Abstract
Reviewed by: Valentina Cuzzocrea, Università di Cagliari, Italy
The imagination of the future is a topic which increasingly catalyses scholarly attention across a variety of disciplines. In this volume, Julia Cook takes as her point of departure the perspectives of young people on the uncertainty inherent in the long-term, societal future, vis a vis dominant accounts of short-term struggles. Long term and short term, personal future and the future of society are all present in the book. It is around these axes that research on the future – which looks at young people as a privileged barometer for understanding societal change – has flourished, offering multi-layered insights into ways of dealing with uncertainty. Yet, predominant interpretations view uncertainty as a factor which hinders the possibility for mid- to long-term projection, unless such uncertainty is resolved into short-term scepticism and individualistic strategies. The personal and the short term have, in other words, been the central concern of academic research to date when it comes to identify what strategies young people feel they are able to enact.
Giving attention to the short term helps to situate the study in this established tradition of research. From this perspective, the book is somewhat cautious, given that this interpretation is perhaps in need of updating with the help of current empirical data. The extent to which we can continue to say that young people have difficulties in imagining a future or that they therefore retreat into a fragmented short-term temporal dimension is, to me, a question which needs to be revisited, particularly in face of recent structural issues, technological advancements and pressures of all kinds which require reconsideration of the very nature of the transition into adulthood.
However, Cook is successful in unveiling the dimensions of analysis which are closely related to this issue, but which have received considerably less attention. Her discussion brings us to consider how in the study of the future, the personal and the public are interconnected, as are short-term and long-term futures. This should be appreciated as a significant development. Another characteristic of this book, one which it shares with other recent literature (Archer, 2012 is referenced; however, there are a number of others, e.g. Leccardi, 2009), is a focus on the imagination of the future which somehow underplays the ‘youth studies’ aspect of the research, namely which relegates to secondary importance the fact that the research focuses on young people. Unveiling aspects of youth through the study of time, and imagined time in particular, should perhaps be recognised as central per sè. Other cognate subdisciplines such as childhood studies are moving in this direction, and very rightly so.
The structure of the book proceeds as follows: Chapter 1 focuses on long-term, societal futures and uncertainty. Chapter 2 considers how the future has been conceptualised in sociology, surveying classical approaches to future horizons. Cook describes the distinctions which have been made between premodern futures (a), modern futures (b) and post-modern futures (c), taking the reader on a journey which revisits the contributions of key contemporary theorists. Chapter 3 discusses the interconnections between personal and societal futures, drawing specifically from Archer’s work and her focus on ‘communicative reflexivity’, ‘meta-reflexivity’ and ‘fractured reflexivity’. This chapter is particularly successful in synthesising the complex contributions of existing scholarship. Chapter 4 engages with discourses surrounding the long-term future, i.e. the ways in which individuals imagine the future of their society, and discusses themes of apocalypse, technology, intergenerational continuity and decline. At this point in the book, the author’s focus on long-term and short-term futures on the one hand and her focus on private and public futures on the other, have already been developed separately and analytically.
Chapter 5 is entitled ‘future imaginaries in theory and practice’ and is another revealing part of the book. In this chapter, Cook compares and contrasts macro- and micro-level accounts, thereby leaving space for the intersection of hope and despair. One concept, in particular, comes here to the fore: the importance of examining feelings of integration into society. The author ultimately argues that there is much more space to imagine a future if there is a perception of social connection and integration (see, in particular, p. 88). While this aspect has already been highlighted by Archer, Cook particularly stresses that the discomfort caused by having to choose among a variety of opportunities (notably too many and too pressing, as highlighted by social acceleration theorists) can only be attenuated when some opportunities resonate with feelings of ‘integration into social institutions’. Similar analyses form the bases of work by some other theorists mentioned in the book but not referenced on this issue, such as Rosa and his work on resonance (2016). Such a perspective on the predominance of risk and uncertainty opens insightful space for further work. Despite findings which, at times, suggest the existence of selfish orientations amongst research subjects – Cook digresses, for instance, from Groves’ work (2014) noting that, in her empirical material, ‘the respondents only exhibited signs of care-based relationships and forms of thinking in relation to their own children’ (p. 73, my emphasis), the book opens the way for systematic reflections on the role of hope, which is becoming more and more key across scholarship in the field. This is the central point of chapter 6, which discusses, in particular, the fruitfulness for youth of a hope-based approach in making things happen, in contrast to situations dominated by fear.
Cook asks, throughout the volume, what space is left to imagine futures which are new, and different from those imagined by previous generations. Who, ultimately, chooses the future for contemporary youth? Along this line, the book constitutes a valid stepping-stone for further advancements in the field. I only have the concern that a stronger emphasis on youth as a chosen group of reference for this research could help to make these questions more urgent in wider debates, and in thinking analytically about the political and policy underpinnings of this research. Discussions on youth work which are taking place internationally, for instance, could certainly benefit from such a discussion. Cook’s book is therefore an excellent contribution for pushing further research not only in relation to theories on the future – probably the most predominant feature of the book – but also, in perspective, on a policy sensitive level.