Considering the past, present and future: making the case for a hauntological approach to youth

Abstract

Young people’s emergent position in the life-course means that they are widely perceived to embody the future, with their ‘successes’ and ‘failures’ in youth considered important portents of the future viability, prosperity, and moral character of wider society. In many regards, this futurist lens is reflected in research within youth studies, including in the extensive youth transitions literature and in temporal and relational streams of research exploring young people’s ‘imagined futures’ in the context of rising precarity, uncertainty and risk in the contemporary period. While this emphasis on the future is undoubtedly important, it has contributed to the significance of the past in young people’s lives being overlooked and, moreover, often erroneously characterises the future as somehow temporally disembodied from what precedes it. In this article, I argue that there is a need for more meaningful engagements with the past in contemporary youth studies. Specifically, I suggest there is considerable value in Jacques Derrida's (1994. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. New York, NY: Routledge) concept of hauntology for enriching current understandings of youth. This article describes how hauntology’s pantemporal focus represents an increasingly timely and important conceptual tool through which to capture, analyse, and address the structural and temporal complexities confronting contemporary generations of youth.