRobbie, 2015; Sellar and Zipin, 2019). However, their future-making is also entangled with a different manner of relating to uncertainty, a manner to which we now turn.

Carving Out a Breathing Space in the Present

In our interviews, the informants expressed the importance of sometimes keeping aspirations at arm’s length. Marie said:

I just think that it’s one thing what you want to, and another what you’re able to. I mean, I can believe that I’m competent and really like it as well, but that’s not [. . .] I mean, there are many who dream of becoming the next Beyoncé, but not many do.

Such sober negotiations around the optimism of aspirations (here personified by Beyoncé) are, however, not about abandoning futures. Rather, not engaging in discussions about plans and aspirations is a practice of setting the present free. Ann said:

I would rather have fun now and do my stuff and pay attention in school, but then find out when I’m done what kind of average I come out with, and what I can use it for. Instead of my having to work my fingers to the bone for something I might later decide that I after all don’t want to be.

In these excerpts, another kind of relationship between an open future and the present emerges, one where sustaining an open future concerns resisting the lure of optimism. Rather than intensifying the present, this resistance allows the young women to carve out a space in the present where performance is not key. Raynor (2021: 566) aptly describes it as hope for the absence of optimism and the creation of ‘a future-less present as a kind of liberation’. This liberation resonates with Claire, who said: ‘I just don’t feel that you should waste your life.’ Following up, one of us asked: ‘How could you waste your life?’ She replied:

It’s about . . . if you only think about your grades [. . .] Also if you go directly to a [tertiary] education after secondary school. If you have a clear path, then it’s fine of course, and if that’s what you want to do. But I just think I want to go out and experience stuff and feel this freedom and live life before I go back to school.

Most informants expressed the above-described worries about grades and hard work, but this other concern about not wasting the present in the name of an uncertain future also emerged. Under the conditions Berlant (2011) diagnosed, wherein experiences of cruel optimism pervade social spaces, the open future here emerges as a resource for navigating precisely such experiences, where the attachment to something one desires hinders one’s flourishing in the present. This finding extends and nuances the rich studies on neoliberal female subjectivity that emphasise the high expectations young women pose to themselves. The informants’ future-making can indeed meaningfully be described as cruel optimism (Berlant, 2011), however, they also demonstrate a reflexive capacity to observe and navigate this dynamic, as they are concerned with protecting the present from stress and anxiety. The figure of an open future seems not only to have bound their present with hard labour, but also to be a useful resource for undoing neoliberal promises about direct causality between individual hard work in the present and future career success (Allen, 2014; McRobbie, 2007). Reflecting on how some dreams might not be achievable (Amira), how not to let work and pressures overwhelm one (Ann) or how to find other less linear life trajectories (Claire), our informants seem to have carved out a space in the present where performance is less critical and in which to enact other ways of navigating uncertainty. This ability on their part may reflect and be underpinned by the larger Danish context of a comprehensive welfare state with relatively low unemployment. Moreover, as possibilities of actively choosing to deviate from direct educational trajectories are related to class and financial security (Allen, 2014, 2016; Brannen and Nilsen, 2002; Skeggs, 2005), the skills and possibilities of the mostly middle-class informants in this study may also reflect their class background. Our study thus points to a need for further studies to explore the differential affordances of an open future, that is, for whom, and under which circumstances, an open future can become a resource for alternative performances of future-making.

Entanglements of Individual and Collective Futures

The literature on aspirations and cruel optimism focuses in particular on how neoliberal discourses individualise responsibility for success and thereby efface structural limitations (Brannen and Nilsen, 2005; Sellar, 2015; Sellar and Zipin, 2019). However, in our interviews we also found an omnipresent concern for collective futures, indeed for the planet’s future. Consider this excerpt from Marie:

It hits me in the weirdest moments, where I’m just doing nothing, when I’m riding home from school on my bike or something like that. And it’s like a kind of despair because there are really a lot of problems to tackle. I mean, I think it’s unbelievable, insects become extinct [. . .] and there is the ozone layer, though it has improved a bit, and there is something with water, which isn’t good, there is plastic in the oceans, there is meat and methane, and I mean I can’t even [. . .] there are so many things. I have no idea where to begin.

