We (James Goring and Peter Kelly) have just had our new book – Young People and the Problem of Uncertain Futures – published by Routledge in the series Youth, Young Adulthood and Society.
Over the past 40 or so years, knowledges of the behaviours and dispositions, capabilities, 21st century skills, and future orientations of young people have become the focus of governmental interventions for dealing with the problem of complex and uncertain futures.
Our interest in the problem of young people and uncertain futures emerges as a particular entanglement of pasts-presents-futures. The character of this entanglement – and the tensions and contradictions that are evident here – includes such things as:
- the techno-optimism of Marc Andreessen (and other tech-bros) that is made explicit in spaces such as his The Techno-Optimist Manifesto, and which sees the digital and machine intelligence revolutions as central to how humans will thrive in uncertain futures in his model of ‘markets + technology = ‘techno-capital machine’ = ‘increasing abundance’ = the emergence of ‘Technological Supermen’.
- what the UN Secretary General calls the ‘code red for humanity’, the EU Policy Centre identifies as the state of ‘permacrisis’, and the World Economic Forum calls the ‘polycrisis’,
- and the ways in which scenario planning, ‘futures literacies’, 21st century skills, sustainable futures and other key ideas have become entangled in shaping the problem of young people and uncertain futures as the second quarter of the 21st century dawns.
In doing this work we draw on the archaeological, genealogical and governmentality frameworks developed by Michel Foucault to examine the emergence of what we call a neoliberal education apparatus in Australia.
Our analysis of the emergence of this apparatus highlights the form it takes, the problems it addresses, the stakeholders who emerge as being significant and strategically important to the production of the dominant relations between power/knowledge/subjects that are produced in relation to young people, education and uncertain futures by the apparatus.
We demonstrate how these discourses of young people’s skills take on a different shape, and deploy different keywords, in different spaces across global networks. However, they are intimately connected, and we examine how and why these sorts of behaviours and dispositions have been made knowable in these ways, in different forums, and the limits and possibilities that they produce for understanding what individuals must be and become as young subjects of these discourses.
In this sense, the book is framed by a number of purposes that include:
- First, to re-imagine the “scale” at which the future is imagined through the relations which structure contemporary understandings of young people, education and futures.
- Second, to ask what are the different “temporal” scales that could enable thinking about pasts-presents-futures, and the relationships between places, eco-systems, earth systems, the bio-sphere, and the planet?
- Third, to think speculatively about the “spatial” scales informing the relationships between human bodies, non-human beings, places, eco-systems, earth systems, the bio-sphere, and the planet.
- Fourth, to explore alternative ways of doing education policy and practice that can account for the ways in which things make sense at different local, regional, state, national, and planetary levels, and which are not reducible to universal abstractions of individualised skills solutions, and technocentric, uncertain futures?
As Donna Haraway has suggested, in thinking through these sorts of questions and challenges:
It matters what knowledges know knowledges.
It matters what relations relate relations.
It matters what worlds world worlds.
It matters what stories tell stories.
*The title artwork for this post, and the YPSF Lab logo is being used with the permission of Seth Brown, Water Series, 2009, Relief Print.