Adolescence and ClockTime: Two modern concepts intertwined, revisited, reconsidered

Abstract

This article engages the intersecting sociologies of adolescence and time, two concepts that in their modern, universalized iterations are born of a proximate historical moment. It suggests that conceptual studies of being young – in this case, studies of adolescence, but also, broadly conceived, of childhood and youth – can be deepened through inquiry into the definitional orthodoxies of time. Brought about in large part by the new temporal relations of subjectivity, sociality and community endemic to life online, new approaches to the scholarship of time have of late blossomed in cultural studies. The article asks, Can new orientations to time – that concept so foundational to definitional notions of adolescence – complicate contemporary understandings about what it means to be young? And can new orientations to time re-energize scholarship focused on documenting the various terms by which adolescence takes form as a social construction, particularly as global imperatives to managerialize and over-determine young people’s lives intensify?.