This book offers a much-needed analysis of how young people understand and navigate their lives as workers, family members and political actors in an era of uncertainty, Brexit and Trump. Drawing on the latest and most seminal international research and the unique stories of 30 young university students from Australia, France and Britain, it explores the nature of higher education and post-education trajectories for young people facing a ‘post-truth’ world in which opportunities for home ownership, work security and the formation of committed relationships have been thoroughly eroded. It also presents a timely reflection on young people’s hopes and concerns in the wake of global political upheaval, demographic change, financial crises, labour market uncertainties and unprecedented human mobility. Imagining Youth Futures makes a unique contribution to the fields of youth studies, transitions to university, and contemporary youth patterns in the areas of work, family, politics and mobility.

This book is about how to trigger the capacity to aspire among black youth. Examining the transition out of adulthood and imagined futures of black youth, Maja helps us understand how black youth aspirations might be raised, and how a better future for young people can be achieved.

How do young people see the future? Are they optimistic or pessimistic? Do their views vary from culture to culture? Are young people actively engaged in creating their desired futures or are they passively receiving the future? What effect has globalization on youth culture? How is the future taught in schools? These and many other questions are dealt with in this volume of comparative empirical research from around the world on how youth see the future. Generally, youth are considered immature, irresponsible toward the future, cliquish, impressionistic, and dangerous toward self and others. They are considered as a mass market—two billion strong—the passive recipients of globalization. Most recently in OECD nations, youth have become fodder for political speeches—they are the problem that reflects both the failure of the welfare state (dependence on the state), the failure of globalization (unemployment), and postmodernism (loss of meaning and the crisis of the spirit). In the Third World, youth are seen not only as the problem, but equally as the force that can topple a regime (as in Yugoslavia). However, youth can also be seen as carriers of a new worldview, a new ideology. These and other views concerning youth are examined in this volume of comparative empirical research. Studies from around the world provide intriguing answers to questions about how youth see the future and their future roles. This book will be of particular interest to scholars, students, researchers, and policymakers involved with youth issues and future studies.

The first substantial history and analysis of the To-Day and To-Morrow series which published 110 books from 1923 to 1931 and included works by J. B. S. Haldane, Bertrand Russell, Vernon Lee, Robert Graves, Vera Brittain, Sylvia Pankhurst, Hugh MacDiarmid, James Jeans, J. D. Bernal, Winifred Holtby, and Andre Maurois.

This edited collection invites educational practitioners and theorists to speculate on - and craft visions for - the future of environmental and sustainability education. It explores what educational methods and practices might exist on the horizon, waiting for discovery and implementation. A global array of authors imagines alternative futures for the field and attempts to rethink environmental and sustainability education institutionally, intellectually, and pedagogically. These thought leaders chart how emerging modes of critical speculation might function as a means to remap and redesign the future of environmental and sustainability education today. Previous volumes within this United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development series have responded to the complexity of environmental education in our contemporary moment with concepts such as social learning, intergenerational learning, and transformative leadership for sustainable futures. 'Envisioning Futures for Environmental and Sustainability Education' builds on this earlier work - as well as the work of others. It seeks to foster modes of intellectual engagement with ecological futures in the Anthropocene; to develop resilient, adaptable pedagogies as a hedge against future ecological uncertainties; and to spark discussion concerning how futures thinking can generate theoretical and applied innovations within the field.

Practicing Futures: A Civic Imagination Action Handbook is a practical guide for community leaders, educators, creative professionals and change-makers who want to sharpen their visions for the future and understandings of the how the past affects them.