The presence of this uncertain or even compromised future prompted reflection upon how not to repeat the mistakes of past generations and instead develop more responsible ways of being. Marie said:

You must think new thoughts and new lines. I actually thought about it recently, you know, fuel, oil, I mean since kindergarten I’ve been taught that you can’t all go to the same table and think you can all get cake. You have to spread out, right. Humanity has completely fucked that up. We’re all dependent on petrol and oil as the power for our engines. Nobody said, ‘Hey guys, this won’t last forever, maybe you should try different things.’ Nobody did that before . . . 20 years ago. That’s maybe too late. It has gone too slowly. So, you must always think new ideas for everything because we’re so many people, we can’t all depend on one resource.

Here, hesitating, refraining from forming aspirations and thinking carefully about what new forms of knowledge and creativity are needed to live more sustainably on the planet emerge as a mode of future-making. Keeping one’s future open is a careful attempt not to repeat past generations’ mistakes and to develop more responsible forms of interacting with the world and its planetary resources, and, as such, it is also a performance of political subjectivity. Furthermore, in these planetary considerations, the informants come to see themselves as interconnected with distant people and parts of the world. For instance, in talking about their motivations, a couple of our informants told us about their involvement in promoting the UN sustainable development goals as UNESCO youth ambassadors. They were passionate about promoting green solutions at their local school, but, more importantly, also in a wider context. Recounting a brainstorming exercise at a UNESCO event, Aida told us the following:

And that’s what I find exciting; that it’s in a wider context . . .

Interviewer: So, again, it’s about making a difference for someone else also?

Yes, and just working together, and the fact that it’s international, and it’s not just about that you can be something, a doctor, here, or someone who makes a difference here, but in a wider context.

Forming an aspiration (to be a doctor) does more than simply determine one’s future. For Aida, it will also lock her within a trajectory of ‘be[coming] something, here’. The aspiration performs an exclusion of the rest of the world, binding her to an individual and narrow context. In lieu of forming individual aspirations, ‘working together’ excites her and gives her hope in the face of climate-altered futures (see also Nairn, 2019). Although this is but one of several ways of relating to the future, the informants here seem to have resisted the lure of ‘the good life’ promised by a given aspiration, which thus allows them to forge ethical, responsible connections with the world beyond their individual trajectories. This resonates with studies arguing that young people’s political subjectivities are increasingly constructed and performed through the spaces and experiences of their everyday lives (Cele, 2013; Furlong, 2012) and also that collectivity generates hope for young people in the face of climate-altered futures (Nairn, 2019).

Hence, for the informants of this study, their future-making practices interweave individual, collective and planetary futures in patterns that embed them within a broader world community. In mundane moments of the informants’ everyday lives, where they are just ‘riding home from school’, deeply challenged futures make themselves felt, so that future-making becomes a matter of preserving an open future, where they hope to be part of an adequate response to the severe challenges our planet and humanity face. Amid neoliberal narratives about individual success, our informants seem to also care for a more responsible and ethical form of future-making. Keeping one’s future open, waiting for a future to come, is a hesitation through which the subject comes into contact with questions of responsibility (Derrida, 1994: 169). Alongside individual forms of future-making, the informants’ effort to keep the future open is also a hopeful waiting in the Derridean sense of an encounter with responsibility. As such, these young women’s negotiations of their attachments to an open future also unfold as ethical and responsible practices of caring for future life on the planet.

Conclusion

We began with Amira’s eerie experience of encountering an absence and with a set of questions about the future’s presence. This article has unpacked the striking finding that uncertain futures are present in young women’s lives in ways that prompt an ongoing labour to keep the future open. With inspiration from theorising on hope (Anderson, 2006; Coleman, 2017; Muñoz, 2009), we have offered a way to study the future by zooming in on the practices and affective experiences through which futures exert agency and organise the everyday lived present.

