Alessandro Cavalli

Paolo Jedlowski

Carmen Leccardi

In this book leading sociologists explore how in our digital age of connectivity, temporal acceleration and real-time simultaneity impact personal experience, relations between generations and institutional processes. The authors analyse the entanglement between past and future and explain how our ability to conceive the future is based not only upon the memory of the past, but also on forecasts about environmental crisis. Bringing memory and future studies into a unique dialogue, they highlight the crucial role of the past elaboration processes in freeing the future from the weight of trauma and renewing the ability to hope. Offering a sophisticated and innovative social theory in a burgeoning field, this is a much-needed intervention to the current 'temporal crisis' of social life and sociological debates.

A Conversation Between Memories and Futures

Exploring New Temporal Horizons

In this book, leading sociologists explore how, in our digital age of connectivity, temporal acceleration and real-time simultaneity impact personal experience, relations between generations and institutional processes. The authors analyse the entanglement between past and future and explain how our ability to conceive the future is based not only upon the memory of the past, but also on forecasts about environmental crisis. Bringing memory and future studies into a unique dialogue, they highlight the crucial role of the past elaboration processes in freeing the future from the weight of trauma and renewing the ability to hope. Offering a sophisticated and innovative social theory in a burgeoning field, this is a much-needed intervention to the current ‘temporal crisis’ of social life and sociological debates.

A Conversation between Memories and Futures

Council of Europe

After the collapse of state socialism at the end of the 1980s, young people in Eastern Europe began to play a dramatically different role in society. Once cast as the vital, reinvigorating protagonists of the communist ideal, they emerged as promoters of democratisation and agents of a now hegemonic market system. Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, an event symbolising both the lifting of the Iron Curtain and the end of the Cold War, an international seminar was held in Budapest to discuss how the opening of eastern European societies to western Europe and the world had changed the living conditions and experiences of young people growing up in the region. This collection of essays, based on this seminar, examines the circumstances of young people in eastern Europe before and after 1989 from a variety of angles: their transition to adulthood; their living conditions; the scope they have for social participation; the way in which they construct their identities and constitute and represent current social realities; their cultures and genders; and the interplay of continuities and discontinuities around this historic watershed. This book, which pays particularly close attention to the relationship between research, policy and practice, is an invaluable tool for anyone wishing to achieve a deeper understanding of young people in Eastern Europe today.

Carmen Leccardi

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