How popular culture is engaged by activists to effect emancipatory political change One cannot change the world unless one can imagine what a better world might look like. Civic imagination is the capacity to conceptualize alternatives to current cultural, social, political, or economic conditions; it also requires the ability to see oneself as a civic agent capable of making change, as a participant in a larger democratic culture. Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination represents a call for greater clarity about what we’re fighting for—not just what we’re fighting against. Across more than thirty examples from social movements around the world, this casebook proposes “civic imagination” as a framework that can help us identify, support, and practice new kinds of communal participation. As the contributors demonstrate, young people, in particular, are turning to popular culture—from Beyoncé to Bollywood, from Smokey Bear to Hamilton, from comic books to VR—for the vernacular through which they can express their discontent with current conditions. A young activist uses YouTube to speak back against J. K. Rowling in the voice of Cho Chang in order to challenge the superficial representation of Asian Americans in children’s literature. Murals in Los Angeles are employed to construct a mythic imagination of Chicano identity. Twitter users have turned to #BlackGirlMagic to highlight the black radical imagination and construct new visions of female empowerment. In each instance, activists demonstrate what happens when the creative energies of fans are infused with deep political commitment, mobilizing new visions of what a better democracy might look like.

This book presents the findings of a recent interview-based study of how 28 young adults living in Melbourne, Australia viewed and related to both the personal and societal future. In so doing it addresses issues such as how individuals imagine the future of their society, and whether this has any bearing on the way in which they perceive and relate to their own, personal future. The respondents’ future imaginings are also considered in relation to influential theoretical accounts that have sought to diagnose the character of contemporary society, and with it the future horizon. Drawing on this discussion, some alternative ways of conceptualising micro experiences of future-oriented thinking are proposed, and the role that hope can play in this process is addressed. This book will appeal to readers who are interested in the sociology of risk and uncertainty, time, and youth.

Do young Australians understand and live equality and difference differently from older generations? Is Australia the gender equal society that many claim it to be? How do we understand and explain growing economic inequality when our dominant ideologies are individualism and neoliberalism? What are or should be the limits of tolerance in our negotiation of cultural difference? Imagining the Future explores our contemporary complex equality narrative through the desires and dreams of 1000 young Australians and 230 of their parents from diverse backgrounds across Australia. This extraordinary data set affords analysis of the impact of gender, socio-economic disadvantage, ethnicity, Aboriginality and sexuality on young peoples imagined life stories, or essays written about their future. An intergenerational comparison assesses how different young people really are from older generations. The book offers a compelling and subtle engagement with the sometimes deeply moving, sometimes hilarious voices of young people to deliver insight into the challenges and complexity of gender and other social relations in early 21st Australian society. Young people yearn for and believe in equal opportunities, but their imagined life stories indicate massive inequalities in the personal resources that will allow them to achieve their goals. They claim to live in a world of gender equality, even as they continue to cherish performances of gender difference. The gulf between young mens and young womens imagined intimate lives together suggest that many are bound for conflict. They (and indeed their parents) do not understand the world in terms of class relations, but proclaim that everyone is the same, even as they are aware of fine distinctions in economic resources and cultural capital. Alongside proclaimed acceptance of cultural diversity, the advantages experienced by virtue of being white challenges many young Australians. In an increasingly individualistic world, some young people perform in intimate citizenship, or personal engagements based on shared experiences. Like their parents, few understand obligations towards unmet others, which form the basis of national solidarity.

Adolescents are at a critical life stage where they will soon be able to contribute to the wellbeing of humankind, or do it great harm. Consequently, it is vital that the challenges and possibilities of adolescence be well understood and addressed. In Australia, such understanding is urgently needed with respect to Aboriginal adolescents. Not only must they adjust to their changing bodies and minds, but they must negotiate these changes within a context usually characterised by racism and poverty. They must also do this within intercultural environments that include the disparate and sometimes incompatible beliefs and practices of their multicultural populations. The chapters in this collection address these challenges to Aboriginal adolescents in the Northern Territory and the intercultural contexts in which they take place. Their discussions include the adolescents’ experiences with health and health care, education, and the criminal justice system. They also address their hopes, dreams, plans and politics, engagement with social media, food preferences and nutrition, engagement with language, family, and changing mores affecting sexual behaviour and marriage. The book aims to provide readers with a greater understanding of the day-to-day lives of Aboriginal adolescents, and some of the adults who care for or neglect them. It seeks to provide readers with a better understanding of the circumstances, processes and factors that affect adolescent health, wellbeing and future prospects in their intercultural environments, and glimpse the multiplicity of these circumstances, processes and factors and the complexity of their interaction.