Shifting the focus from the formations and contents of specific futures (Archer et al., 2012b, 2014; Mendick et al., 2015), we contribute with new understanding of the future’s presence in young women’s life. We have demonstrated how future-making is practised as an attachment to open possibilities and an open future, and we have thus identified a different mode of future-making, one where the aspiration itself remains absent. We have offered an empirical account of the labours that such orientations towards open futures entail, and we have shown how this labour is ridden with contradictory affects, where feelings of enhancement and diminishment or excitement and disappointment are often co-present.

A central aim has been to investigate how the orientations towards open futures both conflate and conflict with neoliberal pressures involved in performing aspirational normativity for young women. Speaking to a rich body of literature that has studied future-making as attachments to neoliberal promises of the good life (Berlant, 2011; Ravn and Churchill, 2019; Raynor, 2021; Sellar and Zipin, 2019), we have revealed less explored aspects of how neoliberalism is lived by young women, in ways that accentuate but also potentially resist its terms. Our findings confirm previous studies that have documented how future-making for young women under neoliberal conditions takes the form of cruel labours including performance demands and internalisation of the responsibility for ‘success’ (McRobbie, 2015; Ringrose, 2007). However, our study also testifies to informants’ abilities to navigate cruel optimism and negotiate their attachments to the future in ways that relieved the present of its intensity and extreme performance demands. It is well documented that the possibilities of departing from straight educational trajectories are related to class and mostly available only to those who benefit from a ‘buffer of privilege’ (Allen, 2014, 2016). Therefore, these findings should be seen in light of the informants’ middle-class backgrounds as well as of the national context of Denmark and its extensive welfare system.

Although individual success certainly figured in our informants’ future-making, we have also shown how they practised connections to collective futures. Through encounters with compromised futures, future-making became entangled with planetary considerations, and the informants came to forge bonds with distant people and parts of the world. As such, these young women’s efforts to keep the future open were also negotiated in ethical and responsible practices of care for a collective, planetary future. Thus, whereas previous studies have mainly explored young people’s approaches to uncertainty in relation to class and privilege (Allen, 2014, 2016; Brannen and Nilsen, 2002), our study opens questions about how concerns of future planetary crises are felt and lived. We have investigated how young women tie their individual futures more closely to collective ones, and we have shown how a hesitation to specify trajectories towards the future is also related to a felt need to not repeat the mistakes of past generations and become part of more responsible futures. Thus, by attending to the lived experiences and affective complexities of future-making, this article has analysed the cruelty of neoliberal narratives, but also young women’s remarkable performances of navigating these narratives in ways that sparked glimmers of hope for new, more ethical and responsible, futures.

Supplemental Material

sj-docx-1-soc-10.1177_00380385231156065 – Supplemental material for Future-Making in an Uncertain World: The Presence of an Open Future in Danish Young Women’s Lives

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-soc-10.1177_00380385231156065 for Future-Making in an Uncertain World: The Presence of an Open Future in Danish Young Women’s Lives by Justine Grønbæk Pors and Sharon Kishik in Sociology

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank the research group for Gendered Formations of Educational Interests and Aspirations, Jette Sandager, Mie Plotnikof, Anja Pors, Signe Ravn and Dorthe Staunæs, for their brilliant remarks, generous suggestions and caring critique throughout the process of writing this article. We also thank the editors and the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful and lucid comments.

Funding

The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: this article is based on research made possible by a grant from the Independent Research Fund, Denmark. Grant number: 8091-00051B. The authors are grateful for this important support.

ORCID iDs

Justine Grønbæk Pors

Sharon Kishik

Supplemental Material

Supplemental material for this article is available online.

Justine Grønbæk Pors is Associate Professor and Research Director at the Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy at Copenhagen Business School. Her work concerns questions about time and temporality in education policy and educational institutions. She is interested in the contradictions inherent to contemporary policies and in subjectivity, affect and ghostly matters.

Sharon Kishik is a Research Assistant at the Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy, Copenhagen Business School. He is currently involved in the research project, ‘Gendered formations of educational interests and aspirations in primary and secondary schooling’. He is interested in questions about subjectivity, time and affect.

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